Your new life in France, an ocean away from home

The United States has never been part of the European Union, so there's no before-and-after story here the way there is for a British move. What applies to you has applied to every American moving to France for decades: the franchise for a transfer of normal residence, which lets you bring used household effects into France without customs duty or the 20% TVA, declared on form Cerfa 10070 with an itemised inventory.

The American side has one wrinkle Britons don't have. US law requires an Electronic Export Information filing through the Automated Export System for any shipment of household goods worth more than $2,500 leaving the country, under the Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Regulations. It sounds like paperwork and it is, but it's routine and your remover files it as part of the job. What genuinely needs thought is the short list the French relief won't cover: alcohol, tobacco, and anything you've owned for less than six months.

Almost every household shipment on this corridor lands at Le Havre, the largest container port in France and the usual gateway for personal effects arriving from the United States, whatever region of France you're actually moving to. From an East Coast or Gulf port, that's a direct Atlantic crossing: 11 to 15 days at sea, 18 to 32 days door to door once loading, trucking and clearance are added.

West Coast shipments work differently, and the reason is worth knowing before you assume it's a simple Panama Canal run. A container bound for a northern French port can transit Panama into the Atlantic. One bound for a Mediterranean destination like Marseille usually can't take that shortcut, because Panama lands you on the wrong side of France and backtracking costs more time than going the other way around. Most West Coast household shipments to southern France instead cross the Pacific and come through the Suez Canal, which is why the estimate for that leg is measured in weeks, not days: 25 to 35 days at sea, 32 to 42 door to door.

The honest planning question on this route isn't what fits in the container, it's what the French property will take. American houses run bigger than French apartments almost everywhere outside the countryside, and a lift above the second floor of an older Parisian building is not a given. Measure the stairwell and the door frames before you decide the sectional sofa is coming.

Without the franchise, your household goods are treated like any other commercial import: customs duty at the rate for the goods, plus French TVA at 20% on the total, calculated on value plus freight. On an ordinary household shipment that's a four-figure bill for possessions you already own, and it's entirely avoidable. The franchise isn't a discretionary favour. It's a defined relief with four defined tests, and most people moving for real pass all four without doing anything special.

The drinks cabinet deserves its own paragraph, because it's the exclusion that surprises American movers most often. Wine, spirits and beer are outside the franchise by name, and so is tobacco. A few bottles won't turn on this. A serious cellar, a Napa collection built up over years, or a case of something good you were saving is worth pricing before it's packed: bring it and pay the duty and TVA, drink it, sell it, or leave it in storage at home. Putting it in a box marked 'kitchen' is not one of the options.

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

An ocean crossing means more handling than a road move: your things are packed, loaded into a container, carried by ship, unloaded at a French port, and delivered, with a port stop in the middle that a shorter corridor doesn't have. Most shipments arrive without incident. Insurance is for the ones that don't.

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, so ask specifically if you're packing any of it yourself.

An American passport has never carried the right to live in France. There's no shortcut here the way there sometimes is elsewhere on this site: no working holiday agreement between the United States and France, and no ancestry route. Visiting is easy. Living there means applying for a long-stay visa from the United States before you go, and there's no way to arrive as a tourist and convert once you land.

Le Havre is where almost every household shipment from the United States lands, regardless of which part of France you're actually moving to: it's the largest container port in the country and the standard gateway for personal effects. Where your own port of departure sits, East Coast, Gulf or West Coast, is what actually decides your transit time and route.

The service covers everything between your US front door and your French one: packing, the export filing, the ocean crossing, the French declaration and delivery. One Move Manager owns the whole file, so nothing gets lost in a handover between a US crew and a French broker.

The French end
Our customs broker presents the Cerfa 10070, the inventory and your residence evidence at Le Havre, and handles any query or examination directly.

Delivery to your French door
Once cleared, the container is trucked to your address, our crew carries in, places items where you want them, reassembles what they dismantled, and the packing materials leave with them.

If the dates don't line up
They often don't, because a US sale and a French purchase rarely complete on the same day. Storage at either end is arranged as part of the same job rather than as a surprise line item.

