Your new life in France, a day's drive from your British front door

Since 2021 a household move from Great Britain to France is a third-country import into the European Union. There is no lighter-touch route for a short crossing and no leftover EU exception: the same rules apply whether your things arrive from Kent or from Bangkok. For a genuine home move the relief that matters is the franchise for a transfer of normal residence, and it is the first thing to sort, not the last.

The British side is the simple half. Personal effects leave Great Britain without a licence to chase, and your remover files the export side as part of the job. What needs thought is the short list of things the French relief will not cover, chiefly alcohol, tobacco and anything you have owned for less than six months. None of those is a problem if it comes up at the survey. All of them are a problem if they come up at Calais.

Almost everything on this corridor travels by road. Your things are loaded into a vehicle in Britain and that vehicle drives onto the Channel Tunnel shuttle at Folkestone or onto a ferry at Dover, Portsmouth or Poole, and drives off again in France. The shuttle crossing is about 35 minutes and the short ferry about 90; the western sailings to Caen, Cherbourg and St Malo take longer but land you much closer to Normandy and Brittany. There is no port handling, no container to stuff or unstuff, and no waiting for a vessel that sails twice a week. That is why the estimates on this page are in days: the variable is the road at each end, not the water in the middle.

The honest planning question on this route is not how much fits, it is what the French property will take. British and French rooms are different shapes: French ceilings are often higher and the stairwells in an older immeuble are often narrower, and a lift is not a given above the second floor. Measure the staircase and the door frames before you decide the wardrobe is coming.

Without the franchise, your household goods are treated like any other commercial import into the EU: customs duty at the rate for the goods, plus French TVA at 20% on the lot, calculated on value plus freight. On a modest three-bedroom house that is a four-figure bill for possessions you already own, and it is entirely avoidable. The franchise for a transfer of normal residence is not a discount or a discretionary favour. It is a defined relief with four defined tests, and most people moving for real pass all four without doing anything special.

The drinks cupboard deserves its own paragraph, because it is the one exclusion that surprises British movers most. Wine, spirits and beer are outside the franchise by name, and so is tobacco. If it is a bottle of gin and a few beers, nobody's move turns on it. If it is a serious cellar or a collection of single malts, it is worth pricing before you pack it: bring it and pay the duty and TVA, drink it, sell it, or leave it in bonded storage in Britain. All three are reasonable answers. Putting it in a box marked 'kitchen' is not.

The other thing worth raising early is the car, which is covered further down this page. It can travel under the franchise if it was bought tax paid in Britain and you have owned and used it for at least six months, and it needs certificate 846 A from French customs before it can be registered. Outside the franchise it is 10% duty plus 20% TVA, which is usually the moment people decide to sell it at home instead.

A road move is handled far less than a container move, which genuinely lowers the risk. Your things are packed once, loaded once and unloaded once, and nobody stuffs or destuffs a container at a port in between. That is a real advantage of this corridor and it is worth saying plainly. It is not the same as nothing going wrong, which is what insurance is for.

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, and that matters more than usual here because a short crossing tempts people into packing their own boxes.

This is the part of the move that changed most, and the part people leave latest. Until 2021 a British passport was a right to live in France and there was nothing to apply for. That is over. If you moved to France before 31 December 2020 you have rights under the Withdrawal Agreement and a carte de séjour to go with them; if you are moving now, you are a third-country national applying for a long-stay visa like anyone else, and you apply from Britain before you go. There is no way to arrive as a visitor and convert once you are there.

There is no departure port in the usual sense on this route, because your things are never handed to a shipping line. A vehicle is loaded at your British address and that same vehicle drives to France. What you are really choosing is a crossing, and the right crossing is the one that puts the lorry closest to your new front door: the short Dover and Folkestone routes for Paris, the north and anywhere reached by autoroute, the western sailings from Portsmouth and Poole for Normandy, Brittany and the Atlantic coast.

The service covers everything between your British front door and your French one. Packing, the export side, the crossing, the French 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 French end
Our customs broker presents the Cerfa 10070, the inventory and your residence evidence, and handles any query or examination directly. On a short crossing that usually means hours rather than days.

Delivery to your French 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 British sale and a French purchase rarely complete on the same day, and a French notaire works to a different rhythm than a British conveyancer. 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 Britain-to-France support is built around a single contact: a dedicated Move Manager who owns your file from the first survey through packing, the crossing, French clearance and delivery. You are not handed between a British crew and a French 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 sequencing, because the journey is short and the administration is not: a load can be in France within a day of leaving Kent, and the visa, the French address and the residence evidence all have to exist before it gets there. The second is the short list of things that sit outside the franchise, chiefly the drinks cupboard and the car, which are far cheaper to plan for at the survey than to argue about at Calais.

