Table of Contents

How to choose comes down to a short, ranked list of your own requirements, carefully thought through, not another “best for” town added to a never ending spreadsheet. There is no one best place to live in France and every list that pretends otherwise is the reason your shortlist keeps growing instead of shrinking.

I’ve gone through this process myself more than once, gotten it wrong at least a few times during the last 3 years while doing this exact search on the ground in France.

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I realised I could write a longer post detailing the process that we refined over the last three years when I got this DM on Instagram last week from a couple house-hunting saying “We have NO idea whereabouts to pick,” praying-hands emoji and all.

If you have a spreadsheet open on your desktop right now, town names in one column, nothing at all in the rest, this is for you.

By the way if you ask ChatGBT where to live in France and it will list all the big cities and usually at the top Lyon. Every time. Great job market, less expensive than Paris, TGV to everywhere. It’s a good answer for someone with a tech career.

The wrong answer for a lot of people reading this. It’s only scraping the same time-worn advice and missing the nuances of real life.

Going through these steps will give you a more true answer for yourself.

If you would rather have a workbook/guide that takes you through all these steps you can get your free copy of A Tasting: Find Your France Quiz and Guide. It walks you through everything, if you’d rather do it on paper than in your head.

Start With the Life You Want, Not the Map

The question everyone starts with is the wrong one. “Where should we live in France” sends you straight to a map and a map has no opinions, it will happily show you thirty-six thousand communes and let you drown in them.

The better question is smaller: what do you want your Tuesday to look like?

Tuesday is the market morning you get up early for or don’t. It’s the café you walk to where the owner starts your order when they see you walk in, or the twenty-minute drive to the nearest one. It’s how you feel surrounded by the people in your neighbourhood. None of that shows up on a top-ten list, which is exactly the trouble with top-ten lists, they answer a question about scenery or stats, not about a life.

Questions do more work here than a map ever will:

What does your Tuesday actually look like? Morning coffee at the cafe, Market day, museum visit, joining the local hiking group, dinner night out? What daily activities are important to you?

Who do you want around you (if anyone), full-time neighbours or a street that empties out every September?

How far will you drive for the things you need, and how often are you willing to do it?

Starting from the map or a top ten list creates the opposite of clarity: more options, zero personal criteria, a spreadsheet where every row looks plausible because nothing has been asked to disqualify it yet.

I’m not saying top ten lists are entirely bad. They do help you jumpstart your initial thoughts about what kind of place you want to live in France.

If you’ve read the guide on which kind of France person you are and still feel no closer to a shortlist, this is why, the guide narrows the kind of place but the specific shortlist is still yours to build and that’s what the rest of this post is for.

The Requirements Checklist (the One the Lists Skip)

Every guide hands you a list of things to consider. Almost none of them tell you to rank it and ranking is the actual trick. Ask an AI model to help with this same decision and underneath the polish, it does one thing well: it tells you to order your priorities so the top two or three do the eliminating, instead of treating all twelve as equally important. Copy that.

A list you never rank just sits there being reasonable about everything, which is another way of saying it decides nothing.

Non-negotiables

These are the ones that cancel a town right off, no matter how good the market square looks.

Airport or TGV access sits at the top for almost anyone crossing an ocean a few times a year, for family, for work or for whatever your personal reason is. A place near Agen puts you about ninety minutes from Bordeaux airport and on a TGV line that reaches Paris in a little over three hours; a house forty minutes further into the Lot stretches that same trip into four hours plus with a train change. SNCF Connect will give you the real journey time from any address to any station.

Healthcare distance is often the second non-negotiable, and it isn’t only a retiree’s concern. A town can look gorgeous in the listing photos and still have no doctor within thirty minutes accepting new patients.

Walkability to daily needs, a boulangerie, a pharmacy, a grocery store you can reach on foot, is often the third, because a car-dependent version of rural France is a different life than the one being sold in the photographs.

Trust me we made this mistake when we rented a house for two months in rural France and didn’t realize that the closest proper supermarché was 20 minutes away by car. Not that was necessarily a bad thing but it definitely changed how we actually lived those 2 months than we had originally imagined.

The fourth is often your personal requirements. For me a place needs to have a thriving arts community. For my husband there would need to be good fishing somewhere close by.

Preferences, not requirements

Climate wishes, architecture, a wine region on the doorstep, these are the things people mistake for criteria because they’re the easiest ones to have an opinion about. They matter, but they don’t often disqualify a particular place on their own.

Climate might exclude vast areas in France depending on if you want a lot of sunshine and are okay with the heat or if you prefer more moderate temperatures and are okay with grey skies in winter but they don’t help you really narrow your list down substantially.

Which Region of France Should You Live In?