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

Our USA-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're not handed between a US crew and a French broker, and you're not re-explaining your own move to somebody new halfway across the Atlantic.

On this route that continuity earns its keep in two specific places. The first is sequencing: the visa, the French lease and the residence evidence all have to exist before the customs franchise can be applied, and getting that order wrong is what turns a five-week move into a five-month one. The second is the short list of things that sit outside the franchise, chiefly the liquor cabinet and the car, which are far cheaper to plan for at the survey than to discover at the port.

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

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The steering side is the easy part. American cars are left-hand drive and France drives on the right, so unlike our UK, Australian or Thai corridors there's no conversion to make and no learning to overtake from the wrong seat. The harder part is that most American cars aren't built to European specification, so registering one usually means an individual technical inspection rather than a quick certificate.

The question we'd actually ask you isn't what it costs, it's how long you plan to keep it. If the car is nearly new, unusual, or something you genuinely love, bring it. If it's an ordinary five-year-old sedan, the honest answer on this corridor is usually to sell it at home and buy something already registered in France: you skip the individual approval process entirely, and you're on the road faster.

This is one of the easier pet moves on the site in one specific way: the United States is listed under the EU's simplified pet-entry rules, so there's no rabies blood test and no quarantine. Your dog or cat can travel with you and walk into the French house the same week you do.

The extra step Americans have that a British or French pet mover doesn't is the government endorsement. Your vet issues an EU-format animal health certificate, but it also has to be endorsed by USDA APHIS before travel, a formal government sign-off that has to happen within 10 days of your pet's arrival in the EU for a non-commercial move. Build that appointment into your timeline early, because APHIS offices book up and the endorsement window is fixed.

The adjustment for an American arriving in France runs deeper than it does for some of our other corridors, and it's worth saying so plainly. You can't drive home for the weekend. The time difference makes an ordinary phone call to family a scheduling exercise. And English, however global it feels online, is not the working language of daily French life outside a handful of international neighbourhoods.

What surprises most American arrivals is that the friction is front-loaded and largely administrative: the visa validation, the numéro de sécurité sociale, the bank account, the carte Vitale, the tax number, each of which wants a document produced by one of the others. Then, quite suddenly, it 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 is most visible, and it depends entirely on which American city you're leaving. A 45 square metre apartment rents for around 1,485 euros a month in Paris, roughly $1,720 at recent exchange rates, well below Manhattan or San Francisco and closer to a mid-size American city. Outside the capital it drops further: about 765 euros in Lyon and closer to 630 euros as a national average, which buys space that would be unusual in most American downtown cores.

Buying is generally cheaper per square metre than a comparable American coastal city and more expensive to transact. Notaire fees, most of which are actually transfer taxes rather than the notaire's own charge, run to roughly 7 to 8% on an existing property and 2 to 3% on a new build, and unlike American closing costs they apply at almost every price point. On the recurring side, the annual property tax, taxe foncière, averaged around 1,117 euros nationally on the last full year of figures and varies enormously by commune, which is genuinely lower than property tax bills in much of the United States.

Day to day the picture is mixed rather than uniformly cheaper. Groceries and eating out are generally better value than a major US city, particularly outside Paris. Cars, gasoline, and anything imported from outside the EU, American brands included, tend to cost noticeably more than they did at home.

The SMIC, France's statutory minimum wage, is 1,823.03 euros gross a month, roughly $2,115, as of 1 January 2026. The average net salary sits at around 2,733 euros a month, about $3,170, on gross pay of around 42,000 euros a year. Paris runs well above the national figures, but so does Paris housing.

The gap between gross and net is bigger than most American arrivals expect, closer to the gap between an American gross salary and take-home pay in a high-tax state, but structured differently. 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're buying with it is a health system that reimburses most of your costs, a state pension, unemployment cover and family benefits.

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

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, well above the top US federal bracket. 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.