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

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The economics of this one are unusually good and the practicalities are unusually awkward, which is the opposite of most routes on this site. A car you have genuinely owned and used for at least six months, bought tax paid in Britain, can come under the same franchise as the furniture, which means no 10% duty and no 20% TVA. The catch is not the money. It is that your car is right-hand drive and France drives on the right, and no amount of paperwork fixes the view at a blind junction.

The question we would actually ask you is not what it costs but how long you plan to keep it. If the car is nearly new, unusual, or something you love, bring it. If it is an ordinary five-year-old hatchback, the honest answer on this corridor is usually to sell it at home: you avoid the paperwork entirely, and you stop overtaking on French roads from the wrong seat.

This is one of the two easiest pet moves on the whole site, and after the customs section you have earned some good news. Great Britain is a listed country for entry into the EU, which means no rabies blood test, no three-month waiting period and no quarantine. Your dog or cat travels in the car or the van with you, on the same crossing, and walks into the French house on the same day you do.

The one detail worth knowing is that the paperwork is directional, and it catches people out on the way back rather than on the way out. Coming into France there is no tapeworm requirement. Going back to Great Britain for Christmas, a dog needs tapeworm treatment by a vet between 24 hours and 5 days before arrival. Same animal, same route, different rule depending on which way the car is pointing.

The move is short. The adjustment is not, and it is a strange kind of adjustment because so much is familiar. You can drive home for a weekend. The television is in a language you half-learned at school. And yet almost every system you deal with, from the bank to the doctor to the tax office, works on a logic you have to learn from scratch.

What surprises most British arrivals is that the friction is front-loaded. The first six months are a paper chase: the visa validation, the numéro de sécurité sociale, the bank account, the carte Vitale, the tax number, the utility contracts, each of which wants a document produced by one of the others. Then, quite suddenly, it all works, and it works rather well. The people who struggle are almost always the ones who expected month one to feel like month twelve.

Housing is where the difference shows, and it shows most for anyone leaving the South East of England. A 45 square metre flat rents for around 1,485 euros a month in Paris against roughly the equivalent of 1,620 euros in London, which sounds marginal until you look outside the capitals: the same flat is about 765 euros in Lyon and closer to 630 euros as a national average. Space that is unimaginable in Surrey is ordinary in the Lot.

Buying is cheaper per square metre in most of France and more expensive to transact. Notaire fees, most of which are actually transfer taxes rather than the notaire's own fee, run to roughly 7 to 8% on an existing property and 2 to 3% on a new build. Budget for them from the start, because unlike British stamp duty they apply at almost every price point. On the other side, taxe d'habitation has been abolished on main homes, so the recurring bill is taxe foncière alone, which averaged around 1,117 euros nationally on the last full year of figures and varies enormously by commune.

Day to day the picture is mixed rather than uniformly cheaper. Food shopping and eating out are generally better value, particularly outside Paris and particularly if you buy what is in season. Energy has historically been cheaper thanks to nuclear generation. Cars, fuel and anything imported tend to cost more than they did in Britain, and a household that runs two cars in rural France can find that the housing saving has quietly moved into the driveway.

The SMIC, France's statutory minimum wage, is 1,823.03 euros gross a month at 12.02 euros an hour as of 1 January 2026. The average net salary sits at roughly 2,733 euros a month, on gross pay of around 42,000 euros a year. Those are national figures and Paris runs well above them, but so does Paris housing.

The gap between gross and net is bigger than British arrivals expect, and it is the single most common shock on a first French payslip. Employee social contributions take a meaningful slice before income tax is even considered, with CSG and CRDS alone at around 9.7% of gross salary. What you are buying with it is a health system that reimburses most of your costs, a state pension, unemployment cover and family benefits, and the trade is genuinely a trade rather than simply a deduction.

Worth knowing if you are negotiating: French offers are usually quoted as an annual gross figure over 12 months, but many employers pay a thirteenth month, and the 'cadre' status attached to a role changes pension contributions, notice periods and sometimes the working-time rules. Ask which one you are being offered rather than assuming the headline number is comparable to a British one.

For income declared in 2026, the French scale runs 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. Crucially those bands apply per share of the family quotient, so a married couple with children is assessed very differently from a single person on the same household income, and comparing the headline rates with British ones without adjusting for that will mislead you. Income tax is deducted at source, but you still file an annual declaration, and the first one after you arrive is the important one.

