Your French chapter starts on the other side of the Atlantic

Two sets of rules meet your shipment. France decides what you owe when your belongings land, and for a genuine move the answer is usually nothing: the franchise for a transfer of normal residence lets used household goods in free of customs duty and the 20% TVA, claimed on form Cerfa 10070 with a detailed inventory.

Canada decides what can leave. The list is short but it catches people who had no idea they were on it. Anything 50 years or older can fall under Canada's cultural property rules, with thresholds that start at 3,000 dollars for medals and 15,000 for decorative art. Firearms need an export permit from Global Affairs Canada before they go anywhere but the United States. And cash or monetary instruments worth 10,000 Canadian dollars or more must be reported to the border agency before you leave, not after.

There is a piece of good news buried in the cultural property rules that applies to a lot of Canadian households: if you brought the object into Canada yourself within the last 35 years and can show it, the permit is issued automatically without review. The rule is aimed at Canada's heritage leaving the country, not at your grandmother's furniture coming back out.

The ocean leg is the short part. From the eastern ports it is a matter of days rather than weeks: Halifax is the closest major North American port to Europe, and a direct sailing to Liverpool takes about six days at sea. A French port adds to that, because Le Havre and Fos-sur-Mer tend to sit later in the rotations that serve Canada, so plan on roughly nine to fourteen days from Halifax to Le Havre and a little longer from Montreal or Saint John.

Door to door is a different number, and this is where estimates on the internet disagree wildly. Once you add packing, the inland leg to the port, waiting for a sailing, French clearance and delivery, most households on this corridor should plan on six to ten weeks, and longer for a shared container or a west coast departure. Anyone quoting you three weeks door to door is quoting the ship, not the move.

Schedules have also been less reliable than they used to be. Through 2026 only a minority of transatlantic sailings arrived on their published day, delays of several days have been normal, and the big northern European hubs your container may pass through have been running close to full. We build that into the arrival window we give you rather than quoting the brochure and apologising later.

The real question is not whether it fits in the container. It is whether it fits in France. Canadian homes are generous and Canadian basements are a national storage habit; a French apartment is neither. A building in Lyon or Bordeaux may have a staircase that turns twice before the first landing and no lift at all, and French kitchens are rarely built around a fridge the size of yours. Measure doorways and stairwells before you decide the sectional is coming.

If your belongings do not qualify for the franchise, France treats them as an ordinary import: customs duty where it applies, plus TVA at 20%, worked out on the value of the goods including the cost of getting them there. Freight is part of that base, so the bill is bigger than people expect. The franchise exists precisely so that people genuinely moving house do not pay it, and it comes with published conditions rather than an official's discretion.

The exclusion that stings on this corridor is the cellar, and Canadians are often caught out twice over. Alcohol is outside the franchise entirely, so every bottle is assessed for duty, excise and TVA on arrival in France. The particular Canadian version of this is the case of Niagara or Okanagan ice wine bought as a farewell present to yourself, or the bottles friends press on you in your last month. Ship it and pay, drink it, give it away, or leave it behind. Wrapping it in towels and labelling the carton 'linen' is not on the list.

The other item worth raising early is the car, covered further down. It can travel under the same franchise if you have genuinely owned and used it for at least six months and the other conditions are met, and French customs issue certificate 846 A once it is cleared. Without the franchise it is 10% duty and 20% TVA, which is usually the moment an ordinary family car gets sold in Canada instead.

Your things are packed in Canada, railed or trucked to a port, lifted onto a ship, carried across the Atlantic, unloaded in France and delivered to your door. Each of those handovers is a moment where something can knock or crack. Most shipments arrive exactly as they left. Insurance is there for the ones that don't.

Read the exclusions and the declared values carefully with your insurer or broker before you sign. Boxes you pack yourself are often excluded or covered only against total loss, so ask directly if you're planning to pack any of your own.

A Canadian passport gets you into France for a holiday without a visa, 90 days in any 180, but not into a life there. To live in France you need a long-stay visa, applied for before you leave, and you can't arrive as a visitor and switch once you've landed. Canadians do have one advantage most nationalities don't, and it is worth knowing before you rule yourself out on age.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about shipping from Canada to France: there is far less direct service between the two countries than the map suggests. Canada's transatlantic container services are built around Montreal, Halifax and Saint John, and most of them run to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Liverpool and Bremerhaven rather than to a French berth. The French calls exist, but they are fewer, so the honest answer to 'when will it arrive' depends on which loop your container joins.

Two French gateways matter. Le Havre serves the north and west, with river and rail links up the Seine to Paris. Fos-sur-Mer, the container port of Marseille, serves the south and is reached on the Mediterranean loop that calls at Montreal and Saint John. If you are moving to Provence, Occitanie or the Riviera, a southern routing can genuinely beat landing in Normandy and trucking down.

Our service runs from your Canadian front door to your French one: packing, export, the crossing, the French customs declaration and delivery. A single Move Manager holds the whole file, so nothing slips through the crack between a Canadian packing crew and a French broker.

