The step-by-step plan for France

No visa, no registration, no residence card — French law says it literally: EU citizens don't need a residence document. If you want one anyway (handy at some counters), you can apply for a carte de séjour "Citoyen UE", but nothing obliges you.

For completeness, because this site also tells what nobody tells: there is a notification at the mairie in the law, within three months of settling. There's no fine on it, proof of it may nowhere be a condition, and the government information doesn't even mention it anymore. The only consequence of not notifying is that you're formally deemed to have lived there for less than three months.

The real lesson is a different one: because no counter forces you, nothing starts by itself either. Healthcare, the tax office and the bank only learn you exist when you report yourself — and of those three, healthcare counts in months. This journey turns on clocks you have to start.

Three routes, just as in Spain and Portugal — but with a longer bridging period, and that's the core warning of this route. If you're going to work in France, you're entitled to the country-of-residence system (PUMa) from the start of your work and can register right away. If you're retired, the S1 form from the CAK (the Dutch body for healthcare abroad) arranges your access. If you don't work — you live off assets, or work remotely for a Dutch employer — your right only starts after three months of stable residence, and your means have to be at least at the level of the French social minimum.

Add to that the processing of your registration itself may take months, and the sum is clear: between your Dutch cover (which stops on emigration) and your working French cover there's a gap you have to bridge. How you do that you arrange in phase 2 — here you only need to know which route applies.

France is big, and the choice of region has two sides here that Dutch dreamers both underestimate. The first is money: the official rent observatories measure about twenty-six euros per square metre in Paris, eleven to thirteen in the provincial cities, and six to seven in the deep countryside. So the same monthly rent buys two to four times as much home outside France's own Randstad.

The second side is amenities. In parts of the countryside GPs don't take on new patients — and without a declared GP healthcare reimburses structurally less (phase 5 explains how that works). Whoever chooses the quiet checks first whether there's a doctor, a school and a station within reach. And count outside the summer: second-home regions have a winter side, with closed shutters and a village square without people.

Outside the cities English is no safety net. The language weighs more heavily in this journey than in Spain or Portugal — take it into the choice, not as a footnote.

The calculator for France works on your own moving choices and shows three cost blocks. The application block is virtually zero for France — there's no registration after all, and no fees. The money is in the move (the shortest trip of all our destinations, so also the cheapest) and in the landing: deposit and rent, living while no income comes in yet, and the mutuelle — the supplementary health insurance almost every French person has — in your monthly budget.

A rule of thumb that makes the journey less stressful: don't count yourself rich on a quick sale or a quick job, and only start spending once the first months are covered.

This is the step without forms, and yet this is where most journeys fail. Emigrating isn't something you do alone — even if the papers are in one name. Discuss with your partner and, depending on their age, your children: why do we want this, what are we giving up, and what is for each of us the condition for saying yes?

With France the language deserves the heaviest weight in the conversation. Daily life — the school, the doctor, the town hall, the neighbours — runs in French, and unlike in the Algarve or on the Costa there's no English-speaking safety net outside the cities. For children what applies everywhere applies: young children pick it up surprisingly fast, for teenagers the transition is harder and extra support is no luxury.

Close the orientation phase with a target date for departure. Not as a deadline — as a compass. Here too you wait for nobody's permission, so the pace is up to you. A realistic picture: from serious decision to being settled, this journey takes most people three to nine months — where "settled" with France above all means: the healthcare clock run out.

You fill it in below in this card, and filling it in is completing the step. You can always adjust your target date — the planning adjusts with it.