Self-Employed in France: The Micro-Entreprise Explained

Starting a business in France: the ways to work for yourself

Moving to the Duras area can ease the cost and pressure of everyday life, but it does not remove the need for a dependable income. Very few people move to rural south-west France and walk straight into a well-paid local job; most arrive with pensions, savings, an established remote career or a business idea suited to the area. For a great many newcomers, becoming self-employed in France is the most realistic route, and understanding how it works is one of the first practical steps of the move.

There is more than one way to work for yourself in France, and it helps to see the whole map before fixing on a single road. At the simplest end sits the micro-entreprise, still universally known as auto-entrepreneur, a lightweight status for a sole trader with modest turnover. Above it sits the entreprise individuelle taxed under the régime réel, which is still one person trading in their own name but with proper accounts and real-expense deductions. Beyond that lie the company structures: the EURL, the SASU and, for property in particular, the SCI (société civile immobilière). Each carries a different mix of paperwork, cost, liability protection and tax treatment.

The temptation, understandable when you are already juggling a house purchase and a visa, is to reach for the simplest option and stop thinking. That instinct is often right for a first year of freelancing in France, but not always. The correct structure depends on the work itself, your anticipated turnover, your expenses, your exposure to liability and whether the profession is regulated. This guide concentrates on the micro-entreprise, because it is where most self-employed newcomers begin, but it keeps returning to the honest question of when you should look past it. All figures here are for 2026 and change most years, so treat them as a guide rather than a guarantee.

What the micro-entreprise actually is, and who it suits

The micro-entreprise is a simplified self-employed status designed to give an individual the most straightforward possible way to register and run a small business. It is not a separate kind of company; legally you are trading as yourself, an individual, under a streamlined tax and social-security regime. That is the whole point of it. You register once, declare your turnover on a fixed rhythm, and pay contributions calculated directly on what you have invoiced. There are no annual accounts to file in the way a company must, no balance sheet, and no complicated corporation-tax return.

Its appeal, then, is administrative lightness, and that appeal is genuine. For someone testing whether a service will sell, or building a client base gradually, the micro lets you be legally in business within days rather than weeks, and lets you keep your own records without an accountant if you choose. It suits activities where your labour and expertise are the product and your costs are low: consulting, coaching, translation, copywriting, design, web development, tutoring, bookkeeping and similar knowledge work. It also suits many hands-on local services where the materials are minor compared with the time, such as gardening, cleaning, changeover services for holiday lets, small-scale property maintenance and certain tourism-related activities, always subject to the rules that apply to each individual trade.

Who does it suit less well? Anyone whose business swallows large sums in materials, fuel, equipment or subcontractors before a single euro of profit appears, because, as we will see, the micro charges you on turnover and ignores those costs. Anyone expecting to grow past the turnover ceilings quickly. And anyone in a regulated profession that the regime does not accommodate. That simplicity, in other words, is real but it can also be misleading, and a clear-eyed newcomer weighs it against the alternatives rather than defaulting into it.

The right to work: EU citizens, British nationals and the visa link

Before any of the tax detail matters, you have to be allowed to work at all, and here your nationality is the first thing that decides the route. This is one of the most important points in any honest guide to self-employment in France, because a beautifully planned micro-entreprise is worthless if your immigration status does not permit the activity.

Citizens of the European Union or the European Economic Area — Dutch, Belgian, German, Irish and others — benefit from freedom of movement. They do not need a visa to move to France, establish their main home here or set up in business. There is still practical administration to complete, including registering the activity and sorting out tax and healthcare, but for an EU or EEA citizen the question is generally not whether you may work for yourself in France, only how to organise it correctly.

For British citizens, Brexit changed the position. Owning a French property gives you no right to live in it permanently, and a French house is emphatically not a residence permit. Unless you are protected by an existing status — for example, British nationals already lawfully resident in France before the end of the Brexit transition period, holding rights under the Withdrawal Agreement — you now follow the rules that apply to non-EU nationals. As a visitor you may generally spend up to 90 days in any rolling 180-day period across the whole Schengen area, which can suit a holiday-home owner but does not support running a business as a resident. To live in France and work for yourself, a non-EU national will normally need an appropriate long-stay visa obtained before relocating, and the visa route must actually permit the working arrangement you intend.

