Utilities in a French home: electricity, gas, water and heat

There is a particular moment, usually about a week after the move, when the reality of a French rural house lands. The trip switch goes for the third time in an evening. Somebody mentions the tank. You find a manhole cover in the lawn that nobody has explained. And you realise that "sorting out the utilities" — a Saturday-morning job in Britain, three websites and a comparison site — is going to be rather more involved than that.

It isn't hard. It's just built differently, and almost nobody explains the shape of it before you arrive. So here's the shape of it: what each utility actually is in France, what you have to do in your first month, and the handful of expensive traps that catch British arrivals almost without exception.

Start here: your house probably has no gas main

This is the fact that reorganises everything else, so it's worth stating plainly. Mains gas in France follows the towns. Outside them — and "outside them" covers most of rural Occitanie, the Dordogne, Brittany, the Limousin, everywhere the British tend to buy — there is simply no gas network in the road. No chaudière quietly humming on a gas supply, no combi boiler, none of the assumptions a British house is built on.

What you get instead is one of five arrangements: an oil boiler with a tank in an outbuilding, a bulk propane tank (a citerne) in the garden, a wood boiler or stove, electric heating, or a heat pump. Many rural houses run two or three of these at once, which is why French energy conversations often sound so complicated: people genuinely are buying their heat from three different places.

So before anything else, walk the property and identify what you've actually got. Look for a tank (above ground on a concrete pad, or a green plastic dome half-buried in the lawn), a boiler and its fuel line, a flue, a woodstore, and the electricity meter. What you find determines which of the sections below actually apply to you.

Electricity: the one that works almost like home

Electricity is the most familiar of the four, and the one place where the British mental model mostly transfers. There is one crucial concept to get straight first, and once you have it, everything else falls into line.

Enedis versus your supplier

The network — the poles, the cables, the meter on your wall — belongs to the commune and is run nationally by Enedis. Enedis is not a supplier, does not sell you anything, and does not change when you switch. Your supplier (fournisseur) is who you have a contract with and who bills you: EDF, or one of a long list of alternatives.

Everything physical — connecting the meter, changing your power level, a fault on the line — is an Enedis job, but you never ring them. You ring your supplier, who instructs Enedis, and the standard Enedis charges appear on your bill. This is why the charge for switching your meter on is identical no matter who you sign up with: it isn't the supplier's money.

Getting the power on when you move in

Your electricity contract belongs to the meter, not to you. There is no transferring a contract from one house to another: you close the old one and open a new one, even with the same supplier. To open it you need the address, your bank details, a meter reading, and ideally the 14-digit meter reference — the PDL on older meters, PRM on a Linky — which you'll find on a previous bill or on the meter's display.

Do this about a fortnight before you move in. If the house has a Linky, connection is done remotely, usually within 24 hours, and costs €1.78. Without a Linky, a technician has to come: five working days and €32.40 for the standard job. Leave it to the day and you're into express and emergency rates, which climb to €151.42.

The tariff, and what happened in 2026

France still has a regulated price — the tarif réglementé de vente, the TRV, sold as EDF's Tarif Bleu. Only EDF and a handful of local distribution companies may offer it. It's set by government on the advice of the energy regulator, the CRE, and it moves once or twice a year, normally on 1 February and 1 August.

2026 has been a two-way year. The February revision brought the average regulated price down slightly, by about 0.74%. Then on 1 August 2026 it rose by around 2.5%, driven mainly by increases in network transport costs. Beneath that, a bigger structural change landed in January: the old ARENH mechanism, which let rival suppliers buy EDF nuclear power at a fixed €42/MWh, expired at the end of 2025 and has been replaced by a new nuclear pricing arrangement. The practical upshot is that the gap between the regulated tariff and market offers is less predictable than it used to be — worth an actual comparison rather than an assumption.

Switching supplier is free, takes no engineering work, causes no interruption, and carries no contractual tie-in. If an offer looks better, there is no penalty for moving, and no penalty for moving back.

The kVA question — or, why the trip switch keeps going

Here is the bit that has no British equivalent and causes more domestic friction than anything else on this page. In France you don't just buy electricity by the unit. You also subscribe to a maximum simultaneous draw, the puissance souscrite, measured in kVA. Exceed it — kettle, oven, immersion heater and washing machine at the same moment — and the whole house cuts out. It isn't a fault. It's the contract doing exactly what you're paying for.

For domestic purposes one kVA is near enough one kilowatt. The common levels are:

• 3 kVA — studios and very light use.
• 6 kVA — the national default, on roughly half of all French homes. Around 30 amps.
• 9 kVA — larger houses, or moderate electric heating.
• 12 kVA — big rural houses running electric heating, a heat pump, an EV charger or a heated pool.

British arrivals routinely land in a farmhouse on 6 kVA, plug in the life they used to run in a well-supplied UK semi, and spend six weeks resetting the trip. Going up is not expensive to do — €4.28 on a Linky, done remotely, effective the next day — though a bigger subscription does raise the standing charge: 6 to 9 kVA adds roughly €47 a year, 6 to 12 kVA around €92, before you use a single extra unit.

