Retire to France from the UK: A Practical Guide

Retiring to France from the UK is one of the more common moves in this region, and the Duras area in particular has a British community that goes back decades — which means the paperwork below has been navigated many times by people now living a few kilometres away.

It is entirely achievable. It is also, since Brexit, a process rather than an entitlement, and the difference matters. This is what the move actually involves.

The visa

British citizens are now non-EU nationals, so the starting point is a long-stay visa applied for from the UK before you move. Without one you are limited to ninety days in any hundred and eighty across the Schengen area.

The usual route for retirees is the VLS-TS visiteur — the long-stay visitor visa. It permits residence but not work in France, which suits a retirement move, and it requires you to demonstrate:

• Sufficient stable resources without working. The benchmark is broadly the SMIC, the French minimum wage, and pension income, investments and savings all count. The assessment looks at your whole position, including whether you own your accommodation.
• Accommodation in France, owned or rented.
• Comprehensive health cover for the first year, until you can join the French system.

Applications go through the French visa service in the UK, with an appointment and biometrics. Allow considerably longer than you expect.

Once you arrive, validate the visa with OFII within three months. This is not optional and missing it creates real problems. Renewal is then annual at your local préfecture, until you become eligible for longer permits.

After around five years of continuous legal residence a ten-year card generally becomes available, and citizenship is possible on a similar timescale subject to language and integration requirements.

Money and tax

Your pension

The UK state pension is paid to residents of France and continues to be uprated annually — France is one of the countries where this applies, which is not universal and is worth knowing.

Private and workplace pensions are paid as normal. Whether to keep them in sterling or convert is a personal decision, but the exchange rate becomes a permanent feature of your monthly income rather than a holiday inconvenience.

Where you pay tax

Under the UK–France double tax treaty, the broad position is:

• Private and occupational pensions are generally taxable in France once you are French-resident.
• UK government service pensions — civil service, armed forces, most teachers, police, NHS in some cases — remain taxable in the UK, though they are still declared in France and affect your French rate.
• The state pension is generally taxable in France for French residents.
• UK rental income remains taxable in the UK and is also declared in France.

You will declare worldwide income in France annually, whether or not it is taxed there. This surprises people and it is not optional.

The interaction of a specific pension mix with the treaty is exactly the sort of thing that repays an accountant for the first declaration. It is money well spent.

Social charges

France levies social charges on some income. Holders of an S1 are exempt from certain of them, which is one of several reasons the S1 matters.

Healthcare

This is the part that most concerns people and, once sorted, worries them least.

If you receive a UK state pension, you can apply for an S1 form. It transfers responsibility for your healthcare costs to the UK and gives you access to the French system on the same basis as a French pensioner. Register it with your local CPAM, and you are issued a carte Vitale.

The French state reimburses around 70% of the official tariff for most treatment. Almost everyone adds a mutuelle — a top-up insurance policy — to cover the balance, at a monthly cost that rises with age and cover.

If you retire before state pension age, there is no S1. You need comprehensive private cover for the visa and for the period until you have been resident long enough to join PUMA, the French residence-based scheme, generally after about three months of stable residence.

Registering with a médecin traitant — a named GP — is how the system works, and rural France has a genuine shortage of doctors taking new patients. Do this early, before you need one. It is far easier to arrange when it is not urgent.

Inheritance

The single most under-considered part of a retirement move, and the one with the longest consequences.

French succession law reserves a portion of your estate for your children regardless of what your will says. This applies to your French property and, depending on circumstances, potentially more widely.

There is an EU regulation allowing residents to elect the law of their nationality to govern their succession, and its interaction with UK domicile rules is genuinely complicated.

How you own the property matters at purchase, not afterwards. The ownership structure chosen when you sign has consequences that are difficult and expensive to change later.

If you have a blended family, children from a previous relationship, or particular intentions about who inherits what, take proper advice before you buy rather than after. This is the mistake that causes the most distress, and it is entirely avoidable.

The practicalities

Driving. A UK licence can be exchanged for a French one, with rules that have changed since Brexit and continue to evolve. Check the current position rather than relying on what someone tells you at a party.

Your UK house. Keeping, letting or selling each has consequences in both countries, and the timing relative to becoming French-resident affects the capital gains position materially.

Banking. A French account is needed in practice for utilities, taxes and standing orders. Some UK banks have restricted services to non-UK-resident customers since Brexit, so check before you go.

Currency. Over a retirement, the difference between a bank's exchange rate and a broker's on a regular monthly transfer is a meaningful sum.

