You own a stone cottage in the Dordogne or a flat near the sea in Brittany. Since Brexit you arrive with your British passport, the border officer stamps it, and you settle in for the season. Then a neighbour mentions the 90-day rule, you count back over your trips, and the total looks uncomfortably close to the limit. Or worse: on your way back through Calais or the Eurotunnel terminal, an officer tells you that you have overstayed, refuses you entry, or hands you a paper signed by the préfet — the State’s representative in the local area — ordering you to leave France. This article explains, for British second-home owners and long-stay visitors, exactly how the 90/180-day rule counts your days, how the French authorities prove an overstay, what decisions can follow, and how each of them can be challenged before the French courts. Every French legal term is explained as it appears, and every decisive statement is anchored to the official text or decision it comes from.

I. How the 90/180-day rule counts your French days after Brexit

A. Do your French second-home days really count towards the 90 days in any 180?

Since the end of the Brexit transition period, British citizens are third-country nationals for the purposes of European Union border law. That single change transformed the position of every Briton with a second home in France. Before Brexit, a British passport gave you the right to come and go as you pleased and to spend the whole summer, autumn and more at your French house. After Brexit, short stays without a visa are governed by the Schengen Borders Code, Regulation (EU) 2016/399, and in particular its Article 6, which sets the familiar condition: a stay of no more than 90 days in any 180-day period across the whole Schengen area.

The British government’s own travel advice explains that visa-free travel to the Schengen area, including France, is limited to 90 days in any 180-day period (GOV.UK entry requirements for France), whether you travel as a tourist, to visit family or friends, or to enjoy a house you own. Ownership of French property changes nothing about the counting. There is no homeowner’s exemption, no reduced rate for people who pay the taxe foncière (the annual French property tax paid by owners), and no credit for the years you have been coming to the same village. The 90 days are a personal immigration allowance, not a property right.

French domestic law points to exactly the same European rule. Article L311-1 of the CESEDA — the Code de l’entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d’asile, which is the French code governing the entry and residence of foreign nationals — provides that “Pour entrer en France, tout étranger doit être muni : 1° Sauf s’il est exempté de cette obligation, des visas exigés par les conventions internationales et par l’article 6, paragraphe 1, points a et b, du règlement (UE) 2016/399 du Parlement européen et du Conseil du 9 mars 2016 concernant un code de l’Union relatif au régime de franchissement des frontières par les personnes (code frontières Schengen)”. In other words, the visa-free British visitor enters France under Article 6 of the Schengen Borders Code, and Article 6 carries the 90/180-day condition with it. The companion provision, Article L312-1 of the CESEDA, confirms the framework: “Tout étranger souhaitant entrer en France en vue d’y séjourner pour une durée n’excédant pas trois mois doit solliciter auprès des autorités diplomatiques et consulaires françaises un visa de court séjour, dans les conditions prévues à l’article 6 du règlement 2016/399 du Parlement européen et du Conseil du 9 mars 2016.” British citizens are exempt from the short-stay visa itself, but they are not exempt from the 90-day condition that Article 6 imposes.

Three counting points cause the most confusion among British owners, and each of them deserves a clear answer. First, the 180-day window rolls. It is not a calendar half-year and it does not reset on 1 January or 1 July. On every single day of your stay, you must look backwards over the preceding 180 days and add up every day spent anywhere in the Schengen area. If that total exceeds 90, you are in overstay from that day onwards, even if an earlier trip has partly dropped out of the window. Second, days in other Schengen countries count. A fortnight driving through Spain, a long weekend in Italy and two months at your house in the Lot add together into one single 90-day allowance, because the limit applies to the Schengen area as a whole, not to France alone. The government advice warns expressly: travellers visiting several Schengen countries must keep the whole trip within the 90-day visa-free limit, since visits to Schengen countries in the 180 days before travel count towards the 90 days (GOV.UK entry requirements for France). Third, both the day of entry and the day of exit count as days of stay. Arriving on 1 April and leaving on 10 April consumes ten days, not nine. Owners who shave the calculation by excluding travel days are the most common source of accidental one- or two-day overstays, and a one-day overstay is still an overstay in the eyes of the law.