How the billing works

Most French households pay by mensualisation: a fixed monthly direct debit (prélèvement) based on an estimated annual consumption, with a reconciliation — the régularisation — once a year when the real reading lands. If your estimate was low, that annual bill can be a shock. If you've inherited an estimate based on the previous owner's usage, it will almost certainly be wrong for you, so check it after your first winter rather than waiting for the reckoning.

Setting up the direct debit needs a French account and a French RIB, which is one of the reasons the bank account tends to be the very first job on the list.

Gas: the tank in the garden

If your house has gas but no gas main, what you have is GPL — bulk propane, delivered by tanker into a citerne either standing on a concrete pad or buried with just an inspection dome showing. It runs the boiler, the hob, sometimes both.

Four companies dominate: Antargaz, Butagaz and Primagaz between them hold about 90% of the market, with Vitogaz the smaller French player. And the important thing to understand is that this is not a competitive market in the way electricity is. In the standard arrangement the supplier owns the tank and rents it to you, and the contract ties your gas purchases to them exclusively for its term. You are not shopping around each winter.

That leads to the one real decision: rent the tank, pay a deposit for it, or buy it outright. Renting is simplest and the installation is generally free. Buying frees you to order from whoever is cheapest, as oil customers do — but the tanks are expensive, second-hand purchases are hedged with technical and contractual conditions, and maintenance becomes yours. It can pay back over a long enough horizon, and plenty of French consumer commentators argue it usually doesn't. Model it against your actual annual consumption rather than the sales pitch.

Two practical notes for anyone buying a house with a tank already in it. First, find out who owns it and read the contract before you complete — you may be inheriting an exclusivity arrangement along with the house. Second, above-ground beats buried on almost every count that matters later: cheaper to rent, cheaper to service, and dramatically cheaper to remove. Taking a tank away runs somewhere between €600 and €2,500, and the buried ones sit firmly at the top of that range.

Separately from all this, bottled butane and propane — the blue and orange bouteilles from any supermarket or garage — remain completely standard for cooking, and for a lot of rural houses that's the only gas in the building.

Water: no choice, no competition, and possibly your own hole in the ground

Water is the utility where British instincts help least, because the entire structure is different. You cannot choose your water supplier. Each commune has exactly one, decided locally — sometimes a municipal régie run directly by the commune or a syndicate of communes, sometimes a contract with Veolia, Suez or SAUR. The price is set by council deliberation, not by a national regulator.

Which is why the price varies so wildly. The national average sits around €4.34 per cubic metre, but the underlying spread is extraordinary: some communes charge under €1.30, others more than €8 — a factor of six. Small rural communes tend to sit at the expensive end, because there are fewer households to carry the cost of the network. Roughly speaking, 40% of your bill is drinking water, 40% is sewerage treatment, and the remaining 20% is taxes and river-basin levies.

To find your own figure, ask at the mairie — they will know, because they set it — or look up your commune on the national SISPEA database. And do ask before you buy a house, because the difference between a €1.50 and a €7 commune is real money on a family's annual bill.

One new arrival worth knowing about: since 1 January 2026, testing for PFAS — the "forever chemicals" — in drinking water has been compulsory across France. Communes that exceed the thresholds have to invest in additional treatment, and those costs will eventually show up on bills. Expect water prices to drift upward over the next few years.

If the water doesn't come from the road

Plenty of rural properties have their own well (puits) or borehole (forage), sometimes alongside a mains connection and sometimes instead of one. If you have one, it must be declared to the mairie — this is a legal obligation, not a formality — and if it's used for anything you drink or cook with, testing is on you. A well is a genuine asset on a rural property, particularly with summers going the way they are. It is not free water with no strings.

Assainissement: the manhole cover in the lawn

Somewhere between five and six million French homes are not connected to a public sewer. They are on assainissement non collectif — a septic tank and a drainage field, which you own, maintain and are responsible for. Your commune's zonage d'assainissement determines which category your address falls into; the mairie holds it.

The body that inspects these systems is the SPANC (Service Public d'Assainissement Non Collectif), and it matters most at two moments. Periodically, it inspects and classifies your installation — compliant, non-compliant without immediate danger, or non-compliant with a risk to health or the environment. And at sale, since 2011, the seller must supply a SPANC report less than three years old, annexed to the sale file.

An unfavourable report does not stop a sale. What it does is transfer a deadline: the buyer then has one year from completion to bring the system up to standard. Full rehabilitation typically runs €5,000 to €15,000, and can reach €20,000 on difficult ground. The SPANC inspection itself costs the seller €100 to €250.

Heating oil: legal, but on borrowed time

Oil — fioul domestique — still heats a great many rural French houses, and if you've bought one, you've probably inherited a tank and a boiler. The rules around it are widely misreported, so here is the actual position.

