Micro-entrepreneur: France's small-business on-ramp, step by step

Entreprendre.service-public.fr — the state's business portal — lays the path out. Domiciliation first: the micro-enterprise needs an address for its documents, and the portal states you may domicile it at your own home, in a dedicated local, or in a shared structure. Then the step that creates it: declaring the enterprise's existence to the administration — the immatriculation — whose cost varies by activity type, with inscription in the RCS and RNE free for a commercial activity.

The regime's boundaries are turnover ceilings that shift with finance laws, and rather than freeze numbers the portal publishes the official simulator for calculating the micro-regime's turnover thresholds — the tool to check your activity class against the current ceilings.

Source: Entreprendre.service-public.fr, micro-entrepreneur — les étapes, read 5 September 2026.

The regime is a tax-and-social status, not a residence right: EU citizens simply start, while third-country nationals need a status that permits self-employment — the visitor card explicitly forbids it, the entrepreneur/profession libérale routes exist for it, and mixed cases are exactly what prefecture wording decides. Our route finder maps which French statuses allow independent activity.

Once running, the micro-entrepreneur pays social contributions through URSSAF's dedicated system and enters French social protection — the numéro de sécurité sociale being the key that turns.

The classic mover's arc: arrive on one status with private cover satisfying the visa file, later switch toward independent activity and French social protection. The seam between those states — processing months, status changes, the PUMa transition our France guide documents — is where cover gaps happen. A specialist can price the bridge against your actual dates:

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