This is where remote work becomes genuinely sensitive. The visitor visa does not permit local paid employment, and the position on work performed remotely for overseas organisations from French soil is a matter for individual immigration and tax advice, not assumption. Do not assume that being paid by a foreign employer or an overseas client places the activity outside the French system: if France becomes your normal place of residence and work, French rules may apply regardless of where the money comes from. Read our guide to visas and residency and take advice before you commit to a plan, because the immigration question sits underneath everything that follows.

Registering: URSSAF, the SIRET and getting legal

Registering a micro-entreprise is deliberately accessible, and for most straightforward activities you can complete it yourself. Registration in France is now handled through the single online business formalities portal (the guichet unique run by INPI), which routes your declaration to the relevant bodies, with URSSAF as the social-security organisation that collects your contributions once you are trading. You declare who you are, the nature of your activity and how you wish to be taxed, and the system does the rest.

Shortly afterwards you are issued a SIRET number, the unique identifier that marks you as a registered business. Your SIRET must appear on your invoices and quotes, and you cannot lawfully trade or bill clients without being properly registered — registration may be required as soon as you begin carrying out a professional activity from France, not once the money reaches a certain level. Depending on the activity, you may also need to register with a particular authority, hold specific professional insurance such as assurance décennale for building work, or prove recognised qualifications. Building trades, property services, food businesses and tourist accommodation should never be launched on the assumption that registration alone is enough; each carries its own regulatory layer on top of the general regime.

A word on language and admin here. Even where your clients speak English, you will usually still need French to deal with URSSAF, insurers, suppliers, the tax authorities and local administration. The forms, the correspondence and the deadlines are all in French, and the system assumes you can engage with it. Many newcomers manage the initial registration themselves and then lean on a bilingual accountant for reassurance; either way, budget some patience for the paperwork, because getting the setup right is far cheaper than unpicking it later.

Turnover ceilings for 2026: services versus sales

To remain within the micro-entreprise regime, your annual turnover must stay under a ceiling, and the ceiling depends on what you do. For 2026 the figures are:

• €203,100 for sales of goods and certain accommodation
• €83,600 for services and professions libérales

These ceilings are revalued every three years, so they do not stay fixed and will move again. The distinction between the two matters enormously if your business mixes activities, because a trader selling goods and also providing services has to watch both limits and how they combine.

The single most important thing to understand is what "turnover" means here. Turnover is what you invoice — your gross receipts — not what you keep after costs. That distinction runs through the whole regime and explains why the micro can be either brilliantly efficient or quietly expensive depending on your trade. A consultant billing €60,000 with almost no costs is in a very different position from a builder billing €60,000 who spends €25,000 of it on materials, even though their turnover, and therefore their exposure to the ceiling and to contributions, looks identical.

If your turnover exceeds a ceiling, you are not thrown out overnight; there are tolerance rules and a transition, but sustained trading above the limit moves you out of the micro and into the ordinary regime. For a growing business that is often a sign of success rather than a problem, but it should be planned for rather than stumbled into partway through a busy summer.

Cotisations sociales: charged on turnover, not profit

Working or running a business in France normally means contributing to the French social-security system. These payments, known broadly as cotisations sociales, help fund healthcare, pensions and other protections, and they are a real and recurring business cost rather than an optional extra. Under the micro-entreprise, they are calculated as a straightforward percentage of turnover. For 2026 the headline rates are roughly:

• 12.3% on sales of goods
• 21.2% on commercial and artisanal services
• 25.6% on liberal (BNC) activities

These rates have been rising in recent years, and the direction of travel is worth keeping in mind when you price your work. The crucial feature, again, is that they apply to turnover rather than profit. If your work involves significant materials, fuel, equipment or subcontractor costs, you pay contributions on the full invoiced sum before any of those costs are deducted. A tradesperson buying expensive materials, or any business carrying heavy overheads, can find the regime surprisingly costly for exactly this reason — the percentage looks modest until you remember it is levied on money that was never really yours to keep.

For a low-cost service business the arithmetic is kind: a translator or consultant with few expenses genuinely keeps most of what they bill, less the cotisations and income tax. For a materials-heavy trade the same rate bites much harder, and that gap is precisely the situation in which a different structure — the régime réel, where you are charged on actual profit after real costs — deserves a serious look. Budget for these contributions from the very beginning rather than treating them as an unexpected bill, and factor them into every quote so they come out of the client's money and not your own margin.

VAT: the franchise en base and what happens when you cross it

One of the quiet advantages of starting small is that many micro-entrepreneurs charge no TVA (VAT) at all, thanks to the franchise en base de TVA. Below the relevant threshold you neither add VAT to your invoices nor reclaim it on your purchases; you simply note the standard mention that VAT is not applicable, and your pricing is that much simpler and, to private customers, that much more competitive.