A decree of January 2022 set a carbon ceiling of 300 gCO₂eq/kWh on new heating equipment installed in homes. Domestic heating oil comes in at roughly 324, which puts it over the line. So since 1 July 2022 you cannot install a new oil boiler, whether in a new build or as a replacement, other than in narrow cases of genuine technical impossibility.

But — and this is the part that gets garbled — your existing oil boiler is entirely legal. You may keep it, run it, service it and repair it for as long as it lasts. There is no deadline by which it must be ripped out. What's changed is what happens when it finally dies: you'll be replacing it with something else, because the major manufacturers have withdrawn their oil ranges from the French market and new units are increasingly hard to source.

The other obligations continue regardless: annual boiler servicing and chimney sweeping (ramonage) remain compulsory, and your insurer will want the certificates if you ever claim.

The practical advice from anyone who deals with this daily is the same: don't wait for a January breakdown to start thinking about it. Replacing an oil boiler on your own timetable — heat pump, pellet boiler, or a hybrid — lets you use the available support, principally MaPrimeRénov' and the CEE energy-certificate schemes, both of which now fund renewable replacements rather than fossil ones. Doing it in a panic, mid-cold-snap, with no quotes and no grant application, is how the same job becomes twice as painful.

There's also biofioul (F30, a blend with 30% rapeseed-derived content) as a transitional option for existing installations, though it needs your boiler manufacturer's confirmation that the seals will take it.

Wood: the stère, and how not to be had

Firewood is a serious energy source in rural France, not a decorative one, and it's bought through a genuinely local, semi-informal market — a man with a lorry, recommended by a neighbour. It's also the one purchase on this page where a newcomer is easiest to short-change, and the mechanism is worth understanding precisely.

Wood is sold by the stère, defined as one cubic metre of stacked logs one metre long. Here's the catch: shorter logs stack more tightly, so the same nominal stère occupies less space as the logs get shorter. A stère of 50 cm logs is about 0.80 m³; at 33 cm it's roughly 0.70 m³. So "€90 a stère" means genuinely different quantities of wood depending on a detail nobody volunteers. Always establish the log length before you agree the price.

The second variable is moisture. Dry wood means under 20% moisture content; below that threshold a stère of oak yields around 1,950 kWh, whereas the same volume at 30% might give you 1,300 to 1,500. Green wood is cheaper for a reason, and needs 18 to 24 months stacked under cover, raised off the ground and open to the wind, before it earns its keep.

Prices in 2026 typically run €70 to €130 a stère in bulk, with wide regional variation, plus delivery. Most suppliers discount above five stères. For a moderately insulated 100 m² house heated principally by wood, budget 10 to 15 stères a season. Look for the NF Bois de chauffage label and the H1/G1 classification (dry wood, hardwood), or the France Bois Bûche label; ask for a delivery note stating species, volume and moisture. VAT on firewood is the reduced 5.5%.

The chèque énergie, if you qualify

France's main help with energy bills is the chèque énergie, and it's worth checking because plenty of British pensioners on modest incomes are eligible without realising. It's worth €48 to €277 a year — around €153 on average — for households with a reference taxable income (revenu fiscal de référence) below €11,000 per consumption unit.

It can go against electricity, gas, heating oil or firewood, which makes it unusually useful in a rural context. Most eligible households are identified automatically from tax data and the 2026 cheques went out from 1 April; if you think you qualify and nothing arrived — which happens easily when your tax and utility records don't yet line up, as they often don't for recent arrivals — you can claim until 31 December 2026 at chequeenergie.gouv.fr. You'll need your 13-digit French tax number.

Your first month, in order

Pulling it together into a sequence that actually works:

• Before you move: open the electricity contract, ideally a fortnight ahead. Have the PDL/PRM, a meter reading and your bank details ready.
• Week one: contact the mairie for the water service — they'll tell you who supplies you and what it costs. Read your own meters and photograph them.
• Week one: identify what heats the house, and if there's a tank, find out who owns it and what contract it came with.
• Week two: check your kVA against how you actually live before you spend a month resetting the trip.
• Week two: confirm whether you're on mains drainage or a fosse, and if it's the latter, find the SPANC report.
• Before autumn: order wood in summer, when it's cheaper and drier. Book the boiler service and the ramonage before the September rush.
• After the first winter: check your monthly direct debit against real consumption, so the annual régularisation holds no surprises.

None of it is difficult. It's just unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things cost money when you meet them for the first time in an emergency. Get the shape of it clear in the first month and French utilities become what they are for everyone else: a direct debit, a tanker in the drive twice a winter, and a woodpile you're quietly proud of.

This guide offers practical, general information, not legal, technical, or financial advice. Pimpernel are not engineers, heating specialists, or energy advisers. Prices, tariffs, thresholds, and the rules on heating equipment change regularly — the regulated electricity tariff alone is revised up to twice a year, and every figure here is a 2026 snapshot rather than a quotation. Water and drainage arrangements are decided commune by commune, so your local position may differ significantly from the national picture. Always confirm current figures with your supplier, your mairie, or a qualified professional before committing to anything.