There is one clean way out of the counting altogether: a French residence permit or long-stay visa. The same official guidance confirms that time spent in France under a residence permit or long-stay visa does not count towards the 90-day visa-free Schengen allowance (GOV.UK entry requirements for France). In French terms, that means a carte de séjour (residence permit) or a visa de long séjour (long-stay visa, typically the visitor visa for retired or financially self-sufficient Britons) takes your French days outside the 90-day allowance. This is why many second-home owners who want to spend four or five continuous months at their French house now apply each year for a long-stay visitor visa before leaving the United Kingdom. The mechanism is strict, however: Article L412-1 of the CESEDA provides that “la première délivrance d’une carte de séjour temporaire ou d’une carte de séjour pluriannuelle est subordonnée à la production par l’étranger du visa de long séjour mentionné aux 1° ou 2° de l’article L. 411-1.” You cannot arrive visa-free and then convert your stay into a residence permit from inside France as a matter of right; the long-stay visa must normally be obtained from the French consulate before you travel. Owners who discover the 90-day problem mid-stay, already in France, therefore face a narrower set of options, which is exactly why counting correctly from the start matters so much.

Practical counting discipline is the cheapest legal protection available. Keep every boarding pass, Eurotunnel or ferry booking confirmation, and fuel or toll receipt that proves when you entered and left. Note each entry and exit date in a single running table, add the rolling 180-day total before booking each new trip, and build in a margin of at least a few days for disrupted travel. If illness, a cancelled ferry or a family emergency forces you to remain beyond your allowance, gather the written evidence immediately — medical certificates, cancellation notices, correspondence — because any later request for leniency or any court challenge will turn on documents, not on explanations given orally months afterwards. Readers who already live in France under the Withdrawal Agreement rather than visiting visa-free are in a different position, governed by their Withdrawal Agreement residence card rather than the 90-day rule, as explained in our guide to renewing a Withdrawal Agreement residence permit and challenging a refusal or removal order.

B. How do French border officers actually prove that you overstayed?

An overstay is not a matter of impression; it is a matter of proof, and the proof system has recently changed. Until recently, the system was ink: the border officer stamped your passport on entry and on exit, and the stamps were added up. The British travel industry association described the practice accurately when it noted that passports are stamped by the border officer on entry and exit to check compliance with the 90-day limit. That stamping system is now being replaced by the Entry/Exit System, the European Union’s electronic register of third-country nationals’ crossings. The official British travel advice records the change: the new system replaces manual passport stamping for short stays, and travellers may be asked to provide biometric details at each entry and exit (GOV.UK entry requirements for France). If you enter the Schengen area through the Port of Dover, the Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone or Eurostar at St Pancras, the juxtaposed French controls mean your data is captured before you even leave British soil.

The shift from stamps to biometrics matters for British owners in two opposite ways. On the one hand, the electronic record is far harder to dispute: entry and exit events are logged centrally, the rolling calculation can be performed automatically, and an officer at Calais can see your full recent travel history on screen. On the other hand, electronic systems make errors — missed exit registrations when you leave through a small or congested crossing point are the classic example — and an error in the system becomes, in practice, a presumption against you until you rebut it. That is why the paper trail recommended above remains essential even in the biometric age: boarding passes, booking confirmations and receipts are the evidence that corrects a missing exit record. If the system shows no exit and you cannot prove one, the authorities may treat the intervening period as continuous presence.

French law gives officers several further tools at the border. Article L311-2 of the CESEDA lists the situations in which a foreign national “ne satisfait pas aux conditions d’entrée sur le territoire français”, including the case where the person “fait l’objet d’un signalement aux fins de non-admission sur le territoire français introduit dans le système d’information Schengen” — an alert for refusal of admission entered in the Schengen Information System — or is subject to “une peine d’interdiction judiciaire du territoire, d’une décision d’expulsion, d’une interdiction de retour sur le territoire français, d’une interdiction de circulation sur le territoire français ou d’une interdiction administrative du territoire.” An earlier overstay that led to an entry ban therefore compounds itself: the ban is visible to every Schengen border officer through the shared system, and it supplies an independent ground for refusing you admission on your next trip, even if your day-count for that trip would otherwise be lawful.

