Moving to the French Riviera

The people who arrive calm are not the ones who found the prettiest apartment on a Sunday night. They are the ones who did the move in an order. The long-stay visa is requested before you pack the house. A real address comes before the bank, the doctor and the school forms. The town comes before the furniture.

I moved here from abroad myself. The first year was a lot of queues and a lot of French I did not yet have. This page is the map I use now when someone writes from the US or Canada and says they want to be here for good, or at least for longer than a season.

If you hold a US or Canadian passport, you can come for a short stay without a short-stay visa. France's own embassies in the United States and Canada describe that exemption: 90 days in any 180-day period in the Schengen area, under the European list of visa-exempt nationalities.

There is a second, older arrangement on top of that, and it is easy to get wrong. A bilateral agreement lets US citizens (since 1949) and Canadian citizens (since 1950) add another 90 days in metropolitan France, but only after the Schengen 90 days, and only if you say so when you cross the French border so the officer can adjust the entry record. You cannot spend the bilateral days first and then hop to Italy as if the clock had reset. The French embassy pages explain the sequence. It is a way to lengthen a scouting trip. It is not permission to live here.

On a short visit, border police can still ask for a passport, proof of where you are sleeping, insurance that covers medical care, hospital costs, repatriation and death, and enough money for the days you are staying. France-Visas publishes the daily amounts used at the French border: 65 euros a day if you have a hotel booking, 120 euros a day if you do not, and a mix of the two if the booking only covers part of the trip. Those figures are for a short stay. They are not the test for a residence card.

If the plan is to stay past what those short-stay rules allow, you need a long-stay visa before you come, unless your nationality is one of the few excused from it. US and Canadian citizens are not on that short list. The interior ministry's visa-exemption page keeps long-stay exemptions for EU, EEA and Swiss citizens, and for Monaco, Andorra and San Marino.

France-Visas is plain about this. A stay of more than 90 days needs a long-stay visa in advance, if your nationality does not excuse you. The visa itself lasts somewhere between three months and a year. Staying past that means a residence permit from the prefecture.

There are two shapes. A long-stay visa that counts as a residence permit (you will see it called a VLS-TS) covers a stay of up to a year and means you do not apply for a separate card at the start. You do still have to register it. A long-stay visa marked "carte de séjour à solliciter" means you must ask the prefecture for the actual card after you arrive. Some work routes, including the ones France-Visas groups under "passeport talent", can lead to a multi-year card. Which file is yours depends on why you are coming: a private stay, work, study, or family. The visa assistant on France-Visas is the checklist. I can tell you which conversation to have. I can't lodge the application for the consulate.

If you will not be working, the private-stay route is the one retirees usually use. I wrote that up separately, with the resource floor Service-Public publishes, on Retiring on the French Riviera. If you are coming for a job, a course, or to join family, say so at the start. Those files are different, and a visitor file that forbids work will not quietly turn into a work permit after you land.

If your visa is a VLS-TS, France-Visas says you validate it within three months of arrival, online, on the étrangers en France portal. You need the details printed on the visa, the date you entered France, your address here, an email address, and a card to pay the fee the portal charges for issuing the residence permit. Miss the three months and France-Visas is blunt: you are no longer in regular stay, and you cannot cross a Schengen border again until that is fixed.

If the visa instead says you must request a residence card, you do that at the prefecture of where you live, within two months of arrival, and you do not start that particular step with OFII. Around Nice, that prefecture is Alpes-Maritimes. The longer, lived version of the prefecture, the récépissé and the pile of photocopies is in Visas & paperwork.

Almost every desk after the visa asks where you live. A hotel printout rarely satisfies them. The rental file a landlord is allowed to ask for, the guarantor, and Visale are in Renting an apartment in Nice as a foreigner.

If you would rather I did the looking, that is the work I actually take on. I search, shortlist, visit and negotiate, for a rental or a purchase. The short version is I'll find your place. The step by step is how I find your home and apartment search and viewings. Once you have keys, utilities and home setup is the electricity, the internet and the insurance.

Which town is a real decision, not a mood. Nice if you want a city and an airport. Antibes if you want a harbour and a school run. Menton if you want quiet. I keep the sketches on Neighborhoods.

Families ask me about schools before they ask about neighbourhoods, which is the right instinct and the wrong order only if the school is an hour from the apartment. The schools I am willing to name, because I have read them on their own sites, are on International schools in Nice and along the Riviera.

If the move is a retirement rather than a job, start with Retiring on the French Riviera. The visitor card has a published income floor, a health-insurance condition, and a ban on working. Those are not details to discover at the consulate window.

I am not going to invent a monthly budget on this page. Rents and groceries on this coast are real, and they are not the same in Menton as they are in Cannes. Ask me for the town you are considering, and I will tell you what I am seeing.

The rest of the first month is already written, from the same desk: bank and phone, healthcare, getting around, learning French, and local businesses. The whole shelf is Settling in. If you want the smaller stories, they are in the journal. And if you want a person rather than another tab, the button below comes to me.