France’s taxe foncière: ‘I pay per year here what I paid per month in England’

"I pay per year here what I was paying a month in England, 25 years ago," Marianne Ironside, a British resident and estate agent, told The Connexion, comparing her taxe foncière bill in rural France with the property tax she paid when she owned a home in the UK.

Ms Ironside has lived in France for 25 years, after moving from England with her two young children. 

She now lives in a hamlet of around 117 residents in the department of Indre (36) in central France.

She compares the amount she pays now with what she paid in property taxes on her home near Canterbury in 2002. 

"At the moment I pay about €230 a year, and in 2002 I was paying over £200 a month," she said.

Her English home was around 120m², compared with around 80m² for her current house in France. She also had slightly more land in England, although her French property has around 750m² of outbuildings.

However, for Ms Ironside the difference is enormous when taking into account that both properties were in rural areas.

"In England, your property tax is more expensive in the countryside, in rural areas, than in the town, which is strange because we have no facilities," she said.

"In France, it's the other way around. If you live in a rural area, your property tax is cheap.

"It depends where you live, obviously. If you live in the south, near Perpignan, Béziers, for example, it's probably expensive. But where I live in central France, it's really, really cheap."

Even though she acknowledged that her income in England was higher, she still considers that the higher property tax was a significant expense.

Her experience of France, however, extends beyond the cost of owning a home.

She moved to France when she was 30, with an eldest child aged four and a half and a youngest who was just three months old.

"I was really surprised that the school bus came to my house to pick them up for primary school, and it was free, whereas in England, you have to take them to a bus stop and you have to pay.

"I was also really surprised about the quality of the school dinners compared to England or the fact that when the kids go swimming at school, it's free. In England, you have to pay for that."

She said these experiences had shaped her view of the taxes paid in France.

"When it's someone French, and they're saying, 'Oh, in France we pay tax, we have this, we have that', they don't realise, because they haven't lived somewhere else, how many good things they have that tax money pays for."

For Ms Ironside, this was one of the reasons she chose to raise her children in France.

"They've had a really good life here, and I'm just really pleased that I brought them."

There are things she finds frustrating about living in France, including the cost of social contributions for employers and the amount of administration, but they are outweighed by the good parts.

"There are so many good things here, and people are nice, and they have time to talk to you."