Officers may also examine the classic entry conditions that Article L311-1 of the CESEDA preserves: proof of accommodation and of the purpose of the stay, means of subsistence, medical insurance covering hospital and welfare costs, and guarantees of return travel. For a second-home owner these are usually easy to satisfy — title deeds or the latest property tax notice, bank statements, an insurance certificate, a return booking — but they should be carried or accessible on every trip, because a difficult examination at the border is precisely the moment when missing documents turn a routine admission into a formal refusal procedure. Travellers staying with family rather than in their own property may additionally be asked for the attestation d’accueil, the formal hospitality certificate signed by the host, which Article L313-1 of the CESEDA describes as the document a foreign national visiting family or friends for under three months “doit présenter”, taking “la forme d’une attestation d’accueil, signée par la personne qui se propose d’assurer le logement”. Owners hosting visiting relatives from the United Kingdom should arrange this certificate at their local town hall (mairie) well before the guests travel.

The evidential lesson of this section is simple and runs through everything that follows. The authorities prove overstays with stamps, electronic records and shared alerts; you rebut them, or prevent them, with your own contemporaneous documents. Every challenge described in Part II — against refused entry, against a removal order, against an entry ban — begins with the same question from the judge: what does the file show, and what can you prove? A British owner with a clean travel table, complete bookings and insurance, and prompt written evidence for any forced extension starts every procedure several steps ahead.

II. What an overstay can cost you, and how to challenge each decision

A. Refused entry, removal order and entry ban: which decision does what?

Three different decisions can strike a British visitor who has overstayed, and they must not be confused, because each has its own author, its own effect and its own remedy. The first is refusal of entry at the border (refus d’entrée), governed by Article 14 of the Schengen Borders Code. When officers consider that you do not satisfy the Article 6 conditions — typically because your accumulated days exceed 90, or because a Schengen alert exists against you — they refuse admission and the carrier that brought you is normally required to take you back. A refusal of entry is immediate and physical: you do not enter France that day. Its legal importance for owners is that it leaves a trace in the systems consulted on your next trip, and repeated refusals harden the attitude of officers and prefectures towards any later visa application. The leading French authority on the limits of refusal decisions is worth knowing: in a published ruling of 2 February 2024, the Conseil d’État — France’s highest administrative court — held that “La seconde phrase de l’article L. 332-3 du code de l’entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d’asile est annulée en tant qu’elle ne limite pas l’édiction de refus d’entrée aux frontières intérieures aux cas dans lesquels ils sont pris en vue de la réadmission de l’intéressé par l’Etat membre dont il provient en application d’un accord ou d’un arrangement passé par la France avec cet Etat existant le 13 janvier 2009” (Conseil d’État, 2 February 2024, No 450285, published in the Lebon collection). The context there was checks at internal Schengen borders, but the principle travels: refusal decisions are hemmed in by legality conditions that a court will enforce, and an officer’s word at the barrier is not the last word of the law.

The second and most consequential decision for someone already inside France is the obligation de quitter le territoire français, universally known by its initials OQTF: the formal order to leave French territory. The préfet — the senior State official for the département (administrative county) — issues it, and overstay is one of its textbook grounds. Article L611-1 of the CESEDA provides that “L’autorité administrative peut obliger un étranger à quitter le territoire français lorsqu’il se trouve dans les cas suivants”, and its paragraph 2 targets exactly the visa-free overstayer: “L’étranger, entré sur le territoire français sous couvert d’un visa désormais expiré ou, n’étant pas soumis à l’obligation du visa, entré en France plus de trois mois auparavant, s’est maintenu sur le territoire français sans être titulaire d’un titre de séjour”. A British owner who entered visa-free and is still at the cottage more than three months later without a visa or residence permit fits that description precisely, at least on the face of the file — which is why proving the true dates, as Part I recommends, is the first line of defence.

