Guide
Transfer of residence relief: how your furniture crosses duty-free
By Covered Abroad Research Desk · Last verified July 2026
The conditions, from the customs fiche
The French douane's English-language fiche on transferring your main residence sets out the relief's architecture. You qualify if you have been staying in a third country for at least 12 months and are transferring your main residence to France. The goods qualify if they are personal property used privately for at least 6 months before the move — bought tax-paid or tax-free alike — provided they bore customs or tax charges in the country of origin. Moving from another EU country is the easy case the fiche notes separately: no special customs formality at all.
The mechanics are paperwork-shaped: imports can happen in one or several shipments, but the inventory handed to customs at the first import must list everything you will claim relief for — a late-remembered garage's worth cannot be appended afterwards. And the relief binds you forward: you may not sell, lease, lend or pledge the duty-free goods during the holding period after entry.
Source: Douane française, transferring your main residence to France (EN fiche), read 4 September 2026.
What sits outside the relief
The fiche's exclusion list is where surprises live: alcohol and tobacco products, commercial-nature means of transport, mixed-use vehicles, transportable dwellings, professional equipment beyond portable instruments, and stocks of raw or semi-worked materials do not travel under the household relief. Embassy and international-organisation staff run under different regimes entirely. Vehicles generally are the subject with the most fine print — enough that we treat car import as its own topic and only write it where an official page will anchor it.
France here is one member state implementing an EU-wide relief framework — the tests read similarly across the Union, but each country's customs office administers its own procedure, so the fiche of your actual destination is the document to work from.
60-second check
Not sure the policy you have meets your destination's written rule? Run it through the policy check now, before you build the rest of the file around it.
Check my policySlotting the shipment into the move
The relief's clocks interact with the visa's clocks: the 12-months-abroad test looks backward from the residence transfer, the 6-month ownership test looks backward from the shipment, and the inventory must be ready at first import — which for most movers means writing it before the container is packed, not after it lands. Our moving-from-the-US checklist holds the whole sequence, and the country hubs carry the insurance rules that gate the visa half of the move: