French tax residence and the presence indicator, explained

France is where imported intuitions about day counting go wrong most reliably. There is no standalone statutory day test for French residence. The law asks, in order of practical weight, whether France is your foyer — your household, where your family life is anchored — or your principal place of stay, or the seat of your professional activity, or the centre of your economic interests. Any one of them can make you resident. The familiar threshold figure appears only inside the second of those, the “principal place of stay” analysis, as a point of reference; it is not a line that, kept under, keeps you safe.

That is why this counter is advisory in Residay. It tracks your French presence days as evidence for the analysis. It can never show met or not met, because French residence is not a quantity the count settles.

How days are counted

The counter runs against the calendar year, and any part of a day spent in France counts as a French day — a morning in Paris uses a day, the same as a full week does one each. The reference line drawn on the chart sits at 183 days, because that is the figure the principal-place-of-stay case law orbits. Read it as context, not as a boundary: people have been held resident below it when France was their foyer, and presence above it is one factor rather than a conclusion.

The foyer dominates in practice. A family home in France — a spouse and children living there while you travel — can make you resident with very few counted days of your own. No arrangement of flights changes where your household is.

What Residay computes and what it asks

This rule carries no attestation interview. What the app derives from the ledger is the running calendar-year count of French presence days, how the pattern compares with the reference line, and how your French presence sits against your other jurisdictions — which matters, because “principal place of stay” is inherently comparative. What it deliberately does not do is convert that number into a status. Foyer, professional activity, and economic interests are questions about family, contracts, and where your wealth is managed; they live outside any location ledger, and the count is one exhibit among several in an assessment only a professional should make.

Planning notes

• Track your presence everywhere, not just in France: the principal-place-of-stay comparison is between countries, and a clean record of the alternative is half the argument.
• If your household is in France, the day count is close to irrelevant — take advice on the foyer limb first.
• Part-day counting means short, frequent hops accumulate faster than they feel; a weekly Paris day for a year is a substantial number.
• The tax administration’s guidance, linked above, sets out the criteria; treat any French residence question as advice territory.