Editorial standards

How we keep this right

French rules, fees and deadlines change constantly, and getting them wrong can cost you real money or real time. So we treat accuracy as a job that's never finished, not a box we ticked once.

Here's exactly how we do that — and, just as importantly, where our plain-English guidance stops and a professional's begins.

Our promise on every guide

✓A named human writes it. Every guide is written by a real person who has lived this — not generated from the open web and left to rot. Pimpernel is Will & Jenny, a British family who actually made the move. Meet us →
✓It carries a last-checked date. Each consequential guide shows when it was last reviewed, so you can see for yourself how current it is rather than taking "up to date" on trust.
✓It links to the official source. We tell you where a rule or figure comes from and link straight to the French or UK government page, so you can verify anything yourself.
✓We re-check it every week. A standing weekly review compares the dates, fees and thresholds in our guides against the official sources, and anything that has drifted gets fixed — and flagged in What's changed.
✓We separate fact from interpretation. Where the rule is settled, we say so plainly. Where it's genuinely uncertain, or varies by préfecture or by your situation, we tell you that too — rather than inventing a false certainty.
✓We tell you when to get professional advice. We're navigators, not your lawyer, notaire or accountant. When something needs a professional, we say so — and, if it helps, point you to people we'd trust.

Why we send you to the government's own pages. It might seem odd for a guide to keep pointing you back to Service-Public and GOV.UK. We do it deliberately. We're not asking you to trust us instead of the official source — we've done the hard work of reading, decoding and sequencing it for you. The source is always there to check.

Where our information comes from

Depending on the topic, we check against the primary official sources — including Service-Public.fr, impots.gouv.fr, Ameli, France-Visas, the ANEF portal, and the UK's GOV.UK Living in France guidance — and against reputable specialist reporting where it helps. Where a guide relies on a specific figure or date, that guide names its sources at the top.

How often we re-check

Not everything moves at the same speed, so we don't pretend to re-verify all of it every week. We keep a registry of every date, fee, rate and threshold on the site, each tagged by how volatile it is. The fast-moving ones — tax deadlines, permit fees, healthcare charges, benefit rates — are checked weekly. Steadier rules are checked monthly, and the structural, rarely-changing material quarterly. It's a system, not a spring-clean.

Do you actually need professional advice?

Probably not

if you're trying to understand a process — what the steps are, what a letter means, what order to do things in, what a fee is likely to be. That's what our guides are for.

Consider it

when real money or your legal position turns on the specifics — a complex tax position, an unusual visa category, a property or inheritance question with a twist.

Definitely

for anything a lawyer, notaire or accountant must sign off, or where getting it wrong is expensive or hard to undo. We'll tell you when we think you're there.

Not sure which of these you're in? That's one of the things a real person at Pimpernel can help you work out.

When we get it wrong

We will, occasionally — the whole point of the weekly re-check is that French rules move faster than any guide. If you spot something that looks out of date or plain wrong, tell us and we'll fix it and check the rest. That's not a disclaimer; it's the deal.

Written and maintained by Will & Jenny, Pimpernel. Last reviewed 23 August 2026.