You only need to register for and charge TVA once your turnover passes the franchise en base thresholds, currently €85,000 for goods and €37,500 for services. A widely discussed reform proposing a single, much lower threshold of €25,000 was suspended and is not in force; if you read older commentary suggesting otherwise, treat it with caution and confirm the current position before you price anything.

Crossing the threshold changes your day-to-day life in two ways. You must start charging VAT to your clients, which raises your prices to consumers who cannot reclaim it, and you must account for that VAT to the tax authorities — though you can now also reclaim VAT on your own business purchases, which softens the blow for a trade that buys a lot of materials. There is a tolerance band above the threshold that gives you a little breathing room in the year you first cross it, but sustained trading above the limit means VAT becomes a permanent part of your admin. If most of your customers are businesses that reclaim VAT, the change is close to neutral; if they are private individuals, it is effectively a price rise you must plan for. Either way, the VAT thresholds and the turnover ceilings are two separate lines, and a growing business often meets the VAT line long before it approaches the ceiling.

Income tax and the versement libératoire option

Cotisations sociales are only half of what you owe; income tax is the other, and it is genuinely separate. For income tax you have two broad options under the micro.

The first is the standard regime, in which the tax authorities apply a fixed cost allowance to your turnover and tax what is left as part of your household income. The allowance is 71% for sales of goods, 50% for commercial and artisanal services and 34% for professions libérales and other BNC activities, reflecting the assumed cost of each type of work. The remaining fraction is added to your other household income and taxed under the normal progressive bands, which for 2025 income run from 0% up to around €11,500 per part, then 11%, 30%, 41% and 45% on the highest slices, uprated slightly each year. Because it folds into household income, your actual rate depends on everything else the household earns.

The second option is the versement libératoire, a flat-rate income-tax payment settled at the same time as your social contributions and calculated on turnover: 1% on sales of goods, 1.7% on commercial and artisanal services and 2.2% on liberal activities. It is available only if your household reference income for the relevant earlier year sits below a set limit, and its great virtue is predictability — you pay a known, small percentage as you go and there is nothing more to settle later. It is not automatically the cheaper choice, though. For a household with little other income and generous personal allowances, the standard regime can beat it because the first slice of income may be taxed at 0% anyway. The versement libératoire tends to reward those whose other income already pushes them into the taxed bands. It is worth running both calculations, ideally with an adviser, rather than assuming the flat rate must be best because it is simplest.

What the micro covers, and when to switch to régime réel or a company

The micro-entreprise is a superb tool within its limits, and it is important to be honest about where those limits are. It gives you legal trading status, a straightforward contribution mechanism, social protection including healthcare and pension rights, and enough simplicity to run alone. For a low-cost service business comfortably inside the ceilings, it may be all you ever need.

Its limits, though, are real. Because you are taxed and charged on turnover with only a notional cost allowance, you cannot deduct your actual expenses, so a business with genuine costs subsidises the regime's simplicity out of its own margin. You cannot reclaim VAT until you cross the threshold, which hurts a materials-heavy trade in its early years. As a sole trader you and the business are legally the same person, so although recent reforms have improved the protection of an entrepreneur's personal assets, you should still consider liability and insurance carefully, particularly in the building trades. And the ceilings themselves cap your growth within the regime.

The alternatives answer these limits directly. An entreprise individuelle taxed under the régime réel keeps you as a sole trader but charges income tax and contributions on actual profit after real, documented costs — the obvious move once your expenses are high enough that the micro's flat allowance is costing you money. A company such as an EURL or SASU adds a layer of formality and cost but brings clearer separation between you and the business, more flexible ways to draw income, and room to grow well beyond the ceilings. For property specifically, an SCI can help several owners hold and pass on real estate. None of these is universally better; each trades simplicity for capability. The practical signal to switch is usually one of three things: your real costs have grown until the micro overcharges you, your turnover is pushing the ceiling, or your liability exposure has outgrown a sole trader's position. This is exactly the kind of question to put to an accountant who understands international clients, because choosing the wrong structure is far cheaper to avoid at the outset than to correct after a couple of years of trading.

