A British passport no longer opens the French labour market. Since 1 January 2021 you have been a third-country national. The Withdrawal Agreement residence card protects those who were already living in France at the end of the transition period; it does not cover a new move to take up a job. If a French employer has offered you a contract, three separate layers of French law now sit between the offer letter and your first lawful day at the desk: a long-stay visa (a visa de long séjour, the consular sticker in your passport), a work authorisation (an autorisation de travail, the decision allowing a named foreigner to occupy a named post), and a residence permit (a carte de séjour, the card issued by the préfecture, the local State authority). Mix the order, start work on a 90-day visit, or treat a visitor card as a work permit, and the file can collapse at the consulate, at the labour window, or at renewal.
This note is for the British reader with a concrete French job offer after Brexit, or already in post and facing a refusal, a silent two-month rejection, or a non-renewal letter. It explains which card matches an open-ended contract and which matches a fixed-term contract, what the employer must file before you fly, when the labour-market test can block the hire, how to challenge a refusal, and what the Labour Code still gives you if you were put to work without the proper title. French terms are translated at first use. Buying French property and creating a company are outside this note; the person, the visa, the card and the right to be paid are not.
I. How does a British citizen get the right to take a French job after Brexit?
A. Do I need a salarié visa, a work authorisation, or both — and in which order?
The starting point is the visa. Article L. 312-2 of the CESEDA (the code de l’entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d’asile, France’s code on the entry and stay of foreigners) states: “Tout étranger souhaitant entrer en France en vue d’y séjourner pour une durée supérieure à trois mois doit solliciter auprès des autorités diplomatiques et consulaires françaises un visa de long séjour dont la durée de validité ne peut être supérieure à un an.” In plain English, anyone who wants to stay more than three months must apply to the French diplomatic and consular authorities for a long-stay visa, valid for no more than one year. That visa can be issued for professional activity. It is not a Schengen visitor stamp and it is not the 90-days-in-180 rule that still applies to a British holiday.
Once you are in France, the first residence card is, as a rule, locked to that visa. Article L. 412-1 of the CESEDA provides: “Sous réserve des engagements internationaux de la France et des exceptions prévues aux articles L. 412-2 et L. 412-3, 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.” The first temporary or multi-year card is therefore, subject to listed exceptions, conditional on producing the long-stay visa. The British applicant who enters as a visitor and then asks the préfecture for a salarié card is fighting the architecture of the code. If the consulate has already refused the visa, the challenge is a visa challenge, which we have set out in a dedicated note on how a British citizen can appeal a refused French long-stay visa after Brexit.
The card that matches an open-ended French contract is the temporary card marked “salarié” (employee). Article L. 421-1 of the CESEDA is unambiguous: “L’étranger qui exerce une activité salariée sous contrat de travail à durée indéterminée se voit délivrer une carte de séjour temporaire”. The foreigner who works under a contrat à durée indéterminée (open-ended employment contract, CDI) receives a temporary employee card of at most one year, and that card is subordinated to a prior work authorisation under the Labour Code. A fixed-term contract or a posting follows a different card. Article L. 421-3 of the CESEDA states that the foreigner who works under a contrat à durée déterminée (fixed-term contract, CDD) or who is posted receives a temporary card marked travailleur temporaire, again only after a work authorisation. The temporary-worker card is issued for the length of the contract or posting, up to one year, and is renewed for the same length.
Work authorisation is not a courtesy letter from human resources. Article L. 5221-2 of the Labour Code requires the foreigner who enters France to work as an employee to present “1° Les documents et visas exigés par les conventions internationales et les règlements en vigueur ; 2° Un contrat de travail visé par l’autorité administrative ou une autorisation de travail.” You therefore need the visa papers and either a contract endorsed by the administration or a work authorisation. Article L. 5221-5 of the Labour Code adds, for the person who is already authorised to stay: “Un étranger autorisé à séjourner en France ne peut exercer une activité professionnelle salariée en France sans avoir obtenu au préalable l’autorisation de travail mentionnée au 2° de l’ article L. 5221-2 .” A visitor card, a second-home stay and a 90-day entry do not satisfy that sentence. The same article allows the authorisation to be withdrawn if the foreigner does not obtain a medical certificate within three months.
