France

Whether a short visit needs a visa is decided by Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 and not by French law: Annex I nationals need one, Annex II nationals do not, and the exemption runs for 90 days in any 180-day period. The CESEDA opens by saying it applies subject to Union law and to international conventions, and then builds its own layer on top. Article L. 311-1 lists what every foreigner must carry to enter: the visas required by the Schengen Borders Code where they are not exempt, proof of accommodation where it is asked for, documents on the purpose and conditions of the stay, means of subsistence, medical and hospital cover taken out with an approved insurer, and guarantees of repatriation. Article L. 312-1 measures a short stay in a different unit from the Union: it speaks of a stay not exceeding three months, where the Regulation counts ninety days across a rolling window. And the proof of accommodation is a French institution of its own - the attestation d'accueil, signed by the person putting you up, validated by the mayor of the commune, and carrying the host's undertaking to pay your costs in France for the validity of the visa or for three months.

France has a permit for someone living on their own resources and it is called the carte de séjour temporaire portant la mention "visiteur". Article L. 426-20 of the CESEDA sets three conditions and they are tight. The resources have to be at least equal to the net annual minimum wage, the salaire minimum de croissance, and two named disability and old-age supplements are excluded from the count. You must hold sickness insurance covering the whole stay. And you must give an undertaking to carry on no professional activity in France at all - the article then says in its own words that, by way of exception to the general rule that a card lets its holder work, this one does not. It runs for one year. There is no multi-year version of it in the article, and the first issue needs a long-stay visa obtained from a French consulate before departure.

France has a residence document with the word retired printed on it, and it does almost the opposite of what the name suggests. Articles L. 426-8 to L. 426-10 of the CESEDA give the carte de séjour portant la mention "retraité" to a foreigner who draws a contributory old-age pension from a French basic social security scheme, who lived in France under a carte de résident, and who has since established their habitual residence outside France. It lasts ten years, is renewed as of right, and lets the holder come to France at any time for stays of up to a year - and that is all it does: article L. 414-1 excludes it by name from the documents that let their holder stay in France for their whole period of validity, and article L. 414-11 excludes it from the right to work. A pensioner arriving from abroad for the first time is not in these articles at all. The route for someone living on retirement income is the visiteur card of article L. 426-20, which asks for resources at the net annual minimum wage, sickness insurance and an undertaking not to work.

A foreigner coming to France to work needs two things and the CESEDA only supplies one of them. The card follows the contract: an open-ended contract gets the carte de séjour temporaire "salarié" under article L. 421-1, a fixed-term contract or a posting gets "travailleur temporaire" under article L. 421-3, and both say in their second sentence that issue depends on holding a work authorisation first, under articles L. 5221-2 and following of the code du travail. That authorisation is where the labour market enters. Article L. 414-13 makes the state of the employment market opposable to the applicant unless the code says otherwise, and the exception is a list of occupations and geographical areas with recruitment difficulties, drawn up and updated at least once a year. Above that sit the talent cards, four years each: talent-salarié qualifié for a master's-level graduate or a hire into an innovative company, talent-carte bleue européenne for a highly qualified job at a salary no lower than 1.5 times the average gross annual wage, talent-chercheur on a hosting agreement, and talent for a legal representative, an artist or someone of established renown. And the employer pays: article L. 436-10 charges a tax of 55 % of the worker's gross monthly salary, counted up to 2.5 times the gross monthly minimum wage, on a hire of twelve months or more.

France's investor route is the third limb of one article. The carte de séjour pluriannuelle "talent-porteur de projet" of CESEDA article L. 421-16 is granted on any of three grounds: a master's-level graduate or someone with five years' comparable experience who has a real and serious economic project and creates a business in France; an innovative economic project recognised by a public body; or a direct economic investment in France. The legislative article sets no amount for any of them. The amounts are in the regulatory part of the same code. Article R. 421-35 says when a foreigner may be regarded as making a direct economic investment: personally or through a company they run or hold at least 30 % of, they must create or save jobs, or undertake to, within the four years following the investment, and must invest or undertake to invest at least 300,000 euros in tangible or intangible fixed assets. The two conditions are cumulative. Article R. 421-36 then withdraws the card if the operation has not begun within a year of its issue, or if the money is shown to come from unlawful activity. The business-creation limb is cheaper and narrower: article R. 421-33-2 asks for project financing of at least 30,000 euros, and article R. 421-33-1 asks the applicant to support themselves and their family at the full-time gross annual minimum wage.

