I’m a German citizen, my wife is not. When we moved to France, we were confused. Looking at the French government’s website, we couldn’t figure out a crucial question: when, and how, would she have the right to work?

We talked to the French embassy and EU aid organizations, got advice from my employer and blogs and Facebook groups. She’s a schoolteacher, and we wanted to make sure she was able to work when we arrived, at the beginning of the school year. We did everything we were told, filled out everything we were advised to…but still, employers weren’t sure she had the right to work.

Six months and a lot of pain later, we’ve now left France. We’ve learned a lot more about EU law and French immigration practices than we ever planned to. I’m writing this guide because I haven’t found anything quite like it, something that puts all the information we found in one place. Read this guide, and you’ll learn how the law is supposed to work, how it actually works…and what you should do if, as a non-EU spouse of an EU citizen, you still want to move to France.

How it’s supposed to work

I want to be absolutely clear here: I am not a lawyer. This is not professional legal advice. This is based on what I’ve been told by Your Europe Advice, an organization that provides free advice about EU law. It’s also based on my own reading, because the relevant law here (the EU Directive on Freedom of Movement, 2004/38/EC) is surprisingly readable.

First, the crucial question. Your spouse is an EU citizen, and you have moved together to a (different!) EU country. Do you have the right to work? Let’s check the directive:

Article 23

Related rights

Irrespective of nationality, the family members of a Union citizen who have the right of residence or the right of permanent residence in a Member State shall be entitled to take up employment or self-employment there.

Yes, you have the right to work.

You may need a visa to enter the country, but if so, it is supposed to be issued quickly and free of charge according to Article 5:

2.  Family members who are not nationals of a Member State shall only be required to have an entry visa in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 539/2001 or, where appropriate, with national law. For the purposes of this Directive, possession of the valid residence card referred to in Article 10 shall exempt such family members from the visa requirement.

Member States shall grant such persons every facility to obtain the necessary visas. Such visas shall be issued free of charge as soon as possible and on the basis of an accelerated procedure.

To make sure this is done properly, the EU recommends that you make it clear that you are applying for an entry visa as a family member of an EU citizen. These are generally short-stay Schengen visas that last 90 days.

After entering, you may be required to apply for a residence card.

Article 9

Administrative formalities for family members who are not nationals of a Member State

1.  Member States shall issue a residence card to family members of a Union citizen who are not nationals of a Member State, where the planned period of residence is for more than three months.

2.  The deadline for submitting the residence card application may not be less than three months from the date of arrival.

3.  Failure to comply with the requirement to apply for a residence card may make the person concerned liable to proportionate and non-discriminatory sanctions.

This residence card must be issued within six months, and they can only ask for a very short list of documents:

Article 10

Issue of residence cards

1.  The right of residence of family members of a Union citizen who are not nationals of a Member State shall be evidenced by the issuing of a document called ‘Residence card of a family member of a Union citizen’ no later than six months from the date on which they submit the application. A certificate of application for the residence card shall be issued immediately.

2.  For the residence card to be issued, Member States shall require presentation of the following documents:

(a) a valid passport;

(b) a document attesting to the existence of a family relationship or of a registered partnership;

(c) the registration certificate or, in the absence of a registration system, any other proof of residence in the host Member State of the Union citizen whom they are accompanying or joining;

Once you get it, the residence card is supposed to be valid for five years:

Article 11

Validity of the residence card

1.  The residence card provided for by Article 10(1) shall be valid for five years from the date of issue or for the envisaged period of residence of the Union citizen, if this period is less than five years.

Six months may sound like a long time, but if everything goes according to EU law you shouldn’t be too worried, because of this:

Article 25

General provisions concerning residence documents

1.  Possession of a registration certificate as referred to in Article 8, of a document certifying permanent residence, of a certificate attesting submission of an application for a family member residence card, of a residence card or of a permanent residence card, may under no circumstances be made a precondition for the exercise of a right or the completion of an administrative formality, as entitlement to rights may be attested by any other means of proof.

“Under no circumstances”, that’s pretty strong! You do not need your residence card either to exercise your rights (such as the right to work) or to complete any administrative formality (basically, anything the government wants you to do). You also don’t need a document certifying you’ve applied for the card. You can attest your rights by any other means of proof: for example, your marriage certificate and your spouse’s passport.

In general, you have almost all of the rights that the locals do, though for a few specific things you may have to wait:

Article 24

Equal treatment

1.  Subject to such specific provisions as are expressly provided for in the Treaty and secondary law, all Union citizens residing on the basis of this Directive in the territory of the host Member State shall enjoy equal treatment with the nationals of that Member State within the scope of the Treaty. The benefit of this right shall be extended to family members who are not nationals of a Member State and who have the right of residence or permanent residence.

2.  By way of derogation from paragraph 1, the host Member State shall not be obliged to confer entitlement to social assistance during the first three months of residence or, where appropriate, the longer period provided for in Article 14(4)(b), nor shall it be obliged, prior to acquisition of the right of permanent residence, to grant maintenance aid for studies, including vocational training, consisting in student grants or student loans to persons other than workers, self-employed persons, persons who retain such status and members of their families.

All of that is pretty clear, and there are some nice guides on the EU website that walk you through a lot of it.

I suspect that no EU country perfectly implements these rules. It’s a lot easier to require a residence card for something than to allow people to show up with just their marriage certificate. But there is a lot of variation in which rights are involved, and in how quickly and reliably things are processed. So next, let’s look at how France does it.

