Bringing your spouse and children to France legally is possible once you are settled here. Family reunification is judged on three concrete things: your income, your housing, and a home visit that confirms both are real.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Your income is measured over the 12 months before filing. The required minimum rises with family size, roughly €1,800 to €2,200 net per month depending on how many people are joining you.
- Your housing must meet a minimum surface area that depends on both family size and where in France you live.
- The prefect has 6 months to decide. No response in that time counts as a refusal. The clock doesn’t favor you by default.
- A refusal can be appealed, but the deadline to go to court runs in parallel with any written appeal to the prefect. Missing it closes the door even if you’re still waiting for a reply.
Who qualifies, and for whom
Family reunification lets a foreign national who has lived legally in France for at least 18 months bring over their spouse and minor children (under 18) to live with them. It does not cover parents, adult children, or siblings. A different and more limited procedure (exceptional admission) applies to those situations, and consulates and prefectures apply this distinction strictly.
The three conditions that decide your case
| Condition | What’s checked | Typical requirement |
|---|---|---|
| Income | Average monthly resources over the past 12 months, excluding most social benefits | ≈ €1,800/month for 2–3 people, rising to ≈ €2,200/month for 6 or more |
| Housing | Minimum living surface, which scales with both family size and geographic zone | Roughly 22–28 m² for 2 people, plus about 10 m² per additional person |
| Stability | Consistency between your declared situation and what the investigation finds | Confirmed through a mayor’s inquiry and, often, an OFII home visit |
Income and housing thresholds are indexed and adjusted periodically — always confirm the current figures for your household size before filing, since they can shift during the year.
What the OFII visit actually looks at
Once your file is submitted, the mayor’s office has up to 2 months to investigate your resources and housing. Silence on their part is treated as a favorable opinion. In many cases, this includes a home visit by the OFII (Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration). The visit doesn’t judge taste or comfort. It confirms that the home you described on paper actually exists, sized appropriately for the family moving in. A mismatch between what you declared and what the visit finds is one of the most common reasons files stall or get refused.
If your application is refused: the appeal process
You can write to the prefect directly (recours gracieux) within 2 months of the refusal, by registered letter, addressing the specific ground given — insufficient income, inadequate housing, or an incomplete file.
At the same time, the court deadline is already running. You generally have 2 months from the refusal to bring the case before the administrative tribunal with jurisdiction over your place of residence. Writing to the prefect does not pause this clock, so the two steps need to be planned together, not one after the other.
A lawyer is not legally required at this stage, and legal aid (aide juridictionnelle) is available depending on your income. A case built around the exact ground for refusal, with updated proof of income or a larger home, has a meaningfully better chance than a generic appeal.
A practical note on timing
The prefect’s silence after 6 months becomes an implicit refusal, and the OFII investigation can add further delay on its own. So it’s worth tracking your file’s status rather than assuming “no news” means it’s still progressing normally. Catching a stalled file early, and knowing whether the 6-month clock has already started, often matters more than anything written in the appeal itself.
TSA FIIC helps clients prepare a family reunification file that holds up to scrutiny from the start. We check income and housing against the real thresholds for your family size before you file, and if a refusal comes anyway, we identify exactly which condition it rests on and whether it’s worth challenging.
Contact us — +33 9 70 70 04 64 — for a personalized consultation.