Who actually needs a separate work-authorisation decision is set out in the regulatory layer. Article R. 5221-1 of the Labour Code states that, to work as an employee in France, “1° Etranger non ressortissant d’un Etat membre de l’Union européenne, d’un autre Etat partie à l’Espace économique européen ou de la Confédération suisse” must hold a work authorisation, and “II.-La demande d’autorisation de travail est faite par l’employeur.” After Brexit, that first paragraph is the British employee. The application is made by the employer, not by you on a personal préfecture form. Article R. 5221-3 of the Labour Code then lists the stay documents with which a person who already holds the authorisation may work, including “2° La carte de séjour temporaire ou pluriannuelle portant la mention “ salarié ”, délivrée en application de l’article L. 421-1 […] ou le visa de long séjour valant titre de séjour portant la même mention”. The long-stay visa that counts as a residence permit (the visa de long séjour valant titre de séjour, VLS-TS) only carries the right to work when it bears the salarié or temporary-worker mention. A visitor VLS-TS is a different animal. A vie privée et familiale (private and family life) card, which we have examined for British spouses of French citizens, follows a family route; it is not a substitute for the salarié procedure described here.
The practical order, for a British candidate still in the United Kingdom, is therefore: the French employer files the work-authorisation request; the decision is notified to the employer and to you; you apply for the long-stay salarié visa at the French consular post; you enter France with that visa; you validate the VLS-TS if the sticker so requires; and, at the end of that first period, you apply for the card. Reverse the order and you ask a consulate to visa a file that has no labour decision, or you ask a préfecture to issue a first card without the visa that article L. 412-1 requires. The Conseil d’État (France’s highest administrative court) recalled the labour half of that chain on 5 March 2024 in decision n° 489189: “en vertu des articles L. 5221-2, L. 5221-5, R. 5221-3 et R. 5221-20 du code du travail, pour exercer une activité professionnelle salariée en France, un étranger non ressortissant d’un Etat membre de l’Union européenne, d’un autre Etat partie à l’Espace économique européen ou de la Confédération suisse, titulaire d’un contrat de travail, doit détenir une autorisation de travail, qui est accordée au vu du respect de conditions qui tiennent notamment à la nature de l’emploi offert, au respect par l’employeur des conditions réglementaires d’exercice de son activité et à la rémunération proposée.” The same opinion records that the employer’s request is sent through a teleservice to the prefect of the department where the establishment sits, and that “la décision relative à la demande d’autorisation de travail est prise par le préfet et notifiée à l’employeur et à l’étranger.”
Article R. 5221-17 of the Labour Code says the same in the code itself: “La décision relative à la demande d’autorisation de travail mentionnée au I de l’article R. 5221-1 est prise par le préfet. Elle est notifiée à l’employeur ou au mandataire qui a présenté la demande, ainsi qu’à l’étranger.” You are not a spectator. A refusal that never reaches you is still a decision that concerns you. After a first year of lawful stay, article L. 433-4 of the CESEDA allows a multi-year card, bearing the same mention, if you still meet the conditions of the temporary card you held and if you satisfy the republican integration contract, the language threshold and the related tests set out in that article. That is a second file, not an automatic reprint of the first sticker.
B. What must the French employer file, and can the labour-market test block the hire?
The labour-market test is the part of the file that most British candidates underestimate. Article L. 414-13 of the CESEDA lays down the principle: “Lorsque la délivrance du titre de séjour est subordonnée à la détention préalable de l’autorisation de travail prévue à l’article L. 5221-2 du code du travail, la situation du marché de l’emploi est opposable au demandeur sauf lorsque le présent code en dispose autrement, et notamment lorsque la demande de l’étranger concerne un métier et une zone géographique caractérisée par des difficultés de recrutement.” Where the card depends on a prior work authorisation, the employment-market situation can be raised against the applicant, unless the code says otherwise, in particular where the job and the area are characterised by recruitment difficulties. Article L. 421-4 of the CESEDA repeats the exemption for the salarié and temporary-worker cards: “lorsque la demande de l’étranger concerne un métier et une zone géographique caractérisés par des difficultés de recrutement, les cartes de séjour prévues aux articles L. 421-1 et L. 421-3 lui sont délivrées sans que lui soit opposable la situation de l’emploi.” Shortage occupations, defined by joint ministerial order and by area, therefore switch the test off. Everything else switches it on.
The regulatory test is in article R. 5221-20 of the Labour Code. The authorisation is granted when the request meets listed conditions. On the job itself, that article requires either a shortage occupation or proof that the vacancy was advertised for three weeks with the public employment service and that no suitable candidate filled it. The same article then looks at the employer: social obligations, the absence of illegal-work or health-and-safety convictions, regulatory fitness to exercise the activity, and pay at least at the national minimum wage or the applicable collective-agreement minimum. A British salary expressed only in sterling, a job title that does not match the advertised post, or an employer who has already been sanctioned for illegal work, is not a detail. It is a ground of refusal.