The student card is the shortest test in the CESEDA. Article L. 422-1 gives the carte de séjour temporaire "étudiant" to a foreigner who establishes that they are following teaching or studying in France and who shows sufficient means of existence; it lasts up to a year, and it carries a right to work on the side, limited to 60 % of annual working time. Two things are waived in the same article: the long-stay visa requirement falls away where the person has been schooled in France without a break since the age of sixteen and is going on to higher education, and the means requirement falls away entirely for someone who has passed the entrance examination of an institution that has signed an agreement with the State. The multi-year version lasts as long as the study cycle, and a repeat year does not in itself call the seriousness of the studies into question. After graduation at master's level, article L. 422-10 gives one year on a card marked "recherche d'emploi ou création d'entreprise" - which article L. 433-1 names, with one other card, as not renewable. The fee is a third of the ordinary one: 100 euros on issue, 50 on renewal.

France does not have a residence permit for a grandchild. What it has, in two articles of the CESEDA, is a ten-year carte de résident running in both directions along one generation: article L. 423-12 for the foreign child of a French national who is between eighteen and twenty-one or dependent on their parents, and article L. 423-11 for the dependent parent of a French national and of their spouse. Both require the long-stay visa of article L. 411-1 and lawful stay, and neither carries an integration condition. Descent before that generation is a question of nationality rather than of residence, and the Code civil answers it generously at one remove and not at all at two: article 18 makes a child French if at least one parent is French, and article 19-3 makes a child born in France French if at least one parent was also born in France. Where neither applies, article 21-7 gives French nationality at majority to a child born in France to foreign parents who has lived there five years since the age of eleven, and article 21-11 lets them claim it from sixteen, or from thirteen with a residence condition running from the age of eight. Article L. 426-1 of the CESEDA joins the two codes: someone who meets the article 21-7 conditions gets a ten-year carte de résident.

France splits family migration in two and the two halves barely resemble each other. Marry a French national and article L. 312-3 of the CESEDA gives you the long-stay visa as of right, refusable only for fraud, annulment of the marriage or a threat to public order; article L. 423-1 then gives a one-year "vie privée et familiale" card while the common life lasts and the spouse keeps their nationality, and article L. 423-6 turns it into a ten-year carte de résident after three years of marriage and three years of lawful residence. Marry a foreigner living in France and you are in the regroupement familial of articles L. 434-1 and following. The sponsor must have been lawfully resident for at least eighteen months on a title valid at least a year; the spouse must be eighteen; the money is measured over twelve months against the monthly minimum wage, rising by a tenth for a family of four or five and by a fifth for six or more; and the housing is measured in square metres by zone - 22 m2 in the tightest zones for a couple, 24 or 28 elsewhere, plus 10 m2 per further person. The mayor of the commune verifies both and has two months. The préfet has six, and article R. 434-26 says that silence at the end of them is a refusal.

France keeps free movement in a book of its own. Book II of the CESEDA governs the entry, stay and removal of Union citizens, of the foreigners treated as such, and of their family members - and article L. 110-4 says the other books apply to them only in the conditions book II sets. Article L. 200-3 extends the regime to nationals of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, and to Swiss nationals, naming all four. Article L. 231-1 then states the rule a reader came for: Union citizens are not required to hold a residence permit, though one is issued if they ask. Up to three months the only conditions are those for entry, so long as the person does not become an unreasonable burden on the social assistance system. Beyond three months article L. 233-1 asks for one of three things - working, or sufficient resources plus sickness insurance, or enrolment in study with insurance and resources - and third-country family members get a right of residence of their own under article L. 233-2. Five years of lawful and uninterrupted residence gives a permanent right of residence under article L. 234-1, and a third-country family member then receives a ten-year card renewed as of right.

Naturalisation in France is governed by the Code civil, not by the immigration code. Article 21-17 asks for five years of habitual residence in France before the application - and opens by subordinating itself to the exceptions in the three articles that follow. Article 21-18 cuts the five years to two for someone who has successfully completed two years of higher education towards a degree awarded by a French university or higher-education establishment, for someone who has rendered or can render important services to France, and for someone with an exceptional record of integration. Article 21-20 removes the waiting period altogether for a person belonging to the French cultural and linguistic entity, where they are a national of a territory or State one of whose official languages is French, or French is their mother tongue, or they can show five years' schooling in a French-language establishment. Article 21-24 is the test everyone meets: assimilation to the French community, a stated level of the language, knowledge of French history, culture and society, adherence to the essential principles and values of the Republic, and signature of the charter of rights and duties. Article 21-16 requires residence in France on the day the decree is signed, and article 21-25-1 gives the administration eighteen months to answer, twelve where the applicant has lived in France ten years, extendable once by three months. There is no requirement to give up another nationality anywhere in these articles, and article 23 points the other way: a French national living abroad who voluntarily acquires a foreign nationality loses French nationality only by expressly declaring that they do.