An OQTF comes in two versions, and the difference shapes everything. The standard version gives a voluntary departure period: Article L612-1 of the CESEDA states that “L’étranger faisant l’objet d’une décision portant obligation de quitter le territoire français dispose d’un délai de départ volontaire de trente jours à compter de la notification de cette décision.” Thirty days from notification to organise departure, with a possible exceptional extension for personal circumstances. The harsh version gives no delay at all. Article L612-2 of the CESEDA allows the authorities to refuse any voluntary departure period where the person’s behaviour threatens public order, where a residence application was rejected as manifestly unfounded or fraudulent, or where “Il existe un risque que l’étranger se soustraie à la décision portant obligation de quitter le territoire français dont il fait l’objet” — a risk of absconding. The official service-public guidance confirms the two tracks in everyday language: the decision requires you to leave France by your own means within 30 days, but in limited situations it can also require departure without any delay (service-public.fr, obligation de quitter le territoire français). Owners should understand that owning a house in France does not protect against the no-delay version; if anything, a fully equipped second home can be presented by the administration as proof of settlement and hence of absconding risk, an argument that must then be rebutted with return bookings, employment ties and family commitments in the United Kingdom.

The third decision is the entry ban, the interdiction de retour sur le territoire français (IRTF). It forbids coming back to France — and in practice flags you across Schengen — for a fixed period. Article L612-6 of the CESEDA makes the mechanism nearly automatic in no-delay cases: “Lorsqu’aucun délai de départ volontaire n’a été accordé à l’étranger, l’autorité administrative assortit la décision portant obligation de quitter le territoire français d’une interdiction de retour sur le territoire français.” The same article caps the effects: the ban ends when the fixed period expires, “qui ne peut excéder cinq ans à compter de l’exécution de l’obligation de quitter le territoire français, et dix ans en cas de menace grave pour l’ordre public.” Five years away from your own house, extendable to ten in serious public-order cases, is the true price of an overstay that ends in a no-delay OQTF. Even without a formal French ban, the British government warns that overstaying the 90-day visa-free limit can lead to a ban from entering Schengen countries for up to three years (GOV.UK entry requirements for France). Whether the ban comes from Paris or from the Schengen machinery, the practical result for an owner is identical: the cottage stands empty, the insurance and tax bills keep arriving, and every future visa application must declare the history.

Two ancillary measures complete the picture. Once the voluntary period expires without departure, the official guidance notes that you may be placed in an administrative detention centre (centre de rétention) or assigned to reside at a fixed address (assignation à résidence), and the préfet notifies an entry ban. Detention is the sharp end of immigration enforcement and it arrives faster than most owners imagine, because an OQTF file with a known French address — your second home — is administratively easy to execute. That address, paradoxically, is both your vulnerability and your asset: it makes you findable, but it also proves stable accommodation, which counts in favour of alternatives to detention and in favour of residence-based regularisation arguments where those exist.

B. How do you challenge refused entry, a removal order or an entry ban — and what actually wins?

Every one of the decisions above can be taken to the administrative court, and the challenge begins with strict, short deadlines. Article L614-1 of the CESEDA provides that “La décision portant obligation de quitter le territoire français ainsi que la décision relative au séjour, la décision relative au délai de départ volontaire et l’interdiction de retour sur le territoire français qui l’accompagnent, le cas échéant, peuvent être contestées devant le tribunal administratif selon la procédure prévue à l’article L. 911-1.” The tribunal administratif is the first-level court that judges challenges to administrative decisions; for a cottage in the Paris region and the inner suburbs, that means the tribunals of Paris, Melun or Versailles depending on the département, and the appeal goes to the Cour administrative d’appel de Paris. The official guidance breaks the deadlines down precisely: without detention or assigned residence, the time limit for challenging the order is one month and the court has six months to rule; where detention or assigned residence applies, the challenge must be lodged within seven days of notification of the order, heard under an accelerated procedure within fifteen days (service-public.fr, obligation de quitter le territoire français). A further warning from the same guidance: a gracious appeal to the préfet or a hierarchical appeal to the Minister of the Interior does not extend the court deadline. Write to the préfet by all means, but file the court challenge in parallel, because the judge’s clock does not stop for correspondence.

