‘Punitive, odd, vexing’ – the French 90-day visa should never have existed

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However, the couple are concerned about what it will mean once they retire, when they would have hoped to spend larger chunks of the year in the property they bought outside of Uzès in the Occitane department in southern France.

“The question for us is going to be when we retire, at which point – although I’ve done lots and lots of calculation –  you can’t use the 90 in 180 days to be there when you want to be there. When you work it out, however you work it out, you’re ending up not being able to spend the time that you’d want to spend.”

On first glance, the idea of being in your foreign property 90 days out of 180 might seem fair and doable enough, but the Schengen stay period is calculated on a “rolling” basis, which in practical terms makes the logistics of planning and carrying out travel complicated and fiddly, almost like a job in itself.

One British woman, who asked not be named, described this difficulty, explaining that in the past she relied on the European Commission’s online Schengen Calculator to work out when she could and couldn’t visit the home she’d owned in the south of France for two decades. 

“Keeping to these 90 days in 180 days is quite difficult,” she says. “They don’t do it like half and half, you know how they do it – they go backwards. It’s odd really.”

The Gov.co.uk website does an honourable job of trying to explain, simplifying it down to (only) five steps and two calculations. Bravo if you can make sense of it without getting a headache.

The British second-home owner says she is not the only one she knows doing the same complicated mathematics. “It’s just awful when you do go [to the south of France],” she said. “You get people saying: ‘Oh I’ve got to leave because I’ve just had all my days allowance for this tranche and I’ve got to get out!’.” 

The French Government’s official line is that Britons with a home in France can choose to apply for a Short-stay visitor visa (VLS-T), which allows them to spend up to six months per year in the country, without the complicated 90-day calculations and without becoming a resident and all the tax implications that would imply. 

However, administration in France is notoriously complicated, and with the knock-on backlog effects of Brexit and Covid, many Brits who have tried to apply for a visitor visa have found themselves confronted with long delays and additional costs, whether they apply at home via a company called TLScontact, or in France. Many Brits abroad are generally reluctant to get embroiled in the paperwork of visas, in particular when they were used to friction-free travel as pre-Brexit EU citizens. “Before everything was just very free and easy”, said the second-home owner.

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