This is where an American passport genuinely changes the picture, because US citizenship carries tax filing obligations with it regardless of where you live. The US-France income tax treaty includes a saving clause, standard in American treaties, that preserves the IRS's right to tax you as if the treaty didn't exist. In practice the Foreign Tax Credit usually eliminates US tax owed, since French rates typically run higher than US ones, and a 1988 totalization agreement between the two countries prevents you from paying into both social security systems on the same income and lets credits from each country count toward eligibility in the other.

The genuine trap is assurance-vie, the tax-advantaged investment wrapper every French adviser will recommend to a new resident. The IRS doesn't recognise it as insurance; it treats it as a Passive Foreign Investment Company, which means a separate Form 8621 for every policy, punitive tax treatment on gains that can run well above ordinary US capital gains rates, and French banks that issue none of the US tax forms you'd need to file correctly. Most cross-border advisers tell Americans to avoid assurance-vie and most other French mutual funds entirely, and to hold US-domiciled brokerage accounts instead. Get that advice before you invest a single euro, not after.

Two other things worth flagging. You'll still need to file FBAR and Form 8938 annually for foreign accounts above their respective thresholds, on top of your regular return, so budget for a cross-border accountant rather than a standard US tax preparer. And France's wealth tax on real estate, the IFI, bites above 1.3 million euros of net taxable property, but a new arrival who wasn't French tax resident in the previous five years is assessed only on French property for their first five years, a real and underused window for anyone keeping US property.

The obvious point first: unless you have a French or EU family route, you need a visa that permits work before a French employer can hire you. 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 on their side.

Demand has held up in technology, healthcare, 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's much less of one in a regional French company, where working French is the actual condition of the job, and a B2 level is roughly the point at which interviews start going well.

If you're self-employed, look at the structures before you arrive. The micro-entrepreneur regime is simple with turnover ceilings; beyond them you're into a heavier set of obligations, and French social contributions for an independent worker are substantially higher than an American 1099 arrangement. Regulated professions, from medicine to accountancy to real estate, require French recognition of American qualifications, which is rarely automatic.

French healthcare is excellent and it isn't the American insurance model. You pay and are reimbursed, typically around 70% of a standard consultation, with a top-up policy called a mutuelle covering most of the rest. Once you've been legally resident for three months you can apply to your local CPAM for cover under PUMA. There's no American equivalent to the S1 form that lets a UK pensioner import their healthcare funding, so budget for private international health insurance to cover the gap. A 2026 change to French social security law provides for a financial contribution from certain PUMA beneficiaries who are legally resident, not working, and not already contributing through French social charges or an international agreement. The amount and detailed application depend on an implementing decree, so check the current position with your CPAM rather than budgeting for a fixed fee.

State schools are free, secular and academically demanding, and children under about ten generally arrive at fluency faster than their parents believe possible. International and American-curriculum schools exist in Paris and a handful of other cities, at private-school prices, and are worth researching well before your move if your children are older.

Getting around is the part American car culture doesn't prepare you for. The TGV network makes Paris to Lyon or Bordeaux a two-hour trip, city public transport is cheap and heavily used, and the autoroutes are excellent and tolled. Rural France assumes a car just as rural America does, but distances are shorter and villages more numerous.

The currency is the euro, and moving money through a specialist currency service rather than a US bank's wire desk is usually worth several percent on a house purchase, worth setting up before you need it rather than the week of closing.

You'll need a French bank account, and here's the part that's genuinely different for an American: FATCA requires French banks to report American account holders to the IRS, and the compliance burden is enough that some French banks, particularly smaller regional ones and online-only banks, simply decline to open accounts for US citizens rather than build the reporting capability. If you're refused, you have a legal remedy called droit au compte, an appeal to the Banque de France that requires a bank to open an account for you, though you won't get to choose which one. In practice, HSBC France and Crédit Mutuel are more consistently willing to bank Americans, and it's worth asking directly before you commit to a branch.

Keep your US accounts open, and keep them open longer than you think you need to. Social Security direct deposit, a 401(k) or brokerage account, and any US-source income all work more easily through an American account, and closing one early is a decision people regularly regret. Tell your US bank you've moved: policies on non-resident customers vary, and finding out yours has restricted your account is much worse from Lyon than from home.