Service-public’s fiche on work authorisation, which we read for this note (F2728), describes the same two gates in administrative language: advertise for three consecutive weeks in the six months before filing, unless the occupation is on the shortage list, and then file online. The official labour-law digest on code.travail.gouv.fr restates the four cumulative families of conditions (job, employer, regulated profession, pay). Those pages tell you how the counter is supposed to work. They do not tell you what happens when the job title on the authorisation, the job title on the contract and the job title on the payslip are three different phrases.
The Administrative Court of Appeal of Nancy did, on 2 June 2026, in n° 25NC02006. A foreign employee held a long-stay salarié visa and sought renewal. His employer had obtained a work authorisation for a chef de chantier bâtiment (building site manager), an occupation for which, in Grand Est, the employment-market situation was not opposable. The open-ended contract, however, described a technicien maçon (masonry technician), an occupation for which the test remained opposable. Payslips before the prefect’s order matched the masonry job and the masonry pay, not the site-manager job. An amendment and later payslips that tried to relabel the post after the order were, the court held, “postérieurs à l’arrêté contesté et, par suite, sans influence sur l’appréciation de sa légalité.” The court then stated that, without a work authorisation matching the masonry post actually occupied, the prefect of Haut-Rhin was entitled to refuse renewal of the salarié card. The authorisation must match the post actually occupied. A later paper trail does not rewrite the decision. For a British hire, that means the English job description, the French contract, the France Travail advertisement and the online authorisation form have to describe the same job in the same area.
Article L. 414-12 of the CESEDA closes the circle: “Cette autorisation est délivrée dans les conditions prévues par le code du travail.” The card is not a free-standing favour from the préfecture. It follows the labour decision. If the labour decision is refused, the card has nothing to attach to. If the labour decision is granted for post A and you are paid for post B, Nancy shows what the renewal looks like. GOV.UK’s guidance on travel to France for work, which we also read, still points British readers towards a visa or permit for long-term work with a French company; it does not replace the Labour Code test, and it does not make a 90-day business trip into a CDI.
Two further employer-side points are worth stating before the appeal. First, a change of employer is a new authorisation, not a stamp on the old one. The Nancy court recalled that a new authorisation must be sought if the employer changes, and it refused to treat an older authorisation obtained for a previous company as covering a later post. Second, article R. 5221-32 of the Labour Code requires that “Le renouvellement d’une autorisation de travail mentionnée au I de l’article R. 5221-1 est sollicité dans le courant du deuxième mois précédant son expiration.” The renewal of the work authorisation is to be sought during the second month before it expires. Waiting for the card appointment without renewing the authorisation is how a still-employed British worker becomes, on paper, a worker without a title.
II. What if the préfecture or the labour authority says no — or the job ends?
A. How do I challenge a refusal of the work authorisation, the visa or the residence card?
Identify which decision you are attacking. A consular visa refusal, a prefectural work-authorisation refusal and a préfecture refusal of the card are three different acts, with three different authors, even though they often arrive in the same month. The Conseil d’État’s 2024 opinion, already cited, insists that the work-authorisation decision is taken by the prefect and notified to both the employer and the foreigner, and that even a teleservice notification must still identify the author by forename, surname, capacity and service. Service-public fiche F2728, read for this note, distinguishes a notified refusal from silence. Where the prefect has notified a refusal of the work authorisation, the administrative site describes a two-month window for an administrative appeal (a recours gracieux to the prefect and/or a recours hiérarchique to the minister of the interior) or a contentious appeal to the administrative court. Where the prefect has not answered after two months, the same fiche treats the silence as an implied refusal. That administrative description matches the ordinary time-limit in article R. 421-1 of the code of administrative justice: “La juridiction ne peut être saisie que par voie de recours formé contre une décision, et ce, dans les deux mois à partir de la notification ou de la publication de la décision attaquée.” The court can be seised only by an appeal against a decision, within two months of notification or publication.
Do not let the two-month clock run while you wait for the employer to “sort it out with HR”. The employer is the applicant for the authorisation; you are the person who cannot lawfully start or continue the job. Both of you have an interest in the appeal. The grounds that actually move a court are the grounds in article R. 5221-20 and in articles L. 414-13 and L. 421-4: the occupation is on the shortage list for that area; or the vacancy was advertised for three weeks and no suitable candidate came forward; the pay meets the minimum; the employer is not disqualified; the authorisation matches the real post. A letter that says only that “a French candidate could have been hired” without engaging with the advertisement, the shortage list or the job as performed is the sort of reasoning Nancy tested against the file. A letter that ignores a salarié request and answers only a family-life request is the sort of error of law the Administrative Court of Appeal of Versailles sanctioned on 8 July 2022 in n° 21VE02818, where the prefect, on a second examination, had refused stay solely on other CESEDA bases without ruling on the salarié application then founded on the former article L. 313-10, the ancestor of today’s article L. 421-1. The holding is not that every foreign worker wins. It is that the administration must actually decide the legal basis that was asked.