What arguments actually succeed? Recent case law gives British owners concrete patterns rather than abstractions. In a ruling of 13 January 2026, the Paris administrative court of appeal annulled both the lower court’s judgment and the removal order itself: “Le jugement n° 2304012 du 28 juin 2024 du tribunal administratif de Melun et l’arrêté du 14 avril 2023 de la préfète du Val-de-Marne sont annulés” (Cour administrative d’appel de Paris, 13 January 2026, No 25PA00437). The case concerned an OQTF without delay combined with a two-year entry ban, challenged on the grounds that the prefecture had not fully examined the personal situation, that the removal order showed a manifest error of assessment, and that the entry ban misapplied Article L612-6. The court went further than annulment: “Il est enjoint au préfet du Val-de-Marne ou à tout préfet territorialement compétent de procéder au réexamen de la situation de M. A… dans un délai de trois mois à compter de la notification du présent arrêt et de lui délivrer dans l’attente une autorisation provisoire de séjour.” Three lessons for owners emerge from that outcome. First, the prefecture must genuinely examine your personal circumstances — length of ties to France, property, family, health — and a stereotyped or copy-pasted reasoning is vulnerable. Second, the entry ban is not a rubber stamp: it must be individually justified under Article L612-6, and humanitarian circumstances can defeat it. Third, victory can include an interim residence authorisation (autorisation provisoire de séjour) while the file is re-examined, which is precisely the bridge an owner needs to regularise patiently rather than under the threat of imminent enforcement.

The standard pleas, adapted to a British second-home profile, run as follows. Procedural defects: lack of a full examination of the personal situation, missing or boilerplate reasoning, failure to indicate the country of removal, defective notification or translation where English was needed for understanding. Substantive errors: wrong day-count (the rolling calculation challenged with your travel table and bookings), manifest error of assessment given decades of lawful visits, property ownership, tax compliance and family ties, and disproportionality of a multi-year entry ban for a short, accidental excess. Where the OQTF was issued without a voluntary departure period, attack the Article L612-2 justification head-on: no threat to public order, no fraudulent application, no genuine absconding risk — demonstrated by the return ticket already booked, the job and family waiting in the United Kingdom, and the owner’s interest in preserving the ability to return lawfully, which absconding would destroy. And where the prefecture refused or ignored a residence-permit application before issuing the OQTF, that refusal must be challenged together with the removal order, because the two stand or fall as one file.

Parallel to litigation, two practical routes deserve attention. The first is the consular route: leaving France within the voluntary period, where one was granted, and applying for a long-stay visitor visa from the United Kingdom for the next extended stay. Compliance followed by a proper visa application presents the cleanest possible history to the consulate and avoids the entry-ban trap altogether. The British advice points the same way when it tells travellers who cannot return before the limit expires to contact the nearest local prefecture in France (GOV.UK entry requirements for France) — early, documented contact with the administration beats silent overstay in every subsequent assessment. The second is the residence route for those whose life has genuinely moved across the Channel: owners who now work remotely from France, for example, face distinct employment-law and permit questions examined in our guide to working from France for a UK employer, from the governing contract law to the required permit, while anyone putting down roots should also understand the tax machinery of arrival covered in our guide to the first French tax return, treaty tie-breaker and double-tax remedies. The right route depends on whether the cottage is a holiday base or the centre of your life — and the administration will make its own assessment of that question, so your applications, tax filings and travel pattern should tell a consistent story.

A final Paris and Île-de-France note, since so many British owners land at the capital’s airports and hold property within reach of it. Refusals notified at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle or Orly, OQTFs signed by the Paris, Val-de-Marne, Hauts-de-Seine or Seine-Saint-Denis prefectures, and detention placements at the CRA (centre de rétention administrative) near the airports all flow to the Paris-area tribunals on the short deadlines described above, with duty lawyers and weekend sittings for detention cases. Keep on your telephone the address of the competent tribunal, copies of your title deeds, insurance, return bookings and the contact details of someone in the United Kingdom who can send funds or documents at short notice. Procedures that must be launched within days cannot wait for papers locked in a drawer in Yorkshire.

Conclusion

The 90/180-day rule is arithmetic with legal teeth. Every day you spend at your French second home, added to every other Schengen day in the rolling 180-day window, brings a fixed legal consequence: lawful stay below the line, overstay above it, and then, step by step, refused entry, a removal order with or without a voluntary departure period, and an entry ban of up to five years. The defences are equally concrete — count rigorously, keep the documents that prove each crossing, insure and book every trip, contact the prefecture at the first sign of trouble rather than after the deadline, and challenge each decision before the administrative court within its short time limit, attacking the day-count, the reasoning and the proportionality of the ban. An overstay discovered early is usually a consular problem with a visa solution; an overstay ignored becomes a court file with a ban attached. The cottage will wait. Your right to return to it depends on what you do before the counting catches up with you.