Arrival in France
Our customs broker lodges the Cerfa 10070 declaration, your inventory and your residence evidence at Le Havre or Fos-sur-Mer, and deals with any question or inspection directly.

Delivery to your new home
Once cleared, your shipment is trucked to your address. The crew carries everything in, puts it where you want it, rebuilds what they took apart and takes the packing materials away.

When the dates don't match
They often don't. Storage at either end is arranged as part of the same job, not added as a surprise later.

And from start to finish, the same person picks up the phone. No call centre, no ticket number.

On this corridor you work with one Move Manager from the first survey in Canada to the last box in France. They own the packing, the crossing, the French clearance and the delivery, so you never have to explain your move again to someone new halfway through.

That matters more than usual here, for two reasons. First, the order of things: the long-stay visa, the French address and your proof of residence all need to exist before French customs will apply the franchise, and a container that arrives before the paperwork does simply waits. Second, the seasons. If you're moving from Ontario or the prairies between January and late March, the Seaway is shut above Montreal and the routing changes, which is the sort of thing you want someone to raise in your first conversation rather than your last.

France runs six hours ahead of Toronto and Montreal and nine ahead of Vancouver, so having one person who already knows your file is the difference between a quick message and a lost day.

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Start with the good news, because on this route there genuinely is some: Canada and France both drive on the right, so your car arrives with the steering wheel on the correct side. That is not true of the Australian or British cars we move to France, and it removes the single most awkward part of importing a vehicle. What replaces it is a paperwork problem. Canadian-market cars are built to North American standards, not European ones, and France wants proof of the European ones.

The honest summary is that the steering wheel is in the right place and almost nothing else is. For a classic, a camper van you have built out, or something genuinely hard to find in Europe, the effort can be worth it. For a three-year-old crossover, most people on this corridor sell it in Canada and buy in France: no approval process, no penalty surprise, and a car that is easy to sell again later.

This is one of the gentler parts of the move. Canada is on the EU's list of countries whose pets do not need a rabies antibody blood test, and there is no quarantine on arrival in France. Your dog or cat needs a microchip, a rabies vaccination in the right order, and a health certificate endorsed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency before you fly.

One thing to know if you are reading older guidance: the EU replaced its pet travel rules in April 2026, and the regulations quoted in most blog posts and even some official-looking PDFs have been repealed. The practical requirements below have not changed much, but certificate formats and some of the detail around who may travel with the animal have. Confirm the current steps with the CFIA before you book flights, and give yourself more time than the minimums suggest.

Canadians arrive in France with an advantage and a blind spot. The advantage is real: if you come from Quebec, or learned French at school anywhere in the country, you are not starting from zero the way most arrivals are. The blind spot is assuming Quebec French and French French are the same social experience. The vocabulary differs, the register differs, and the first few weeks involve being gently corrected by strangers. It passes.

The day-to-day adjustment is mostly administrative. Canadians used to doing almost everything with government online find that France runs on documents: the visa validation, the social security number, the bank account, the health card, each one asking for a piece of paper that comes from another. It's slow for a few months, and then it isn't. The people who struggle are usually the ones who expected the first month to feel like the twelfth.

Coming from Toronto or Vancouver, Paris rents are unlikely to shock you, though you'll get less space for the money and very few apartments come with parking. Leave the capital and the difference is real: in regional cities and country towns, what a one-bedroom costs in a big Canadian city can cover a house with a garden.

Everyday spending shifts in ways Canadians notice quickly. Bread, cheese, wine and a set lunch at a local restaurant are cheaper than you're used to, and the quality is hard to argue with. Petrol, motorway tolls, anything imported from outside the EU and most tradespeople cost more. Buying property carries higher upfront costs than you might expect, mostly transfer taxes collected by the notaire, so budget for them from the start.

For your move, the costs that matter most are timing costs. If your container arrives before you have a French address, storage fees start, and if you sell in Canada before you can buy in France, you'll be renting in between. Lining those dates up is worth more than haggling over the freight.

France's minimum wage, the SMIC, is 1,867.02 euros gross a month for full-time work as of 1 January 2026. Salaries in Paris and in sectors like tech, finance and aerospace run well above that, but most Canadians find French pay lower than they're used to for similar work, and the cost of living is what makes the sums add up.

The gap between gross and net is wider than in Canada. Employee social contributions come out before income tax, and in exchange you get health cover, a state pension, unemployment insurance and family benefits. There's no employer RRSP match to negotiate; the French pension comes from those contributions instead.

When you compare offers, look past the headline figure. French salaries are quoted as an annual gross amount, some employers pay a thirteenth month, and being hired as a cadre changes your contributions, your notice period and sometimes your working hours. Ask which one you're being offered.

Start with leaving Canada, because it happens first. When you stop being a Canadian tax resident you file a departure return, and the CRA treats you as having sold most of your property at market value on that date. Registered accounts are outside that rule, and so is Canadian real estate, but a non-registered investment account is squarely inside it. If the resulting bill is large you can elect to defer it, with security required above a threshold and no interest running in the meantime. Residency is decided on your ties rather than your passport, so the date you stop being resident is a question of fact, not choice.