A visa refusal is not cured by a later préfecture appointment. Article L. 412-1 still wants the long-stay visa for a first card. If the consulate has said no, the file belongs in the visa-appeal track described in our long-stay visa refusal article, not in a hopeful email to the préfecture. Conversely, a granted visa does not bind the labour window on renewal. Nancy’s applicant had entered with a salarié long-stay visa; renewal still failed because the authorisation no longer matched the post. Keep the visa decision, the authorisation decision and the card decision in separate folders, with their dates of notification. An implied refusal from silence is a decision. So is a “clôture sans objet” generated by a teleservice, which is precisely why the Grenoble administrative court referred the signature question to the Conseil d’État in case 489189.
In Paris, residence-card files for foreigners living in the capital are handled by the Prefecture of Police, not by a suburban préfecture. In the rest of Île-de-France the departmental préfecture remains the usual authority, and the work-authorisation decision is still that of the prefect of the department where the employing establishment is based, under the teleservice described by the Conseil d’État. A British employee who lives in Paris and works in Hauts-de-Seine can therefore face two addresses, two clocks and two silences. Diary both. Article L. 433-1 of the CESEDA adds, for renewal of a temporary or multi-year card, that renewal “est subordonné à la preuve par le ressortissant étranger qu’il continue de remplir les conditions requises pour la délivrance de cette carte.” You must prove that you still meet the conditions of issue. For a salarié card those conditions include the prior work authorisation. A renewal file that contains only last year’s visa sticker is incomplete.
Public-order refusals sit on a different shelf. Article L. 432-1 of the CESEDA allows a motivated refusal of a temporary or multi-year card, or of a resident card, to a foreigner whose presence in France is a threat to public order. That is not the labour-market test. Mixing the two in an appeal memorial helps neither. If the refusal is a public-order refusal, the evidence is the police record, the motivation and proportionality. If the refusal is a labour refusal, the evidence is the contract, the advertisement, the shortage list, the payslips and the authorisation. Bring the right bundle.
B. If I am already working, what happens if the card expires, I lose the job, or the employer never obtained authorisation?
Losing the job is not, by itself, the end of the salarié card. Article L. 421-1 of the CESEDA continues: “Par dérogation aux dispositions de l’ article L. 433-1 , elle est prolongée d’un an si l’étranger se trouve involontairement privé d’emploi.” By derogation from the ordinary renewal rule, the card is extended by one year if you are involuntarily unemployed. At the next renewal, if you are still unemployed, the right to stay is aligned with your remaining unemployment-insurance rights. Article L. 432-2 of the CESEDA then stops the administration from treating involuntary unemployment as a failure of the activity condition: “N’est pas regardé comme ayant cessé de remplir la condition d’activité prévue aux articles L. 421-1, L. 421-9, L. 421-11 et L. 421-13-1 à L. 421-21 l’étranger involontairement privé d’emploi au sens de ces mêmes articles.” You are not treated as having ceased to meet the activity condition of the salarié card merely because you were involuntarily deprived of employment. A resignation, a mutually agreed termination dressed up as a resignation, or a long period of unauthorised absence, is not the same thing. Keep the dismissal letter, the France Travail registration and the unemployment award. They are residence evidence as well as benefit evidence.
Expiry is a different trap. The Cour de cassation (French supreme court for civil and criminal matters), in a decision of 29 November 2023 published in the Bulletin, n° 22-10.004, construed the then-applicable CESEDA rules on a resident card and held: “Il résulte de la combinaison de ces textes qu’un étranger, titulaire d’une carte de résident, doit, pour bénéficier du délai de trois mois lui permettant, après expiration de son titre, de conserver son droit d’exercer une activité professionnelle, en solliciter le renouvellement dans les deux mois précédant cette expiration.” A foreigner holding a resident card had, under those texts, to apply for renewal in the two months before expiry in order to keep the three-month buffer during which the expired card still allowed work. The numbering of the CESEDA has since been recast; the lesson of the judgment has not. If you wait until the card is dead and then ask the employer to keep you on, you are asking the employer to take a Labour Code risk.
