Your new life in Britain, a day's drive from your French front door

Since 2021 a household move from France to Great Britain needs a full import declaration to HMRC. There is no EU exception left and no lighter-touch route for a short crossing: the same rules apply whether your things arrive from Lille or from Laem Chabang. For a genuine home move the relief that matters is Transfer of Residence, and it is worth sorting before anything else on this page.

The French side is straightforward. Personal effects leave France without restriction, there is no export licence to chase and no Fine Arts equivalent to worry about for ordinary household contents. What does need thought is the small set of things the British relief will not cover, chiefly alcohol, tobacco and the car, all of which are handled separately and none of which are a surprise if they are raised at the survey rather than at the border.

Almost everything on this corridor travels by road. Your things are loaded once, at your French address, into the vehicle that will deliver them, and they are not touched again until the British end. That single fact is why this move is quicker and usually gentler on your furniture than any container route: no depot handling at a French port, no consolidation, no deconsolidation at a British freight station. The Channel is crossed on the Eurotunnel shuttle in about 35 minutes with the load still aboard, or on a short ferry from Calais or Dunkirk to Dover in around an hour and a half. Western France is often better served by a Normandy or Brittany sailing to Portsmouth, Poole or Plymouth, which is a longer crossing but a much shorter drive at one end. Which one your load uses depends on where you are and how full the vehicle is, and your Move Manager confirms it when the job is booked.

Road moves are priced by the space you occupy in the vehicle rather than by container size, which is genuinely useful on this route: a three-quarters-full load is not billed as a full container the way it would be on a sea crossing. A dedicated vehicle leaves when you are ready and delivers on a date you agree. A shared load costs less and waits for other consignments going the same way, which is where the extra week or two comes from. The honest question on this corridor is not volume but proportion: French rooms tend to be larger than British ones, and an armoire that suited a farmhouse can genuinely fail to get up a Victorian staircase. Measure the British property first.

Without relief, your household goods are treated like any other import: customs duty at whatever rate the goods classify under, and then 20% VAT on the value of the goods plus the transport and insurance it cost to bring them. The freight element is smaller on a road move than on a container, which softens the arithmetic a little, but 20% of the value of a furnished house is still the largest avoidable number on this page.

The cellar deserves its own paragraph, because on this corridor it is the question we are asked most. Transfer of Residence does not cover alcohol, full stop, and no amount of ownership history changes that. Wine coming from France into the UK is assessed for excise duty and VAT on arrival like any other import, and for a collection built over a decade in the Languedoc that can be a four-figure bill on its own. There are three honest options and we will price all of them: bring it and pay, drink or sell it before you go, or leave it in bonded storage in France and decide later. What does not work is packing it in among the kitchen boxes.

Tobacco sits in the same excluded category, as does anything bought new for the move and anything intended for a business. Where a shipment holds a mix of qualifying and non-qualifying items, HMRC assesses only the part that fails, which is exactly why an itemised inventory that separates the wine from the wine glasses is worth the twenty minutes it takes.

A road move is handled far less than a container move, which genuinely reduces the risk, but it does not remove it. Cargo insurance is worth having for anything you would be upset to lose, and on this route the losses we see are almost always about handling at one end rather than anything that happens at sea.

Go through the terms, exclusions and declared values with your broker or insurer before you commit. Owner-packed cartons are commonly excluded or covered only for total loss, which matters more than usual here because road moves tempt people into packing their own boxes.

This is the part of the move that changed most, and the part people most often assume is still fine. A French passport was a right of entry until the end of 2020 and is not one now. Visiting stayed easy: French citizens travel on an electronic travel authorisation, which costs £20, is usually approved within minutes and lasts two years. But that document is for visits of up to six months and explicitly does not allow you to live or work in the UK, and turning up on one with a lorry-load of furniture behind you is not a plan. Settling means a proper visa, applied for before you travel. There is no Youth Mobility Scheme place for France and no UK Ancestry visa unless a grandparent was born in the UK, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man. If you are a British or Irish citizen coming home from France, none of this applies to you and your only paperwork is the ToR1.

There is no departure port in the usual sense on this route, because your things do not change vehicle. What there is instead is a choice of crossing, and it is made on the basis of where in France you are starting rather than where in Britain you are going. The short crossings out of Calais, Dunkirk and the tunnel terminal at Coquelles serve most of the country; the western crossings from Normandy and Brittany exist to save a long drive up the French side for anyone starting west or south-west.

The service covers everything between your French front door and your British one. Packing, the export side, the crossing, the HMRC declaration and the delivery. Because it is one vehicle and one crew, there is no handover in the middle and nothing to go missing between two companies.

The British end
Our customs broker clears the load against your Transfer of Residence reference and handles any query or examination directly, which on a short crossing usually means hours rather than days.

Delivery to your British door
The same vehicle arrives at your address, the crew carries in, places items where you want them, reassembles what they dismantled, and the packing materials leave with them rather than living in your hallway for a month.