On the French side, income tax on 2025 income declared in 2026 ran at 0% up to 11,600 euros, 11% to 29,579 euros, 30% to 84,577 euros, 41% to 181,917 euros and 45% above that, with the bands applied to each share of the household under the family quotient system. Canada and France have a tax treaty, in force since 1976 and amended three times since, which decides where each kind of income is taxed. Your first French declaration is a split-year exercise covering the period before and after you arrived, and it often has to be filed on paper.

Two things worth knowing that catch Canadians specifically. France's wealth tax on property, the IFI, applies above 1.3 million euros of net real estate, but someone who wasn't French tax resident in the five preceding years pays it only on French property until the end of the fifth year after arriving, which matters if you're keeping a house in Canada. And the impatriate regime you may read about, which shelters part of an arriving employee's pay for up to eight years, is explicitly closed to retirees, so it isn't a retirement planning tool.

First, the permission. Unless you're on a working holiday or have a French or EU family route, you need a visa that allows work before a French employer can take you on. A salaried position means the employer applying for a work authorisation, which smaller French firms often find daunting. The talent permit is easier for them to say yes to, because far less of the paperwork lands on their side.

If you trained in Québec, check the mutual recognition arrangements before you assume your qualification has to be redone. France and Québec signed an agreement in force since 2009 that recognises qualifications profession by profession, covering more than eighty professions and trades including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lawyers, architects, engineers and accountants. Where the training differs materially you may face a supervised placement or an aptitude test rather than starting again. It is one of the genuine advantages of this corridor, and it applies to the Québec qualification, not to Canadian ones generally. Apply through the relevant professional order.

Language is the other variable. Canadian French is an asset, not a liability, whatever anyone tells you about the accent; you will be understood everywhere and corrected occasionally. Anglophone Canadians find native English genuinely valuable in international companies, tourism and teaching, and much less so in a regional French firm where working French is part of the job. If you're self-employed, look at the structures before you arrive: France has a simple micro-entrepreneur regime with turnover ceilings, and the obligations grow quickly above them.

French healthcare is excellent and it works differently from a provincial plan. You usually pay the doctor and are reimbursed a share, with a top-up insurance called a mutuelle covering most of the rest. If you work in France you're covered from your first hour of work. If you don't, you can join the public system, PUMa, after three months of stable residence, which means private cover is not optional for those first months and is a standing condition of the visitor visa anyway. France has also legislated a financial contribution for residents who don't work and pay no French contributions, with the amount and start date left to a decree that has not yet appeared, so ask your local health insurance office whether it applies to you rather than budgeting a figure you read online. Your provincial coverage, meanwhile, lapses once you cease to be a resident of your province, so don't count on it as a bridge.

School is compulsory from age three to sixteen for every child resident in France, and access does not depend on your nationality. You register at the mairie first, usually by June for a September start, and then at the school. Children arriving with little French are assessed and can be placed in a dedicated language support class, which works better than most parents expect. If your children are coming from a French-language school in Canada, bring their reports: continuity is easier to argue with paperwork.

Getting around is a pleasant surprise after Canadian distances. High-speed trains put Lyon or Bordeaux about two hours from Paris, city public transport is cheap, and motorways are excellent but tolled. Rural France assumes you have a car, though the next town is usually minutes away rather than an hour down a highway.

Start with the account Canadians most often get wrong. Your TFSA can stay open and Canada will not tax what it earns, but you stop accumulating contribution room while you're non-resident, and anything you do contribute while non-resident is hit with a penalty of 1% a month until you take the whole amount out. On the French side, no French rule recognises the wrapper, so the prudent assumption is that France taxes the income inside it as it arises. Your RRSP or RRIF keeps its Canadian shelter, but withdrawals as a non-resident face 25% Canadian withholding by default, and the Canada-France treaty has no reduced pension rate of the kind the Canada-US treaty is famous for. There are elections that can reduce it. Take advice before you draw anything.

On pensions, which Canada you're leaving matters. The federal agreement between Canada and France, in force since 2017, covers Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan, and lets your French residence and insurance periods count towards qualifying. CPP is payable anywhere in the world. OAS is paid indefinitely abroad only if you lived in Canada for at least twenty years after turning eighteen, with the agreement able to bridge the gap, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement is not exportable at all. Québec sits outside that federal agreement: the Québec Pension Plan and Québec's own 2003 entente with France are separate instruments, and unlike the federal agreement the Québec one has health cover provisions for a Québec pensioner registering with a French health fund.

One more that surprises retirees, and it's the honest bad news on this route. Once you're on PUMa you count as covered by a French compulsory health scheme, which is the trigger for French social levies on your foreign pension income. The exemption that spares people affiliated to a scheme in the EEA, Switzerland or the UK does not extend to Canada, so a Canadian pensioner generally pays them where a British neighbour doesn't. For banking, open a French account early because rent, salary and bills all expect one; if a bank turns you down, the Banque de France can designate one that must open a basic account for you. And once you're French resident you must declare every foreign account you hold, Canadian ones included, with your annual return. The penalty for a forgotten account is 1,500 euros per account, and it is easily avoided.