French Citizenship Eligibility in 2026: Residence Rules and the Two Main Routes

There is no single path to French citizenship, and the route you take decides almost everything else about your application: the conditions you must meet, the documents you submit, who makes the decision, and how long it takes. Most adults who move to France and want to become French go through one of two routes. The first is naturalisation by decree, the standard residence route. The second is acquisition by declaration, used mainly by spouses of French citizens. They are not interchangeable, and applying under the wrong one wastes months.

Naturalisation by decree: the residence route

Naturalisation by decree is the route for people who have built their life in France over a number of years. The core condition is residence. You must have lived in France for at least five years before you apply, with France as the centre of your material and family interests, and you must hold a valid residence permit throughout. This five-year period is known as the stage.

The five years can be shortened to two in a small number of cases. The most common is completing at least two years of higher education in France leading to a French diploma. The reduction can also apply to people who have rendered exceptional services to France or who have an exceptional path of integration.

A few categories have no minimum residence period at all. These include recognised refugees, people from states whose official language is French where French is their mother tongue, people who have completed at least five years of schooling in a French-language establishment, and those who have served in the French armed forces.

Beyond residence, naturalisation by decree requires you to show that you support yourself, that you have no serious criminal record, that you are assimilated into the French community, that you can prove a B2 level of French, and, since January 2026, that you have passed the civic exam. The final decision is discretionary. Meeting every condition makes you eligible, but it does not by itself guarantee approval.

Acquisition by declaration: the marriage route

Acquisition by declaration works differently. It is not discretionary in the same way and it does not depend on a long residence period. The main version is marriage to a French citizen. After four years of marriage and a continuous shared life, the foreign spouse can declare French nationality, provided the French partner has kept their nationality and the foreign partner can prove a B2 level of French. There is no civic exam and no five-year residence requirement on this route.

This is the key distinction to understand early. Marriage to a French citizen does not make you French and it is not naturalisation by decree. It is a separate declaration procedure with its own conditions and its own timeline. We cover it in full in our dedicated post on French citizenship by marriage.

Birth and descent

Some people are French already without realising it. A child born to at least one French parent is French at birth, wherever the birth takes place. There are also routes for people born in France to foreign parents and for those with a French ancestry they can document. If you think you may already be French through a parent, that is worth checking before you start a naturalisation file, because the process to confirm an existing nationality is not the same as acquiring a new one.

Check your route before you start

The rules summarised here are general. Individual situations turn on details such as the exact type of residence permit, time spent outside France, and family circumstances. Before committing time to a file, confirm which route fits your case on service-public.fr, or speak to a qualified adviser. Getting the route right at the start is the single most useful thing you can do.

Once you know you are heading for naturalisation by decree, the civic exam is one of the conditions you can prepare for today. PassCitizen has the full official civic question set with practice mode and timed mock exams, free and with no account required.

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