If the dates don't line up
They often do not, because a French sale and a British purchase rarely complete on the same day. Storage at either end is arranged as part of the same job rather than as a separate contract, and we would rather quote it up front than surprise you with it.

Throughout, one person answers the phone. Not a queue, not a case reference.

Our France-to-UK support is built around a single contact: a dedicated Move Manager who owns your file from the first survey through packing, the crossing, British clearance and delivery. You are not handed between a French crew and a British broker, and you are not re-explaining your own move to somebody new halfway across.

On this route that continuity earns its keep in two specific places. The first is the Transfer of Residence timing, because the journey is short and the paperwork is not: a load can reach Dover in under a day from much of France, and the ToR reference has to be there before it is. The second is the set of things that sit outside the relief, chiefly the cellar and the car, which are far cheaper to plan for at the survey than to argue about at the border.

From collection in France through the crossing, British clearance and the final delivery, your Move Manager stays in touch and keeps you posted at every stage.

Talk to a real person now

Chat on WhatsApp
Send an email

This is the one corridor where importing the car is often genuinely worth doing, and also the one where people underestimate a single detail. The paperwork is unusually friendly: an EU-registered vehicle has a certificate of conformity from the manufacturer, which is the document the DVLA wants, and a car over ten years old will generally just need an MOT. What catches people is that a French car is left-hand drive and Britain drives on the left. That is legal and thousands of people do it, but a left-hand-drive vehicle being registered in Great Britain needs a GB Conversion Individual Vehicle Approval certificate, and the headlights, which are aimed for right-hand traffic, have to be corrected rather than just taped over for the trip.

Fees and thresholds change, so treat these as the shape of the bill rather than the bill itself and confirm current figures with HMRC, the DVLA and the DVSA before you commit. The honest summary for this corridor is the opposite of most of our routes: the car usually can come, the sums usually work, and the thing to weigh is not the cost but whether you want to drive a left-hand-drive car on British roads for the next few years.

This is the easiest pet move on the whole site, and after the Thailand and Australia routes it is a genuine relief to write. France is a listed country for Great Britain pet travel, which means no rabies blood test, no three-month wait and no quarantine. Your dog or cat must travel with you or an authorised person on an approved pet route. It cannot travel in the removal lorry on LeShuttle Freight.

What you do need is a valid pet travel document and an approved carrier. For most pets living in France, that document is an EU pet passport issued in France. Check the passport, rabies record and route well before travel; dogs also need a vet appointment for tapeworm treatment in the final 24 hours to 5 days.

The move is short. The adjustment is not, and it is a stranger one than people expect precisely because the two countries look so similar from a distance.

Most people arriving from France describe the same three things: housing costs more and gives you less, the food shopping takes a while to solve, and the working culture is different in ways that are hard to name until you are in it. None of them are reasons not to come. All of them are easier if you saw them coming.

Housing is where the difference bites, and it bites hardest if you are coming from anywhere other than Paris. A one-bedroom flat in London runs somewhere around £1,500 to £2,500 a month; the same flat in Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow or Sheffield is more like £800 to £1,400. Against Lyon, Nantes or Montpellier that is a serious step up for noticeably less space, and British homes are smaller room by room than their French equivalents. Paris is the one comparison that does not shock, because Paris is expensive too.

Food is the adjustment people talk about most. Supermarket prices are broadly comparable and often cheaper than France for everyday shopping, and the range in a big British supermarket is genuinely wider. What is harder is the ordinary quality floor: the neighbourhood boulangerie, the weekly market, the twelve-euro lunch menu. Eating out costs more for less, at £12 to £20 for a pub meal and £15 to £30 in a mid-range restaurant. Good French produce is available everywhere and costs what imported produce costs.

Then the bills, which work differently. Council tax is a household charge with no French equivalent in shape, utilities for a two-bedroom flat run roughly £150 to £250 a month and climb sharply from October, and water is billed separately. Outside London a car is close to unavoidable, with fuel around £1.40 to £1.60 a litre, which is usually a little cheaper than France. In London, an annual zones 1 to 2 travelcard is about £1,600 and you will not miss the car at all.

The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over rose to £12.71 an hour in April 2026, roughly £24,000 to £25,000 a year full time. Average full-time earnings sit around £35,000 to £37,000, and London and the South East carry a premium of perhaps 15% to 30% for the same job, most of which the rent takes back.

Rough ranges by sector: software and technology £45,000 to £90,000; financial services in London from £50,000 well upwards; nursing and allied health £28,000 to £45,000; state school teaching £30,000 to £48,000. If you are arriving on a Skilled Worker visa the salary question is already settled, because the route has its own floor of £41,700 or the going rate for the occupation, whichever is higher.

The comparison that matters is not the headline number, which is often higher than the French equivalent, but what is left. British gross salaries look generous next to French ones partly because French employer and employee social contributions are much heavier and buy more: healthcare, pension and unemployment cover that in Britain you may end up arranging or topping up yourself. Compare net against net, and factor in what the French figure was already paying for.