Bookkeeping and your ongoing obligations

Even at its simplest, the micro-entreprise carries obligations you must keep on top of, and they are not onerous so long as you are disciplined. The central duty is the turnover declaration: you must declare your turnover monthly or quarterly, whichever you chose at registration, and you must declare it even in a period where you earned nothing at all — a nil declaration is still required, and missing declarations attract penalties. Your cotisations, and your versement libératoire if you opted for it, are calculated and paid on the back of that declaration, so keeping the rhythm is the single most important habit of the regime.

Beyond declarations, you must keep a clear record of your receipts, and, for activities involving the sale of goods, a register of purchases. You must issue compliant invoices showing your SIRET, the required legal mentions and, while you remain under the franchise en base, a note that VAT is not applicable. A dedicated bank account for the activity is required once turnover stays above a certain level for two consecutive years, and many people open one from the start simply to keep business and personal money apart, which makes everything else easier. You will also need appropriate professional insurance for your trade, which for some activities is not optional but a legal condition of working.

None of this requires an accountant by law, and many micro-entrepreneurs manage perfectly well alone. But a bilingual accountant who understands international clients can save considerable time, confirm that you have chosen the right options and warn you before the business quietly outgrows the regime. Given how much cross-border tax, healthcare and residence interact for a newcomer, that reassurance is often money well spent in the first year or two.

Sectors that thrive locally

The country around Duras is a working rural region, not a resort, and that shapes where self-employed opportunity genuinely lies. Agriculture remains central, particularly vineyards, fruit growing and food production, and it drives seasonal demand for extra hands. Tourism supports restaurants, cafés, accommodation and visitor attractions, and it is the engine behind a whole cluster of independent activities. There is also steady, year-round demand for the building trades, property maintenance and practical services that keep old stone houses standing.

Typical areas of self-employed activity that do well locally include:

• Gîtes, chambres d'hôtes and other tourism-related accommodation services
• Building, renovation and the skilled trades, from stonework and roofing to plumbing and electrics
• Gardening, pool care and property management for owners who are away much of the year
• Cleaning and changeover services for holiday lets, which peak through the summer season
• Translation, administrative help and services aimed at the international community
• Remote professional work — consulting, design, writing, development — over the area's growing fibre network

A realistic note runs through all of these. Local salaried jobs are limited, wages can be lower than newcomers expect, and much of the work is seasonal, part-time or dependent on personal recommendation. Occupancy for lettings is seasonal, guests expect high standards, and the property itself matters enormously: a successful gîte or B&B needs the right location, layout, access, privacy, parking and outdoor space, not simply a pool and attractive photographs. The self-employed newcomers who do best tend to combine a realistic business with sufficient reserves and a lifestyle that does not depend on every summer week being booked.

The opportunity for the self-employed around Duras

Set against those cautions, the case for building a self-employed life around Duras is a strong one. This corner of south-west France sits where Lot-et-Garonne, the Dordogne and the Gironde meet, and Duras sits at the heart of it, framed by Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Bergerac, Villeréal, Lauzun and Marmande. That central position is a quiet commercial advantage: you draw on three départements' worth of visitors, clients and networks without committing entirely to any one of them. Duras offers more genuine commercial potential than many quiet rural towns, its château, the Côtes de Duras vineyards, its markets and summer events pulling in the kind of visitor who wants an authentic alternative to heavily developed destinations, and Bergerac's airport and services sit close by.

The human infrastructure is already here too. The area has a deep, established British and Dutch community, alongside residents from Belgium and elsewhere, which means new arrivals are not pioneers. Others have navigated the visas, the URSSAF registration, the healthcare forms and the language barrier before you, and that experience has created a genuine local network of neighbours, advisers and bilingual professionals. For a consultant, designer, writer or developer, the growing fibre connectivity makes remote work practical from among the vines; for a trade or a tourism business, the demand is real and the support to set up legally already exists. The balance that tends to work best is exactly the one the area rewards: a realistic business, sensible reserves and a home that supports your plans rather than working against them.

That last point is where the property and the plan meet. The self-employed newcomers who thrive here arrive with a business that fits the place and a house that fits the business — a gîte with the right layout and privacy, a farmhouse with a barn that could become a studio, a village home with a quiet room for client calls. Getting that fit right is far easier with someone local who knows both the market and the buildings. If a gîte, chambres d'hôtes or a home office is part of your vision, talk to Tina about which Duras-area properties genuinely suit it, so your working life and your new home pull in the same direction. And before you commit to any structure, weigh it against your likely earnings and the wider cost of living in the Lot-et-Garonne, and read our overview of moving to France from the UK to set the rest of the picture in context — a realistic plan, honestly costed, beats a hopeful one every time.