The average price per m² in Denain is 1 302 €/m² for an apartment, based on actual notarised (DVF) sales. About 8 transactions are recorded each year.
Atmospheric illustration of Denain, a former coal mining and steelmaking town of the Valenciennois, in the Nord department.
Apartments in Denain sell for around 1 302 €/m², according to transactions actually completed before notaries and published in DVF data, the French notarised sales database. That benchmark rests on a narrow flat market: twenty-nine apartment sales in five years, or around six a year, concentrated in the centre and in a few blocks built after the war. The everyday market of the municipality lies elsewhere, in houses, with 775 sales over the same period. The housing stock is overwhelmingly made up of individual houses, inherited from the corons, the rows of terraced housing built for miners, and from workers' town houses, and the condition of a property weighs more here than its address.
Prices from the DVF file (Demandes de valeurs foncières, published by the DGFiP), transactions actually recorded at the notary at municipality level. Cross-referenced with the Notaires de France - INSEE indices. Learn more about our methodology.
The Denain market depends on the Valenciennes basin. The municipality backs onto Valenciennes, nine kilometres away, whose economy rebuilt itself after steelmaking around the car industry, rail equipment and services. The tramway, extended to Denain in 2007, brought the town closer to that employment hub and its campus. The urban renewal schemes carried out since, from Faubourg Duchateau to the old centre, are gradually replacing part of the most run-down building stock. It is these two movements, accessibility and renewal of the housing stock, that sustain demand in a town whose population has stabilised after three decades of decline.
Volume is the decisive element for reading this market. Denain recorded 775 house sales in five years, or around 155 a year, against 29 apartment sales over the same period, or six a year. No sector of the municipality reaches the number of transactions that would make a neighbourhood price reliable: this page therefore covers Denain at municipal level, with no page by neighbourhood, because that is what the data allow. For an owner, the consequence is simple: the average serves as a starting point, and it is then the nature of the property that sets the price.
Denain carries the lowest price level in this comparison: appreciably below Valenciennes, its immediate neighbour, and below Douai as well, and on a different scale altogether from Lille.
Denain grew up around an abbey of canonesses founded in the 8th century, destroyed by the Norsemen in 851 and then rebuilt, which governed the village for nearly a thousand years before being pulled down at the Revolution. The municipality entered the history of France on 24 July 1712: Marshal de Villars defeated the Austro-Dutch troops of Prince Eugene of Savoy there and removed the threat of a march on Paris. The Battle of Denain opened the negotiations that led to the Peace of Utrecht, signed in 1713. Until the early 19th century, however, Denain remained a farming village of around nine hundred inhabitants, with no industry.
Everything changed on 30 March 1828, with the discovery of fat coal within the municipal boundaries. The Compagnie des mines d'Anzin opened some fifteen pits there between 1828 and 1853, among them the Mathilde pit, worked until 1859. The first blast furnace of the Forges de Denain was lit in 1837, Jean-François Cail set up a mechanical engineering workshop in 1844, and a steelworks followed in 1873. The population rose from nine hundred inhabitants at the start of the century to 7 272 in 1846, then passed 20 000 in the early 20th century. In 1948, the Forges became Usinor: the plant produced 2 million tonnes of steel in 1962 and the town peaked at around 30 000 inhabitants.
On 12 December 1978, Usinor announced at Denain the largest redundancy plan in French industrial history. The last blast furnace went out in July 1980, the site closed for good in 1988, and the town lost nearly one inhabitant in three compared with its peak of the 1960s. That past shapes the Denain of today: corons and town houses aligned in rows, a centre reworked by successive urban renewal programmes, and a recognised mining heritage. The Renard slag heap, the Mathilde pit and the Chabaud-Latour coron have been listed as UNESCO World Heritage since 30 June 2012, together with the whole of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield.
The Denain market is local and affordable. According to INSEE, the French statistics institute, the municipality has 20 665 inhabitants, 8 041 households and 9 104 dwellings, of which 88,4 % are main residences and 11,2 % are vacant, a high share that reflects the age of part of the housing stock. Still according to INSEE, 38 % of households own their home: renting is clearly dominant. Buyers are mainly households from the Valenciennois, first-time buyers looking for a town house on a contained budget, and landlords drawn by an entry cost that is low by the standards of the conurbation. Demand is above all for houses, apartments remaining marginal.
The average price of an apartment in Denain stands at around 1 302 €/m² in 2026. That figure is calculated on sales actually completed and registered before notaries, published in DVF data, and not on prices advertised in listings. It rests on a limited volume, some thirty apartment sales in five years: depending on the condition of the property, its floor and its location, the gap with that benchmark can be wide.
No, and that is a particularity of the municipality: per square metre, houses trade below apartments, whereas the opposite is the rule almost everywhere else. The explanation lies in the housing stock, made up for the most part of corons and workers' town houses, often small and old. Houses nonetheless remain the dominant market by volume, with 775 sales in five years against 29 for apartments.
Denain is the terminus of line T1 of the Valenciennes tramway, at the Espace Villars stop, since the extension opened on 3 September 2007: it links the municipality to the centre of Valenciennes and to the university campus. Denain station, on place Tolstoï, on the line from Douai to Blanc-Misseron, is served by TER Hauts-de-France regional trains towards Valenciennes and Douai. The A2 and A23 motorways serve the conurbation nearby.
INSEE divides the municipality into six neighbourhoods: Centre-Ville Nord, Centre-Ville Sud, Bellevue, Couture et Turenne, Faubourg Duchateau and Nouveau Monde. Several are classed as priority urban neighbourhoods and are the subject of urban renewal programmes: after Faubourg Duchateau, the effort is focused on the old centre, around place Wilson. The apartments sold are concentrated in the centre, the rest of the municipality being occupied by individual housing.
The municipal housing stock is mostly old and inherited from the mining and steelmaking period. On a coron house or a town house, what makes the difference in price is the condition of the roof and the joinery, the heating system, energy performance and the presence of a yard or a garden. The share of vacant dwellings, above 11 % according to INSEE, confirms that part of the building stock needs work.
This analysis is published by Immover, an independent observatory founded by Antony Barbier. Data sourced from official sources (DVF, INSEE, Notaries of France).