Post-Brexit Long Stays in France: What British Property Owners Can Do in 2025

When the UK left the European Union, the most practical consequence for the thousands of British families who own a second home in France was a hard limit on how long they could actually enjoy it. The 90-day-in-180 Schengen rule snapped into place overnight, turning an informally relaxed lifestyle — ‘we go for the winter, we come back in spring’ — into a rigid calendar-counting exercise backed by passport scans at the border. Five years on, British second-home owners have learned to live within the rules, but the rules themselves have evolved in ways that are less well understood than the breathless headlines of 2023–2024 would suggest.

This guide clears up what’s actually in force in 2025 and 2026, what changed, what didn’t (including the much-publicised ‘six-month automatic stay’ that was struck down at the eleventh hour), and what practical long-stay options British owners of French ski property or second homes genuinely have today. If you own or are thinking of buying in France and you want to spend longer than 90 days at a stretch in your own home, there are clear routes forward — they just aren’t the routes that were announced in the French press at the start of 2024.

Domosno sells ski property across the French Alps to British buyers, and for most of our clients this is one of the practical questions that matters most alongside price, mortgage and tax. A property you can only visit for two weeks at a time is a fundamentally different asset to one where you can stay for three or four months of the ski season. This article walks through the reality of the 90/180 rule, the status of the long-stay visa system, and the case-by-case tradeoffs British owners should weigh before assuming they’re stuck with the short-stay allowance forever.

The 90-day-in-180-day rule is the baseline immigration entitlement that applies to most non-EU visitors to the Schengen area, and since the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020 it applies to British passport holders. The rule is simple to state and counter-intuitive to enforce: at any moment you are standing on Schengen-zone soil, you must have spent no more than 90 days within the Schengen zone in the rolling previous 180-day window. It is not a calendar-year calculation and there is no reset on 1 January.

The practical implication for a British second-home owner is that you can spend, for example, 90 continuous days in your French ski property between January and late March, then none between April and early July, then another 90 days from July to late September, and so on. Any day spent inside the Schengen zone — including transit through a Schengen airport — counts toward the 90-day total, so a three-day trip to Rome eats into the same allowance as three days in your Alpine chalet.

Enforcement is via entry stamps at the external Schengen border (predominantly at Geneva, Paris CDG, Nice and Lyon airports for British ski-property owners), and from late 2025 the new EU Entry/Exit System (EES) began automating the count with biometric scans that remove any ambiguity. Overstaying is not a minor infraction: penalties range from a fine and a formal ‘return decision’ for short overstays, up to multi-year Schengen bans for repeat or significant breaches. This is not a rule to take casually, and the case-by-case discretion border officers used to exercise has been substantially tightened by EES automation.

At the start of 2024, British property owners in France received what looked like game-changing news. The French parliament, debating the Macron government’s sweeping immigration reform law, included a last-minute amendment — known as Article 1er K — that would have allowed British second-home owners to stay in France for up to six months per year without needing a long-stay visa. The amendment was passed by the National Assembly and then by the Senate, and British property owners briefly believed their 90/180 problem had been solved by decree.

It hadn’t. The French Conseil Constitutionnel — the equivalent of a constitutional court — was asked to review the law before it was signed, and in its January 2024 ruling it censured Article 1er K along with a number of other provisions, on the technical grounds that the article was a ‘cavalier législatif’ — a piece of legislation unrelated to the main subject of the bill. The six-month extension therefore never entered force. British property owners who had started to plan longer 2024 stays on the basis of the parliamentary vote learned the hard way that the Conseil Constitutionnel has the final word on French law, and that ‘cavalier’ amendments — however popular — remain vulnerable.

No equivalent standalone bill has since been re-introduced. There have been periodic calls from Franco-British parliamentarians to reinstate the provision through a properly-tabled dedicated law, but no such law has passed as of early 2026, and informal signals from both the French interior ministry and the UK Foreign Office suggest none is imminent. British buyers and owners therefore need to plan their time in France on the assumption that the 90/180 rule will remain the baseline — and pursue a formal long-stay visa if they need more.

The practical route for British owners who want to spend more than 90 days at a stretch in France is the long-stay visa, known by its acronyms VLS-T (temporary, non-renewable, up to 12 months) and VLS-TS (valant titre de séjour, equivalent to a residence permit). This is not a new concept — long-stay visas have existed for decades — but most British second-home owners are surprised by how accessible they are, because the headline ‘visa’ terminology makes the process sound bureaucratic and permanent when in practice it is neither.

The Visitor (visiteur) VLS-T is the right vehicle for most second-home owners: it allows a stay of 6 to 12 months in France, does not allow employment or economic activity in France, and is typically issued for buyers who can demonstrate sufficient funds (typically proof of income or savings equivalent to the French monthly minimum wage, around €1,767 gross for 2025), valid health insurance covering France for the duration of the stay, proof of accommodation (your owned property qualifies), and no criminal record. The visa is issued in advance at a French consulate in the UK, takes 2–4 weeks to process, and costs around €99.

Once you arrive in France with the visa, a 6-month VLS-T is generally sufficient on its own. A 12-month VLS-TS requires you to ‘validate’ the visa online with OFII (the French immigration office) within 3 months of arrival and costs an additional €200 in tax stamps. The renewal logic is where the visitor visa becomes genuinely attractive: once you have held a visitor VLS for a year, you can apply for a carte de séjour (residence permit) to extend for additional years, building up to a 10-year long-term residence entitlement for those who genuinely want it. For buyers who just want to spend the full ski season (December–April) in Val d’Isère or Chamonix without calendar-counting, a single-use VLS-T is usually all they need.

