Studying in France: funding, visas, and how the money works
France runs two separate tuition systems, and which one applies to you comes down to nationality rather than which school accepts you.
If you’re a citizen of an EU or EEA country, or of Switzerland, you pay the same rates as French students at public institutions for the 2026 to 2027 academic year: €178 a year for a bachelor’s degree, €255 for a master’s, and €397 for a doctorate. Engineering degrees at institutions under the Ministry of Higher Education run €630 a year, except at the Écoles Centrales (CentraleSupélec, Centrale Lille, Centrale Lyon, Centrale Méditerranée, Centrale Nantes) and Mines Nancy, where the fee is €2,620.
If you’re not an EU, EEA, or Swiss citizen, you pay differentiated fees at the same institutions: €2,902 a year for a bachelor’s degree and €3,950 for a master’s. You’re exempt from these higher rates if you’re a Québec resident, hold a long-term French residence permit or have been attached to a French tax household for more than two years, have refugee or subsidiary protection status, or are enrolled in a doctoral, HDR, or third-cycle medical, dental, or pharmaceutical program. Full waivers also go automatically to recipients of French government scholarships and to students on exchange programs with reciprocal fee-waiver agreements.
These low figures exist because the French state covers most of the real cost: Campus France puts the actual per-student cost at typically between €10,000 and more than €15,000 per student per year. Private institutions, particularly business schools, are a different story. Annual fees there typically run approximately €6,000 to €18,000 or more, and about 21% of students in France attend a private institution, so check the specific school’s own published fees rather than assume a public-university number applies.
The Eiffel scholarship funds you, not your tuition
If you want a competitive, government-funded route into a French master’s or doctorate, the France Excellence Eiffel scholarship, run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is the flagship program. It funds seven priority fields: biology and health, ecological transition, mathematics and digital, and engineering sciences on the science side; history and civilisation, law and political science, and economics and management on the humanities side.
From January 2026, Eiffel pays a monthly allowance of €1,200 at master’s level and €2,100 at doctoral level, plus international and domestic transport, insurance, and help finding housing. It does not cover tuition. That single fact matters more than it looks: an Eiffel award on its own is not a fully funded scholarship in the strict sense, and you still need a tuition plan, whether that’s a fee waiver, your home government, or another source.
There’s also a mechanical detail worth knowing before you start: you can’t apply to Eiffel directly. Only French institutions can submit a candidacy, and Campus France is explicit that applications sent directly by students or by foreign institutions will be declared ineligible. Your first move is contacting the international relations office of the school you want to attend, not filling out a form yourself.
The visa is a residence permit, not just a stamp
For any stay longer than three months, you’ll need the VLS-TS, a long-stay visa that doubles as a residence permit. France-Visas prices it at €50 for applicants from countries covered by the Études en France (EEF) procedure, which runs from most of West and Central Africa through much of Asia and parts of the Middle East, and €99 for everyone else, given as an indication, since special cases can differ.
If your stay in France is arranged through a formal EU or inter-institutional mobility program of 12 months or less, France-Visas states the VLS-TS must be validated within three months of arriving in France. That specific window applies to mobility-program visas; the standard student visa process is handled through the France-Visas online wizard, which assembles your document checklist and timeline based on your individual case rather than publishing one flat rule for everyone.
Work rights, health cover, and the fee nobody mentions
Non-EU students in France can work up to 964 hours a year, which France-Visas describes as 60% of normal full-time working hours (Algerian nationals are capped at 50% under a separate agreement). That’s a supplement to your budget, not a funding plan on its own.
Registering for France’s student Social Security system is free and mandatory for all non-European students under 28; EEA students are exempt if they hold a valid European health insurance card. Once registered, Social Security reimburses on average 60% of medical costs, which is why most students also carry a complementary insurance plan to cover the rest.
Almost every guide to studying in France skips the CVEC, the Contribution Vie Étudiante et de Campus, a fee nearly all students, French or foreign, must pay before they can enrol. For the 2026 to 2027 academic year it’s €105, payable once a year online at cvec.etudiant.gouv.fr or in cash through the FDJ Nirio network. You need the payment receipt, or a certificate of exemption, before your university will register you. Recipients of CROUS need-based scholarships, French government scholarships, and students with refugee, subsidiary protection, or asylum-seeker status are exempt; recipients of foreign government scholarships or private grants are specifically not exempt, which surprises a lot of scholarship holders.
After you graduate
Once you finish a master’s, an equivalent engineering or professional degree, or a doctorate, most non-EU graduates can apply for the “job seeker/new business creator” residence permit, which replaced the older Autorisation Provisoire de Séjour (APS) for most nationalities. It’s valid for 12 months, is not renewable, and lets you work while you look for a job or set up a business in your field.
You apply either at the prefecture in France before your student permit expires, or at a French consulate abroad within four years of getting your diploma if you’ve already left the country. The tax stamp costs €75 for students and €225 for researchers applying from a researcher-talent-passport status. If the permit is issued from abroad, you validate the resulting VLS-TS online within two months of arriving in France, a shorter window than the mobility-visa rule above.
Not everyone needs this permit. EU, EEA, and Swiss graduates don’t need a residence permit to work in France at all, Algerian students fall under a separate long-standing agreement, and citizens of a specific set of countries with bilateral migration agreements, including Tunisia, Benin, Gabon, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Burkina Faso, India, and several Balkan states, can still use the older APS route instead. Which one applies to you is worth confirming with your nearest Campus France office before you assume either way.
Putting the budget together
Stack these pieces together and you get a realistic floor for a year in France: tuition, from free with a waiver to several thousand euros a year at a public institution or considerably more at a private one, plus the €105 CVEC, the €50 or €99 visa fee, health cover, and whatever France-Visas’ wizard tells you to demonstrate as available funds for your specific case. None of it is guesswork if you go to the source; most of it is buried across half a dozen different government and Campus France pages rather than collected in one place.
If you’re weighing France against other European destinations, it’s worth comparing this against how funding works elsewhere in Europe, since the balance between low tuition and available stipends varies a lot by country. Certified translations of your diplomas and transcripts are a separate cost most applicants underbudget for, and it’s worth reading up on what translation and notarisation actually costs before your consulate appointment. And if you’re applying to France alongside other scholarships in the same cycle, fees like the CVEC and the visa charge are exactly the kind of hidden cost that adds up faster than applicants expect.