Bill 96 / Loi 25 Compliance Checker
A free Bill 96 website compliance checker - un vérificateur de conformité à la loi 96 pour site web. Paste a URL, your page HTML, or the text from a product label, and it counts French against every other language, checks whether French clears the markedly predominant 2:1 standard, and names the specific elements that have no French equivalent.
A screening aid, not legal advice
This tool counts French against non-French text and flags patterns that commonly draw an OQLF complaint. It cannot read your page the way an inspector does, it does not know your business, and a clean result is not a clearance. Use it to find obvious gaps before a lawyer or a translator looks properly.
The page is fetched from our server with an Accept-Language: fr-CA header, so a site that negotiates language properly is judged on its French version.
No check run yet
Why this is worth checking
Fine, natural person
$700 - $7,000
Fine, legal person
$3,000 - $30,000
Doubled for a second offence and tripled for any subsequent one. If an offence continues for more than one day, each day counts as a separate offence.
Those are the statutory ranges, not a prediction. In practice the Office québécois de la langue française usually acts on a complaint, investigates, and issues an order to comply with a deadline before any penal proceeding - which is precisely why finding the gaps yourself is cheap and useful.
Sources
- Norton Rose Fulbright - Doing business in Quebec: language legislationQuotes s. 51 (inscriptions on products) and s. 52 ("catalogues, brochures, folders, commercial directories and other publications of the same nature, regardless of the medium used, must be in French"), the fine range of $3,000-$30,000 for a legal person, the doubling/tripling on repeat offences, and that each day an offence continues is a separate offence.
- Fasken - Québec publishes final language rules: trademarks and sign sizingThe Regulation respecting the language of commerce and business, in force 1 June 2025: French is markedly predominant when the space allotted to it is at least twice that of the other language.
- BLG - The Regulation respecting the language of commerce and business: public signs and advertisingIndependent confirmation of the 2x "much greater visual impact" definition and its scope.
- Stikeman Elliott - Bill 96 and the Charter of the French LanguageFines of $700-$7,000 for a natural person and $3,000-$30,000 otherwise, and the OQLF complaint/order process.
What the checker actually measures
Two passes run on every check. The first is deterministic: it pulls out the page's visible commercial text - title, meta description, headings, paragraphs, links, buttons, form labels, image alt text - classifies each block as French or not using stopword and accent scoring you can inspect in the results table, then counts characters and computes the ratio. It also reads the lang attribute and looks for an hreflang alternate or a link to a French version. Those numbers never come from a model.
The second pass sends the extracted text to a language model, whose only job is to name specific elements worth a human look - a call-to-action button, a warranty clause, a set of safety instructions. It is explicitly instructed never to conclude that anything violates the law and never to quote a penalty figure. If that pass is unavailable, the deterministic results still stand, and the tool says so.
The standards being screened for
| Provision | What it says |
|---|---|
| Charter, s. 51 | Every inscription on a product, its container, its wrapping, or any document or object supplied with it - including directions for use and warranty certificates - must be in French. A translation is allowed, but must not be given greater prominence or better terms. |
| Charter, s. 52 | Catalogues, brochures, folders, commercial directories and other publications of the same nature “regardless of the medium used” must be in French. That phrase is what brings websites, online stores and social media into scope. |
| “Markedly predominant” | For public signs, posters and commercial advertising showing both languages, the Regulation respecting the language of commerce and business treats French as having much greater visual impact when the space allotted to it is at least twice that of the other language, and its characters are at least twice as large. That 2× factor is the threshold this tool tests against. |
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Is this a free Bill 96 website compliance checker, or a trial?
Completely free, with no account and no limit. Paste a URL, HTML or plain text and get the result. Nothing you check is stored - the page is fetched, screened in memory and discarded.
What does "markedly predominant" actually mean in numbers?
Under the Regulation respecting the language of commerce and business, French has the required much greater visual impact when the space allotted to the French text is at least twice the space given to the other language, and the French characters are at least twice as large. So the working threshold is 2:1, not "more than half". This tool measures character counts as a stand-in for space, which is a reasonable proxy for body copy but not for signage - for a real sign or label, measure the physical layout.
Comment fonctionne ce vérificateur de conformité à la loi 96 pour un site web ?
Le vérificateur extrait le texte commercial visible de la page (titre, méta description, titres, paragraphes, liens, boutons, étiquettes de formulaire, textes alternatifs), classe chaque bloc comme français ou non, puis calcule le ratio. Il vérifie aussi l'attribut lang, les balises hreflang et la présence d'un lien vers une version française. Une seconde passe, assistée par IA, signale des éléments précis à revoir. C'est une aide au dépistage, pas un avis juridique.
What are the actual penalties under Bill 96?
The Charter's penal provisions set fines of $700 to $7,000 for a natural person and $3,000 to $30,000 in other cases, doubled for a second offence and tripled for any subsequent one. If an offence continues for more than one day, each day counts as a separate offence. In practice the Office québécois de la langue française generally acts on a complaint, investigates, and issues an order to comply with a deadline before any penal proceeding starts - so the realistic risk is a complaint you have to answer under time pressure, which is exactly what a self-check is for.
Can a clean result be treated as proof that my site complies?
No, and please do not. This tool reads the HTML it is given. It cannot see content rendered later by JavaScript, text baked into images, a checkout flow behind a login, your PDFs, your emails, or your contracts. It also cannot judge whether your French translation is accurate or whether your French page is as complete as your English one - a thinner French version is itself a recurring complaint. Treat a clean result as "no obvious gaps found in what I could read".
Does Bill 96 apply if my business is not based in Quebec?
Location is not the deciding factor - offering products or services to consumers in Quebec is. A business outside Quebec that markets and sells into the province can receive an OQLF complaint about its site, its labels and its commercial documents. That is why this checker accepts any URL, not only .qc.ca or Quebec-hosted pages. Whether your particular operation is caught, and to what extent, is a legal question for a Quebec lawyer.