The most important caveat for any British buyer thinking about longer French stays is the 183-day rule — the point at which French tax authorities can treat you as tax-resident in France rather than the UK. The rule has several triggers: spending more than 183 days per calendar year in France is the obvious one, but also having France as your main home (foyer fiscal), conducting the majority of your economic activity in France, or having the ‘centre of your economic interests’ in France. Any one of these is enough to make you French tax-resident.

Becoming French tax-resident is not the end of the world — in many cases it’s financially neutral or even beneficial, because France’s post-LMNP tax regime on rental income and the generous CGT taper can outweigh losing the UK’s ISA and pension allowances. But it is a major decision with ripple effects on your UK pension, your UK investments, your future inheritance planning, and your healthcare entitlements. It should be made deliberately with cross-border tax advice, not stumbled into by accident during a particularly enjoyable ski season.

For second-home owners who want to extend their time in France beyond 90/180 but emphatically do not want to become French tax-resident, the sweet spot is a long-stay visa allowing 90–179 days per year in France, carefully tracked, with UK remaining the centre of economic interest and the main home. This is the most common configuration for British ski-property owners pursuing a VLS, and it’s perfectly compatible with retaining UK tax residence provided the other tests are not met. See our French property tax guide for the interaction with rental income declarations — which remain mandatory regardless of residence status.

A related point: UK state pension and private pension income generally remains taxable in the UK even for French tax residents under the UK-France double-tax treaty, so the binary ‘UK tax resident vs French tax resident’ decision is less dramatic than the word ‘resident’ implies. A cross-border accountant can model both scenarios on your specific numbers before you commit.

Valid health insurance is a mandatory requirement for any long-stay visa application, and for most British owners this is the practical hurdle that gets the most attention. The UK’s Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC) and its older EHIC predecessor cover emergency treatment in France but are explicitly not a substitute for private insurance for visa purposes — consulates will reject applications that rely on GHIC alone. A formal private insurance policy covering France for the full duration of the stay, with minimum coverage limits (typically €30,000 for emergency treatment and repatriation), is required.

For second-home owners spending 3–6 months in France at a stretch, annual travel/expat insurance policies from providers like April International, Cigna, Allianz Worldwide Care or William Russell are the typical solution, and cost roughly £50–£150 per month depending on age and coverage level. For longer stays crossing into 12-month VLS-TS territory, applicants can also join the French PUMa (Protection Universelle Maladie) scheme once they have been resident for 3 months and hold a long-stay visa — PUMa provides public French healthcare coverage for a percentage-of-income contribution that is often cheaper than private expat insurance for lower-income retirees.

Buyers who plan to eventually transition to full residency should note that PUMa is accessible to visa-holding long-stayers and provides a gateway into the Carte Vitale (French health card) system. Domosno refers clients who are serious about long-stay arrangements to specialist healthcare brokers who can compare private policies and PUMa eligibility on a case-by-case basis.

Across the several hundred British second-home owners Domosno has worked with since Brexit, three configurations cover almost every practical pattern. The first is the pure 90/180 holder: the owner makes peace with the rule, uses a passport-stamp tracking app, and plans trips to keep within the rolling 90-day allowance. This works well for buyers who visit in short concentrated bursts (a week at Christmas, a week at February half-term, a month in summer) and is the zero-friction default. No visa, no paperwork, no tax complications — just disciplined calendar tracking.

The second configuration is the annual VLS-T visitor visa: the owner applies for a 6-month visitor visa each ski season, enters France in December, spends the entire winter in their Val Thorens or Les Gets property, returns to the UK in April, and repeats the following winter. This works well for retirees, semi-retired professionals, and families with remote-work flexibility. The annual €99 consular fee and the documentation refresh are minor costs for the ability to spend the entire ski season in your own home. Healthcare is covered by annual expat insurance.

The third configuration is progressive residency: the owner starts with a 12-month VLS-TS, renews into a carte de séjour, and eventually applies for a 10-year long-term permit after five years of legal residence. This is the right choice for buyers who want to make France their primary base but retain UK nationality, and it often coincides with eventual French tax residence. It is a major life decision, not a casual administrative choice, but it is the clearest path to unrestricted time in your French property if that is what you truly want.

Which configuration fits you depends on your work situation, family responsibilities, healthcare needs, tax position, and how much of the ski season you want to spend in France versus the UK. Domosno walks every serious British buyer through these options at the shortlist stage so that the length-of-stay reality is understood before any offer is made. See our about page for the team’s approach to British-buyer support.

It might, but not soon, and the probability is lower than the 2024 press coverage suggested. Reintroducing the six-month automatic stay for British property owners would require either a standalone French immigration law (politically difficult under any government given the broader immigration debate) or an amendment to the UK-EU withdrawal agreement (negotiated at EU level, not France-to-UK bilaterally, and nowhere on the current EU agenda). Individual French parliamentarians have signalled support, but ‘signalled support’ is a long way from passed legislation.

The most realistic 2026 and 2027 outlook is that the 90/180 rule remains the baseline, the long-stay visa system remains the practical workaround, and the EES automation tightens enforcement of the baseline. British buyers should plan their purchases on that assumption. The good news is that the long-stay visa is genuinely accessible for second-home owners who meet the financial and insurance tests, and the routes above cover almost every realistic British buyer use-case.

For buyers currently weighing a ski-property purchase and worried about the length-of-stay issue, our strong recommendation is: don’t let Brexit stay-limits be the deciding factor. The visa system works, the configurations above are well-understood by every serious British buyer in the Alps, and the tax and rental-yield economics of French ski property remain compelling regardless of which configuration you choose. Get the right advice early, budget for the small additional friction, and focus on the bigger decision of which resort and property actually fits your family life. Our Domosno buying process guide walks through every stage of the purchase with the long-stay question addressed explicitly.