How the matching works
No mystery scores. Here is every factor, where its data comes from, and the rules we hold ourselves to — including what we refuse to fake.
The idea
You tell us what matters — climate, budget, healthcare proximity, pace, community, the landscape out your window — and we compute a personal ranking across 55 French towns and cities we have researched in depth. Your answers set the weights; every town's factor scores come from official French data wherever official data exists. The result page shows the factors that drove each match and each town's weak spot for what you asked. A matcher that only flatters would be a brochure.
The sixteen factors
| Factor | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Winter light | Sunshine hours, rain days, and frost days | Météo-France climate normals 1991–2020, station-matched per town and disclosed |
| Summer comfort | Days over 30 °C and length of the warm season (days over 25 °C) | Météo-France normals; climate-projection layer in progress |
| Affordability | Median sale prices and asking rents | DVF notarized sales 2022–2024 (DGFiP); Carte des loyers 2025 (ANIL) |
| Finding a year-round rental | Second-home share and housing vacancy — how real the year-round rental market is. In officially tense metros the score is capped: deep, liquid markets with competitive dossiers, scored for a newcomer using agencies — not for a median household. Renters only; the second-home tax surcharge is shown but never scored (primary residents do not pay it) | INSEE census; ABC housing-tension zoning (Ministère de la Transition écologique) |
| Doctor access | The APL indicator — consultations accessible per resident, age-adjusted, incl. a doctors-under-65 variant | DREES, 2023 vintage |
| Serious medicine | Real drive times to the nearest full hospital, university hospital, and comprehensive cancer center | FINESS register + road routing, hand-checked |
| Aging-care capacity | Travel-time-aware access to residential elder care and home help | DREES, national percentile |
| Daily amenities & pace | Facility counts across 200+ equipment types, matched to your town-size preference | INSEE BPE 2024 |
| Nature within reach | How quickly you are in big nature (sea, 1,000 m mountains, a major lake) or open country — a metropolis scores low however good its parks | Natural Earth coastline + curated massif/lake anchors + town form |
| Life without a car | Amenity density around the town core plus a cited transit read | INSEE BPE + editorial |
| Year-round life | Second-home share and the festival calendar's seasonal spread | INSEE census; Ministry of Culture festival census |
| Getting home to the U.S. | Airport drive, realistic U.S. routing, rail time to Paris | Cited schedules, re-verified before launch |
| English-speaking community | Verified organizations and their character — American, British, or mixed | Editorial with named citations, never guessed |
| Healthcare in English | Three honest tiers, from real anglophone medical ecosystems to 'be ready to be sick in French' | U.S. consulate lists + documented practices |
| Safety | Recorded-crime bands with a tourist-town correction (visitor-inflated denominators) | SSMSI communal statistics, 2023–2025 mean |
| Culture & food | Cinemas (incl. original-language programming), protected monuments, festivals, markets | CNC, Monuments Historiques, festival census |
| Your landscape | Distance to the sea, the mountains, major lakes; vineyard country; town form — scored against what you asked for | Public-domain geodata + curated anchors |
The rules we hold ourselves to
- Hard requirements are hard. If you say "a full hospital within 30 minutes" or "must work without a car", towns that fail are excluded and told to you with the reason — never silently dropped, never quietly kept.
- Your landscape is not negotiable. A town that fails your "what's out the window" wish is discounted across the board, however good its other numbers.
- Fit bands, not fake precision. We will not print "87.3%" about a town of 9,000 people. Exceptional, strong, good, or a stretch.
- National facts never masquerade as local ones. Visa rules, the U.S.–France tax treaty, and healthcare enrollment are identical in every commune — they belong in your report's "everywhere in France" section, not in town scores.
- Where no data exists, we say so. Community presence and English-speaking healthcare are scored editorially from named, verifiable organizations — and "no evidence found" is an answer we publish rather than pad.
- Vintages are disclosed. Doctor-access data is the 2023 vintage (the latest France publishes); sale prices are 2022–2024; rents are the 2025 edition. When a figure is provisional or under verification, it is flagged or withheld.
- Scales are anchored to France, floors included. A summer-comfort score in the low teens means the hottest belt in France — real Provençal heat, not an uninhabitable place. An affordability score in the mid-twenties means the French price ceiling — Paris — which still costs less per square foot than Manhattan or San Francisco. Zero is reserved for a factor that is genuinely absent, like a year-round rental market in a town that is 43% second homes.
Known limits
Two limits we accept rather than paper over. Heat numbers are 1991–2020 normals — they describe today's climate, not the summers of 2050, and we say so rather than guess. Aging-care capacity is department-level data, the finest grain France publishes for it.
The roster — and who we left out
Fifty-five places, chosen from evidence of where Americans actually settle, France's own livability and retiree rankings, and a set of under-the-radar strong fits. We excluded famous names only for genuinely disqualifying gaps — villages with acute doctor shortages, resort economies that close in winter, places with no path to an English-speaking on-ramp — and we say which and why. The bar for excluding a place you might search for is a real gap, not editorial taste.
Now see it work for you
Nine questions, three minutes — your answers rank all fifty-five towns, honest tradeoffs and all.
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