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Browse the free guides →
Help moving to France
Not a faceless relocation agency charging thousands. Pimpernel is a real British family who made the move to south-west France, and built the honest help we wish we'd had. The guides and tools are free. When you want a real person on the bits that bite, here is exactly how that works, and what it costs.
Most "relocation services" for France do one of two things: charge you a small fortune to project-manage a move you could largely do yourself, or sell you a dream and disappear once the invoice clears. We do neither. Every guide on Pimpernel, more than sixty of them, is free to read, and every tool is free to use. You can plan your whole move without paying us a penny. The paid help exists for one honest reason: some things you only want to get wrong once, and for those it is worth having a real person check your work before it goes.
One handles the whole move, so nothing slips through the cracks. The other takes the single hardest part, your family's long-stay visa, off your plate entirely. Both are one-off payments. No subscription, nothing held back for an upsell.
The whole move, handled
£150 one-off, no subscription
Everything that turns a daunting, deadline-strewn move into a plan you can actually follow, in one place that knows what's next.
The big one, done with you
£950 flat, your whole household
The long-stay visa is the gateway to everything, and building the dossier for a whole family is a real undertaking. We do it with you, start to finish.
Not ready for the whole pack? Have a real person check a single thing, one-off, usually back within a couple of working days.
£35 per letter
We check your French letter before you send it: the wording, the tone, and the law behind it.
£120 per dossier
Before you submit, we tell you exactly what the préfecture would bounce, and how to fix it.
£45 for 30 minutes
Thirty minutes with a real person who's actually done the move, on whatever's stuck.
Want help year after year rather than for one move? Pimpernel Life is the optional ongoing membership.
Because we are not an agency. We are Will and Jenny, a British family who moved to a farm in Tarn-et-Garonne and did every bit of this ourselves: the visa, the carte de séjour, the healthcare, the admin, the mistakes. Pimpernel is the help we wish we'd had, run by the two of us, not a call centre and not a server farm.
It means we can afford to be honest in a way an agency selling you a package cannot. We give away the guides for free. We tell you plainly when something is simpler than it looks, and when it genuinely needs a regulated professional, we say so rather than taking your money. Our paid help is practical help compiling your own application, not regulated immigration advice, and we are upfront about exactly where that line sits.
Payment is handled securely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
Read the guides, use the tools, build your plan. Pay nothing until you actually want a person involved.
The Move Pack for the whole move, the done-with-you visa for the hard part, or a single one-off check.
Will or Jenny look at your actual situation and come back to you, usually within two working days.
No. We offer practical help compiling your own application and plain-English guidance. We are not regulated immigration advisers, and if your case needs one, we will tell you plainly rather than pretend otherwise.
No. The Move Pack and the one-off checks are single payments, with no subscription and no auto-renewal. Pimpernel Life is a separate, optional membership if you want ongoing help year after year.
That is exactly what the one-off checks are for, from £35. You never have to buy the whole pack to get a single letter or dossier looked at.
We live it. Will and Jenny moved to south-west France and went through every stage of this themselves. The guidance comes from having done it, not from a brochure.
Start with the free guides, or let the Move Pack pull the whole thing together for £150.
Pimpernel provides practical, general help and guidance for your move to France. It is not regulated immigration, legal, tax, or financial advice, and our paid services are help compiling your own application rather than representation. Where your situation needs a regulated professional, we will say so. Prices shown are current and may change; the details of each service are set out in full on its own page before you pay.