For 2026/27, the first £12,570 of income is untaxed, the band up to £50,270 is taxed at 20%, up to £125,140 at 40%, and above that at 45%. National Insurance sits on top. Whether you are taxed on the year you arrive comes down to the Statutory Residence Test, and arriving partway through a tax year often means split-year treatment, so only the post-arrival part counts. The UK tax year running from April rather than January is a small administrative annoyance that catches everyone once.

Now the expensive part, and it is the reason to take advice before you land rather than after. HMRC does not recognise French tax wrappers. An assurance-vie keeps none of its French treatment once you are UK resident: depending on how the policy is structured the underlying income and gains can be taxable as they arise, and a flexible, self-selected policy risks falling into the UK's personal portfolio bond rules, which deem a gain each year whether or not you have taken anything out. Surrendering while you are still non-resident is an option that stops being available the day you become resident. A PEA is in the same position: the French shelter simply does not travel. Neither of these is a reason to panic, and neither is a decision to make from a forum post. Both are a reason to speak to an adviser who works across the two systems while you still have options.

Leaving the French system has its own steps. You file a final French return, and if you held securities worth more than €800,000 or more than half of a company when you left, and you were French tax resident for six of the previous ten years, France's exit tax on unrealised gains can apply at the 30% flat rate. In practice payment is usually deferred and the charge often falls away entirely after a holding period, but it has to be declared rather than discovered. The UK and France have a long-standing double taxation treaty sitting under all of this, and if you have been out of the UK for ten tax years or more you should also look at the four-year foreign income and gains regime before you move any money.

Demand has held up in technology, healthcare, engineering, finance, education and the trades. If you are arriving on a Skilled Worker visa the job is already in place. For British citizens coming home after years in France, re-entry is usually easier than expected, particularly anywhere with a skills shortage.

The cultural difference is worth preparing for. British hiring is faster, less formal and much less attached to the diploma than French hiring is: a CV is two pages with no photograph, cover letters are shorter, and the interview is more conversational and more behavioural than academic. A French CV translated literally reads as oddly formal. Where a grande école counts for a great deal in France, a British employer is more likely to ask what you have shipped. LinkedIn, Indeed and Reed are where most of the market sits.

Self-employment is dramatically simpler than it is in France: you register with HMRC as a sole trader, and the whole thing takes an afternoon rather than an encounter with URSSAF. Anyone who has run a micro-entreprise will find the British version startlingly light on process. Regulated professions such as medicine, law and accountancy will want your qualifications assessed against UK equivalents, and that is a process to begin from France rather than after arrival.

The NHS is free at the point of use and funded through general taxation, which is the opposite shape to the French system of paying and being reimbursed with a mutuelle on top. Once you are resident, GP registration is free. The trade-off is access: there is no French-style right to see the specialist of your choice directly, your GP controls referrals, and waits for non-urgent specialist care can be long. A lot of people arriving from France find this the single hardest adjustment and take out private cover as a supplement rather than a replacement. If you are moving on a visa, you will have paid the Immigration Health Surcharge with the application. Pensioners and some others may have cover coordinated between the two countries under the post-Brexit social security arrangements, which is worth checking rather than assuming, because the direction of travel matters.

Schools are free and compulsory from 5 to 16, and quality varies enough by catchment that families routinely choose where to live around it. The structure differs from France: children start formal school younger, specialise much earlier at 16, and the baccalauréat has no exact equivalent. For continuity there are French schools in the UK, including the lycée in South Kensington and other établissements in the AEFE network, plus a number of bilingual sections; places are competitive and worth enquiring about early rather than assuming availability. The independent sector runs roughly £12,000 to £25,000 a year per child.

Rail connects the major cities well enough, though it is more expensive and less punctual than the TGV, and booking far ahead matters much more than it does in France. London to Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol or Edinburgh runs between an hour and a half and four and a half hours. Home broadband is good and cheap at roughly £25 to £45 a month, and full fibre now reaches most urban areas.

The currency is sterling and the exchange rate is a live cost on this corridor in a way it is not elsewhere, because many people keep a French property, a French pension or family commitments in euros for years. The high street banks are Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Santander, and they will generally want proof of a UK address before opening anything, which is awkward in your first fortnight. The workaround most arrivals use is a digital bank such as Monzo, Starling or Revolut, which will open an account on a passport within days.

Keep the French account open. It is the single most useful piece of practical advice on this page: closing it is easy and reopening one as a non-resident is not, and you will almost certainly still have a prélèvement, a tax balance or a syndic to settle for a year or more after you leave. Notify your French bank of the change of residence rather than leaving the address stale, and do larger currency transfers deliberately rather than in the chaos of moving week.

The part that surprises people most: your credit file starts at nothing. Experian, Equifax and TransUnion hold no record of a decade of perfectly conducted French banking, so on paper you look like someone who has never borrowed, and Britain uses credit scoring far more heavily than France does for everything from a mortgage to a mobile contract. Get on the electoral roll if you are eligible, take a starter credit card, pay it off in full monthly, and the picture repairs within a year. Do it before you need a mortgage rather than during.