Region is really climate and culture in one package, climate does seem to affect the culture. Mild and grey on the Atlantic coast, hot and crowded by August on the Mediterranean and the rest of the regions fall somewhere in between.

No one of France’s regions is the right answer on its own, they each just answer a different question and matching one region to your non-negotiables narrows the field before you’ve picked a single town.

City, Town, or Village: Picking Your Size of France

Size is its own decision, big enough to deserve its own post but the short version: a city gives you an airport nearby, restaurants open past nine and English spoken at the pharmacy.

A village gives you a place where everyone knows who you are and a nighttime silence that’s glorious for some and others find unsettling by the end of the weekend. (Side note: 40% of municipalities turn off their street lights from 11pm to 5pm so if you’re coming from a brightly lit city, be aware).

I’ve lived this trade-off myself. Toulouse gave me an international airport, a real restaurant scene and neighbours from six countries. Albi, an hour away, which has a beautiful market square worth a visit on its own and it also had a Tuesday night where nothing stays open past eight. Same regional climate, two different lives.

Think about what you’ve been used to as well. I met a woman who came from a big city in the States. She had bought a beautiful property in a little tiny village in rural France. She hadn’t even been there a year and she didn’t know what to do with herself.

Do You Need to Speak French to Live There?

In Paris and in Nice, you can float on English for years and mostly get away with it. In the handful of places with a real part-time anglophone community like in Orne and Manche in Normandy or in Eymet in Dordogne you might need to hire a hand holder for some administrative tasks but you could get by.

In a village of eight hundred people, you can’t, not because anyone’s unkind about it, but it’s just not a language people know. It’s not like the Netherlands or Germany where almost everyone speaks English.

Be aware that often the lists ranking France’s “most English-friendly” towns are talking about something else entirely. They are talking about the most touristic places, where enough international visitors pass through that English became a service rather than a courtesy. So as a permanent inhabitant you are probably still expected to know French very well.

Surviving on English and belonging in France are two different outcomes, and only one outcome is possible in most of the country at one time.

If you want a dose of reality written in an entertaining way about the learning curve of belonging in France, from someone who lived it, the book Almost French is well worth the read.

Where Expats Cluster and Whether That Should Sway You

Expats cluster in the Dordogne (British enough in parts that people call it Dordogneshire), Paris, the Riviera, parts of Normandy like Le Perche and there’s a real case for choosing one of them: an existing English speaking community softens the first year in a way nothing else does.

It’s not just the language you are getting used to, it’s also the cultural norms. Even though France is European and Western the cultural differences are real. And sometimes just having a taste of the norms you are used to can buoy you up when trying to fit into a new place becomes draining.

There’s also a real cost. Some of the most-recommended guides filter every suggestion through “a thriving American community” as the deciding factor and suggest, unsurprisingly, Paris and Nice every time. You could be limiting yourself to exploring a very small part of France without even meaning to if that is one of your non-negotiables.

Get the Real Cost Picture

The catch: a €120,000 listing in a depopulating commune is cheap for a reason and reading the property market before you fall for a bargain (Post #26 when it’s ready) explains what that reason usually is.

We saw this play out more than once, a beautiful, bargain-priced listing online, and by the time we’d driven into town it was obvious why, no matter how good the place looked on paper.

Could You Do It Part-Time First (or forever)?

There’s a cheaper version of this decision to test before committing to a full move: 90 to 180 days a year in the same place (Post #30 when it’s ready), broken into two blocks, no permanent address required.

It answers half the questions in this post, the climate in the season you’d actually be there, whether the town holds up outside of high summer, without the stakes of a full relocation.

Non-EU visitors get ninety days within any hundred-eighty-day rolling period without a visa, and the EU’s own short-stay calculator can do the math for your specific travel plans.

Read the Values Fit on the Ground

There’s one filter none of your checklist items catch: values fit.

A town can pass every practical test, the TGV time, the doctor, the boulangerie and still be a place you’d never quite belong.

France runs the full range from Paris sophistication to countryside that feels twenty, thirty years behind the times and everything in between. And it has nothing to do with house price or even region, it’s set town by town, often by one mayor and one council.

You can read it on the ground though: repainted shutters versus dusty shopfronts, a dog on a leash at the cafe versus a dog chained in a bare yard, a full café versus an empty street, political posters or community events advertised on the local notice boards.

Rank It and Let the List Do the Work

Everything above is really one long argument for the same move: name your non-negotiables, order them, and let deal-breakers do the disqualifying instead of another “best for” list. Do that and most of France drops out before you’ve opened a single listing, which was the whole point of starting with your Tuesday instead of a map.

Wherever you are on your journey of spending more time in France I hope you’re enjoying it with open eyes, curiosity and feeling lots of joy.