Pets need the correct paperwork, which changed after Brexit.

The 90/180 rule still applies to any time you spend elsewhere in Schengen before your residence is established.

A rough timeline

The move works better as a sequence than as a single decision, and most people who do it well spread it over eighteen months to two years.

Two years out. Start French, however badly. Visit outside summer. Work out roughly what your income will look like in euros and what the exchange rate does to it. Begin thinking about the UK house.

Twelve to eighteen months out. Rent for a season in the area you think you want, including part of a winter. Look at houses without a deadline. Talk to an accountant about the pension and tax position, and to a notaire about inheritance if your family situation is anything other than simple.

Nine months out. Narrow to one area. Register with local agents. Understand what your budget actually buys there rather than what the portals suggest.

Six months out. Begin assembling visa documents — they take longer to gather than to submit, particularly anything needing translation or an apostille. Apply for the S1 if you are of state pension age.

Three months out. Visa appointment. Arrange the move itself, the pets, the vehicle.

On arrival. Validate the visa with OFII within three months — this is a hard deadline. Open the French bank account if you have not already. Register with CPAM. Find a médecin traitant before you need one.

First year. Join something. Do the first tax declaration with help. Sort the driving licence.

The people who find the move hardest are almost always the ones who compressed this into four months because a house came up.

Two people, two experiences

Worth saying plainly, because retirement moves are usually made by couples and rarely land on both equally.

One partner is often the driver of the idea, and typically the one who learns more French, deals with the administration and builds the social connections. The other can find themselves in a country where they cannot follow a conversation, cannot deal with the bank, and depend on their partner for everything that used to be routine.

That imbalance is the most common source of unhappiness in the moves that do not work, far more than money or paperwork. It is also entirely predictable and largely preventable — both people learning French, both attending the associations, both dealing with the mairie occasionally.

There is a harder version of the same point. If one of you were suddenly on your own here — through illness or bereavement — would the other cope with the language, the driving, the house and the administration? It is an uncomfortable question and the couples who have thought about it in advance are the ones who manage when it happens. It is also an argument for a town rather than a hamlet, and for a house without stairs.

The part nobody warns you about

The paperwork is manageable. The thing that decides whether people stay is none of the above.

Language. You can complete this entire process without French, and you cannot live well without some. Rural France runs in French — the bar, the boulangerie, the mairie, the neighbours. Arriving in your sixties and starting from nothing is hard, and the people who succeed are the ones who start before they move and join something after.

Winter. A retirement move is often decided on a summer visit. Rural France in February is quiet in a way that suits some people enormously and isolates others. Rent through a winter before you buy. It is the single most useful thing you can do and almost nobody does it.

Isolation and driving. Everything out here requires a car, and most households run two. That is fine at sixty-five and a real question at eighty-five. A house four kilometres from a village with no bus is a different proposition in twenty years, and rural property with poor access is harder to sell. Buying in or near a market town rather than deep in the countryside is worth thinking about earlier than feels necessary.

Family. Grandchildren, ageing parents and the flights involved are the most common reason people move back. Being thirty-five minutes from an airport rather than two hours matters more over a decade than any view.

Retiring in the Duras area

The country framed by Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Bergerac, Villeréal, Lauzun and Marmande suits this move for reasons that are practical rather than scenic.

Bergerac and its airport are about thirty-five minutes, with a hospital in the same town — both of which matter more each year. Bordeaux is an hour and a quarter for anything specialist, and its TGV puts Paris at around two hours.

There is a British and Dutch community decades deep, but not concentrated enough that daily life stops happening in French. That configuration turns out to be the useful one: somebody who can explain a tax form, and every reason to be speaking French with your neighbours. Eymet, twenty minutes away, has the largest English-speaking network in the area whenever you want it.

The towns have year-round populations, so the bakery opens in February and there are people in the bar. That is not true of every pretty village in this region and it matters enormously to anyone spending winters here.

Property is among the better value in France, which for a retirement move means the same budget buys a single-storey house near a town rather than a farmhouse up a track — a trade that looks dull at sixty and sensible at eighty.

The associative life is active — walking clubs, choirs, language exchanges, the comité des fêtes. The people who settle happily here are almost always the ones who joined something in their first year.

If you are working through this and want to talk to someone who has watched a great many people make exactly this move — including the parts that go wrong — Tina lives in the Duras area and will give you a straight account in your own language.

None of the above is legal or tax advice. On anything with a financial consequence, take proper professional advice on your own position.