Article R. 5221-3 of the Labour Code still lists, among the documents with which a person who holds the authorisation may work, “4° Le récépissé de renouvellement de titre de séjour portant la mention “ autorise son titulaire à travailler ”” — a renewal receipt that itself states that the holder is authorised to work. File in time, obtain that receipt, and keep a copy in the payroll file. Article R. 5221-32, already cited, imposes a parallel second-month deadline on the work authorisation itself.
The hardest case is the British employee who has already been put to work without the title. Article L. 8251-1 of the Labour Code is a prohibition addressed to everyone: “Nul ne peut, directement ou indirectement, embaucher, conserver à son service ou employer pour quelque durée que ce soit un étranger non muni du titre l’autorisant à exercer une activité salariée en France.” Nobody may, directly or indirectly, hire, keep or employ, for any duration, a foreigner who does not hold the title authorising salaried work in France. The second sentence of the same article also forbids employing the person in a professional category, occupation or geographical area other than those mentioned on the title. That is the Nancy problem seen from the employer’s criminal and administrative side. The Cour de cassation, social chamber, in a decision of 17 April 2019 published in the Bulletin, n° 18-15.321, held that, reading articles L. 8251-1 and L. 8252-1 of the Labour Code together, a foreigner who does not hold the title authorising salaried work in France is not treated as a regularly engaged employee for the rules on transfer of the employment contract. Irregular work does not travel across a service-provider change as if it were a normal contract.
That does not mean you leave unpaid. Article L. 8252-2 of the Labour Code gives the foreign employee, for the period of unlawful employment, “1° Au paiement du salaire et des accessoires de celui-ci, conformément aux dispositions légales, conventionnelles et aux stipulations contractuelles applicables à son emploi, déduction faite des sommes antérieurement perçues au titre de la période considérée.” You are entitled to the pay and its accessories, under the legal, collective and contractual rules applicable to the job, minus what you have already received. In the absence of proof to the contrary, the sums correspond to a presumed three-month relationship, and you may prove the work by any means. On rupture, the same article gives “une indemnité forfaitaire égale à trois mois de salaire”, a lump-sum indemnity equal to three months’ pay, unless the ordinary dismissal or fixed-term rules produce a more favourable result. Article L. 8252-1 of the Labour Code already assimilates the unlawfully employed foreigner to a regularly engaged employee for working time, rest, leave, health and safety, and seniority. The Social Chamber went further on 4 July 2012, in a decision published in the Bulletin, n° 11-18.840. The irregularity of the foreign worker’s situation is necessarily an objective cause for ending the contract, which excludes the ordinary unfair-dismissal damages, but it is not in itself a fault that strips the employee of the termination indemnities. If the employer wants to dismiss for gross misconduct distinct from the mere irregularity, that fault must appear in the dismissal letter. A British employee who was asked to start on Monday and sort the visa later therefore has a pay claim and a three-month indemnity claim even if the contract cannot continue.
None of that regularises the stay. A labour-court win on wages does not create a salarié card. The stay file remains with the préfecture and, where the first entry is still in issue, with the consulate. The visitor card that some British retirees hold, which we have described in the note on renewing a visitor residence card, is built on the absence of work. Using it as a cover for a French salary is the shortest route to a refusal on renewal under article L. 432-2, because you have ceased to meet the conditions of the card you hold. The salarié route and the visitor route are not interchangeable. Choose the one that matches the life you are actually living, and put the authorisation, the visa and the card in that order.
Conclusion
After Brexit, a British job offer in France is a three-document problem: the employer’s work authorisation, the consular long-stay visa, and the préfecture card. Article L. 421-1 ties the salarié card to a prior authorisation; article L. 5221-5 forbids salaried work without that authorisation; article R. 5221-20 and article L. 414-13 decide whether the labour-market test applies. The Administrative Court of Appeal of Nancy has shown that the authorisation must match the job actually done. The Cour de cassation has shown that working without the title does not make you an ordinary employee for every purpose, but it does not leave you unpaid. Challenge a refusal within two months, keep the visa, labour and card decisions apart, and file the renewals in the second month before expiry. If the file is already in difficulty — a silent labour window, a job title that has drifted, a card that expires next month, or wages unpaid after an irregular hire — the next step is a dated, written appeal, not another informal email to human resources.
Need a quick opinion on your case
Talk the job offer, the work-authorisation decision, the visa sticker and the préfecture letter through with an avocat before you book the consulate, before you start the role, or before the two-month appeal deadline expires. Our firm offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with an avocat of the firm. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 (Maître Reda Kohen), or reach us through our contact page. We assist British residents and employees in Paris and across the Paris region as well as throughout France.