How France says it works

If you’re trying to move to France, the most intuitive thing to do is to check the French government’s website, service-public.fr, and see what it has to say. You’ll find confirmation of some of these points: that you must apply for a residence permit within three months, that they must grant it within six months unless they have a very good reason not to.

That page takes you to the page on residence cards, which describes part of the process of applying for one. Following the pages, you can eventually find the following steps:

1. Apply via ANEF, the Administration Numérique des Étrangers en France. You’ll have to upload several documents: a scan of your passport, something proving your residence in France (they have a list), an official photo (there are machines called Photomatons in France that do this), a scan of your spouse’s passport and your marriage certificate, and some proof that your spouse has legal residence in France (for example, their employment contract). You have to do this after entering the country. So unlike a normal visa, this can’t be started early!
2. ANEF gives you a document called an attestation de pre-depôt. This certifies that you have submitted your application, but nothing more than that. It explicitly says it doesn’t attest to the regularity of your stay, or let you re-enter France if you leave.
3. ANEF then is supposed to forward your case to your local government: a prefecture or sub-prefecture.
4. The prefecture or sub-prefecture, once they open your file, will give you access to an online space where they can send and receive documents. This online space is supposed to come with an attestation de prolongation. This is a document that attests that you are legally in the country for three months while they process your case, but still does not attest that you have the right to work, register for healthcare, return to the country if you leave, or really anything else. If you go past the three months, they’re supposed to issue you another one.
5. They might ask you for more documents, or to clarify things.
6. Once they’ve processed your case, they give you a way (that can vary by prefecture) to set up an appointment to do biometrics. You show up with the documents they ask for and they take your fingerprints.
7. They give you an attestation de decision favorable. This one explicitly gives you the right to work.
8. Once your residence card is ready, they let you set up an appointment to pick it up.

Note that, despite the EU rules, it’s not until step 7 that you get a document saying you have the right to work. Instead, employers might think that you need a work authorization, a document that is complicated to apply for because it requires the employer demonstrate that there are no suitable French candidates for the position. The page on work authorizations lists a number of exceptions…but not for spouses of EU citizens, nor for the short-term Schengen visa you might have if you followed the normal rules.

Even if an employer understands the rules, they still might be worried. It might not be clear to them how to fill out the paperwork to hire you without one of the documents listed on service-public.fr. They might also be worried that the government will punish them. In France, if you claim to be a spouse of an EU citizen but turn out to be lying, your employer can be punished with very steep fines, or even in some cases jail time! So employers can be very reluctant to hire you if you don’t have some French document that explicitly says you have the right to work.

With all that, maybe you still want to try to do things this way. We still did, or at least, we couldn’t think of a better option. My wife applied with ANEF when we entered France, and we hoped things would go reasonably quickly.

How it actually works

Things do not go reasonably quickly.

The system ANEF uses to register non-EU spouses of EU nationals is quite new, and still buggy. Applications can be lost. Ours was sent to the wrong office, and not processed for some time.

The prefectures and sub-prefectures also take quite long to process things. They aim to finish in three months, but the average is typically much higher. If you check your prefecture, they may have published their average delays for recent years. Ours was around five months.

You may not have the ability to directly check on any of these things. ANEF told us they had no information, the prefecture told us they couldn’t answer our questions. We had to go through a variety of aid organizations to get any information at all.

The prefectures might ask you for documents you don’t actually need. They might want you to certify your marriage in your spouse’s home country if it was made elsewhere, or apostilled if your country does the apostille.

They might also give you a residence card that only lasts one year, instead of five, or charge you to pick it up, when they’re not supposed to.

Is it possible you get processed quickly and correctly? Yes, it’s possible. Some people do get the attestation de prolongation immediately, and not after five months. We had friends who were processed in two months, getting the card in three…after applying some political pressure behind the scenes, in a well-rated prefecture.

(Check your prefecture or sub-prefecture on Google maps, they have star ratings!)

Of the steps above, it took five months for us to get to step 4. We got up to step 6. before we gave up and left the country.

If you don’t want to do that, you need another approach.

What you should actually do

Talk to people in France, and they’ll be confused by all this. Most of them think you have to go through a very different process, one where you get a long-stay visa before entering the country, which explicitly gives the right to work.

That’s because that is actually the official process…for spouses of French people. EU Countries are allowed to have different immigration rules for their own citizens’ spouses from the general rules, and France does. Most bureaucrats you run into in France, and many employers, will assume you are supposed to get a long-stay visa, and that if you didn’t you’re doing something wrong. In particular, the bureaucrats in charge of registering you for health coverage will often assume this, so until you get your residence card you may need to pay full price for your healthcare.

Here’s the thing, though: why not get a long-stay visa?

This is a visa called type D. These visas cost money, they aren’t generally free. You can’t always get one: while the embassy is required by EU law to give you a short-stay visa, they aren’t required to give you a long-stay visa.

But long stay visas can explicitly give the right to work. They don’t expire in three months, before most prefectures will have processed your files. And they are what most French people expect you to have.

So that’s our advice. If you really want to move to France with your EU spouse, and you’re not an EU citizen yourself…then don’t go until you have a type D, long-stay, VLS-TS visa.

It’s not what you’re supposed to do. But until the system changes, it could save you five months of pain.