French income tax residence has no day count in it. Article 4 B offers three tests - your home or your principal place of stay, a professional activity in France that is not accessory, the centre of your economic interests - and meeting one of them is enough; the code says so in the words "l'un au moins". What follows from meeting one is in article 4 A: income tax on everything you earn anywhere. Fail all three and France taxes only what has a French source. The code then writes its own escape into the same paragraph: a person who satisfies one or more of the three is still not domiciled in France if a double-taxation convention does not regard them as a resident of France. That sentence sits inside the test rather than beside it, which is unusual - in most of this corpus the treaty override is somewhere else entirely, or nowhere. A non-resident with French-source income is not left to the ordinary scale either: article 197 A sets a floor under the tax, 20 % and then 30 %, which can only be lifted by proving that the French rate on worldwide income would be lower.

The right to a basic bank account in France comes from Directive 2014/92/EU, which every member state has had to transpose. Article 16(2) requires member states to ensure that consumers legally resident in the Union - including consumers with no fixed address, asylum seekers, and people who hold no residence permit but whose expulsion is impossible for legal or factual reasons - have the right to open and use a payment account with basic features, and says the right applies irrespective of where the consumer lives. Article 16(3) gives the bank ten business days from a complete application, and article 16(4) requires refusal where opening the account would breach the money-laundering rules. The French transposition is in the code monétaire et financier, and the CESEDA names the article: in article R. 551-10 it provides that an asylum seeker's declaration of domiciliation also serves as proof of address for opening a bank account under article L. 312-1 of that code. That is a real and useful fact about French practice. What is behind the reference is not here: the code monétaire et financier is published by Legifrance, which answers 403 to every request this project can make.

The CESEDA treats health cover as something you arrive with. Article L. 311-1 lists among the documents required to enter France proof that an approved insurer will meet the medical and hospital expenses, social assistance included, of care you might need. Article L. 426-20 makes sickness insurance a condition of the visiteur card, article L. 422-10 of the graduate job-search card, articles L. 426-11 and L. 426-17 of the long-term residence cards, and article L. 233-1 makes it a condition of a Union citizen's right to stay beyond three months on means or on study. The code then does one thing in the other direction, and it is the most-litigated provision in French immigration law: article L. 425-9 gives a one-year "vie privée et familiale" card to a foreigner habitually resident in France whose state of health requires medical care whose absence could have consequences of exceptional gravity for them, and who could not effectively receive appropriate treatment in their country of origin given its supply of care and the characteristics of its health system. The decision is taken after the opinion of a panel of doctors of the Office français de l'immigration et de l'intégration, and where the panel finds the conditions met, a refusal has to be specially reasoned. What the CESEDA does not contain is the entitlement itself: who is covered by French health insurance, from when, and on what contributions is in the code de la sécurité sociale, which Legifrance would not serve.

Whether a foreign driving licence may be used in France, for how long, and on what terms it can be exchanged, is not decided by either code read for this country. The consolidated CESEDA last modified on 27 August 2026 was searched in full for the words permis de conduire. They occur in two articles and neither is about driving on a foreign licence: article L. 823-4 lists suspension of the driving licence for up to five years, doubled on a second offence, among the additional penalties for the offences of helping irregular entry and stay, and article R. 142-16 is about who may receive personal data from the residence-permit file. The Code civil does not mention a driving licence at all. The instrument that decides the question is published by Legifrance, which answers 403 to every request this project can make - so this record says where we looked and what was there, and nothing about the rule.

Household goods brought in on a move to France are relieved of import duty by Regulation (EC) No 1186/2009, the same instrument in every member state and not a French one. Three conditions and one deadline do the work. You must have owned the goods and, for non-consumables, used them at your former normal residence for at least six months before you ceased to be resident in the third country, and they must be intended for the same purpose at the new residence. Your normal residence must have been outside the Union's customs territory for a continuous twelve months. And the goods must be entered for free circulation within twelve months of your establishing normal residence in the customs territory - that is article 7(1), and it is a different twelve months from the one in article 5(1) and from the one in article 8(1), which forbids lending, pledging, hiring out or transferring the goods for twelve months after import without telling the authorities first. Alcohol, tobacco, commercial means of transport and the tools of a trade are excluded outright by article 6, which spares portable instruments of the applied or liberal arts.