The item to deal with before you move is the ISA. France does not recognise the wrapper at all, so the tax-free status you have built up stops the day you become French tax resident. Interest, dividends and gains inside it become taxable in France on an arising basis, meaning in the year they are generated whether or not you take the money out, and a fund that quietly reinvests is still generating them. You can keep the account, but you cannot subscribe to an ISA for a tax year in which you are not UK resident, so it stops growing as a shelter and starts creating an annual reporting job. The French equivalent people move towards is assurance-vie, which does the sheltering job under French rules. Whether that swap is right for you is genuinely a question for a cross-border adviser, and the useful options are much wider before you land than after.

Two other things worth flagging. France has a wealth tax on real estate, the IFI, which bites above 1.3 million euros of net taxable property, but a new arrival who was not French tax resident in the previous five years is assessed only on French property for their first five years, which is a real and underused window for anyone keeping a British house. And the UK and France have a double tax treaty, so the same income is not taxed twice, though it is very often declared twice. Getting the first French declaration right is worth paying someone for.

The obvious point first: unless you hold an EU passport or a family route, you need a visa that permits work before an employer can hire you, and that is now a real constraint on how British candidates are received. A salarié visa needs the employer to obtain a work authorisation, which smaller French companies are often unfamiliar with. The Passeport Talent routes, where you qualify, are easier for an employer to say yes to precisely because they carry less paperwork for them.

Demand has held up in technology, healthcare, engineering, aerospace around Toulouse, and anywhere a genuinely bilingual professional is scarce. English is a real asset in international companies and in the Paris, Lyon and Sophia Antipolis tech scenes. It is much less of one in a regional SME, where working French is not a nice-to-have but the actual condition of doing the job, and where a B2 level is roughly the point at which interviews start going well.

If you are self-employed, look hard at the structures before you arrive. The micro-entrepreneur regime is simple and has turnover ceilings; beyond them you are into a different and heavier set of obligations, and the social contributions of a French independent are substantially higher than a British sole trader is used to. Qualifications are the other thing to check early: regulated professions from medicine to accountancy to estate agency require French recognition, and post-Brexit that recognition is no longer automatic.

French healthcare is excellent and it is not free at the point of use in the British sense. You pay and are reimbursed, typically around 70% of a standard consultation, with a top-up insurance called a mutuelle covering most of the rest. Nearly everyone has one. Once you have been legally resident for three months you can apply to your local CPAM for cover under PUMA and, in time, a carte Vitale. If you draw a UK State Pension, ask the NHS Business Services Authority whether the UK is responsible for your healthcare and whether you qualify for an S1, which you can apply for up to 90 days before moving. Eligibility depends on your full pension and contribution record: receiving a French pension, or pensions from more than one country, can change which country is responsible. If the NHSBSA issues an S1, register it with CPAM so the responsible UK scheme can fund your cover in the French system.

State schools are free, secular and academically demanding, and children under about ten generally arrive at fluency faster than their parents believe possible. Older teenagers moving mid-lycée have a harder time, and it is worth talking to the school about support before you commit to a start date. International and British-curriculum schools exist in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and on the Côte d'Azur, at private-school prices. If your child is aiming at the French baccalauréat, the earlier the move the easier it is.

Getting around is the part Britain does not prepare you for. The TGV network makes Paris to Lyon or Bordeaux a two-hour proposition, city public transport is cheap and heavily used, and the autoroutes are excellent and tolled. Rural France is the other side of that coin: outside the towns, life assumes a car, buses are sparse, and the nearest supermarket may be a fifteen-minute drive. Somewhere between the TGV and the tractor is the practical question of where you actually want to live.

The currency is the euro and the exchange rate is a live cost rather than a background detail, particularly if a British pension or salary is funding a French life. Moving money through a specialist currency service rather than a high-street bank is usually worth several percent on a house purchase, and worth setting up before you need it rather than in the week of completion.

You will need a French bank account, and not only for convenience. A French RIB, the bank details slip, is what utilities, insurers, landlords and the tax office all want in order to set up a direct debit, and a foreign account is frequently refused even when it is technically an IBAN in the same payment area. Opening one usually needs proof of address and, for non-EU citizens, your visa or residence permit, which is another reason the paperwork has an order. Online banks are often faster to open than a branch, though a branch relationship helps considerably with a mortgage.

Keep your British account open, and keep it open longer than you think you need to. A UK State Pension, a British rental income, a tax refund or a share sale all land more easily in a British account, and closing it early is a decision people regularly regret. Do tell your British bank you have moved: their compliance rules on non-resident customers vary, and finding out at a distance is much worse than asking in advance.