This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Paris

Paris is, in many ways, the digital nomad’s heaven. It is Europe’s biggest urban economy, a beautiful city with endless activities, packed with international people, dotted with co-working spaces and cafés, connected by planes and trains to half the world. A dense metropole with world-class public transport and now layered with bike lanes, “it’s very compact — you can get around it fast, for meetups and events,” says Adam Green, a British copywriter and editor a former happy digital nomad here. But the city has its pitfalls, too. How best to sidestep them and become a digital nomad in Paris? Below is a brief guide.

Where to live

Paris is too expensive for freshly hatched nomads to pitch up without a guaranteed income stream. Nomadic hubs like Lisbon or Warsaw are cheaper. But there are overlooked areas where you can live at a discount quite near central Paris.

That’s because Paris itself — the picture-postcard city of the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame — is relatively small. Only 2.1 million people live in Paris “intra muros” (“within the walls”), inside the Périphérique ring road. 

The city is now dwarfed by its burgeoning suburbs, the banlieues, home to about another 8.7mn people. The suburbs’ sometimes sketchy reputation is mostly undeserved. Thanks to expanding metro lines and bike lanes, inner suburbs like Montreuil and St-Ouen have become booming hipster neighbourhoods that are only about 15 minutes from central Paris, but much less expensive. Apartment rental prices average €23 per square metre a month in St-Ouen, and €25 in Montreuil, compared with €32 in Paris, estimates the SeLoger website. Digital nomads should include suburbs in their mental maps.

For those wanting to live in Paris itself, it’s best to understand the city’s key cultural divides. Broadly, hipsters predominate east of the Pompidou Centre (north-eastern Paris towards the gorgeous Parc de la Villette is cheapest), and the bourgeoisie lives west of Place de la Concorde. The 16th arrondissement is Peak Bourgeois.

How to find accommodation

Merely having enough money might not get you the apartment you want. French rental laws give strong protection to tenants. Since landlords cannot always kick out people who stop paying rent, they are wary of renting to anyone whose financial security is uncertain. Most accept only tenants armed with monthly bulletins de salaire and the famed French CDI, the contrat de travail à durée indeterminée, in effect a life-long employment contract. One company that acts as guarantor for aspiring foreign tenants is Garantme.

Otherwise, nomads could avoid the French market and rent an Airbnb or a serviced apartment (generally at a premium), or use the local English-language classified website fusac.fr, which offers property rentals aimed at international arrivals. Fusac also has ads for childcare, meeting places, French lessons and more. 

Where to work

Parisian flats are small, so working from home might not be an option. The city’s countless cafés can act as occasional workspaces. Laura Schalk, an American who works remotely from Paris, says that when you have a “dreadfully boring meeting that you just have to dial into, it’s better to do it while eating steak frites in a café”. But in Parisian cafés, too, space is at a premium, and laptops often frowned upon. Schalk’s regular local bistro usually lets her work, but she cautions: “People there give me embraces and kisses when I walk in, so I wouldn’t try it everywhere. I don’t go and open my laptop at peak time.” 

You could suss out which cafés near you will at least let you bash away over coffee for a spell in mid-morning or mid-afternoon. One place that’s generous to laptops, and suited to meeting work contacts, is the spacious and attractive Café Beaubourg, near the Pompidou.  

Regular work is best done in the co-working spaces — les coworkings, in French — that have sprouted across Paris in recent years, including chains of WeWork and Morning. Most coworkings organise communal meals, aperitifs and other events where nomads can meet. Dennis Wilke, a Dutch lawyer who is a habitué of the WeWork Marais, notes that digital nomads the world over look the same: they wear beanie hats, carry MacBooks and make loud phone calls into their AirPods. It’s Paris, but it could be Sydney. 

One beautiful Parisian coworking is the Morning building at 34 Rue Laffitte in the 9th arrondissement. Most of it is reserved for companies that rent their own offices, but there is also a working population of about 30 nomads, who can use the sixth floor with its large roof terrace and the spacious ground-floor café. A nomadic worker here pays €350 a month plus VAT for use of hotdesks in shared spaces, a small gym and more. Certain Parisian coworkings pack too many people into a cramped space (as does Paris itself), but not Morning Laffitte. Currently, about 25 of Morning’s coworkings in and around Paris are open to nomads.

Working in different Parisian beauty spots is a privilege of being a digital nomad here. Joseph Moore, a Briton in marketing who often works remotely from Paris, says: “Every day I try to go somewhere new, see somewhere new.” He recommends Paris’s network of public libraries; particular jewels are the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève beside the Pantheon, and the Forney based in a 16th-century hôtel particulier (urban mansion) in the 4th arrondissement. 

The city’s most beautiful public workspace might be the 1930s Salle Ovale at the Bibliothèque Richelieu. It’s free, but the acoustics mean it’s rarely quiet, and there are sometimes queues for a desk. 

On sunny days, you can work free at the outdoor tables in the pastoral courtyard of the new Académie du Climat on the Rue de Rivoli. The building, the former town hall of the 4th arrondissement, is such an Haussmannian treasure that it was inaugurated in 1867 by Baron Haussmann himself. The snack bar serves a daily vegetarian lunch. 

Station F, based in a disused railway depot, is Paris’s tech hub. Only favoured start-ups get workplaces here, but Station F has a vast Italian restaurant-cum-food market and many public events. “It’s a great location to try and find clients and businesses to work with,” says Green.

Language and networking

Speaking French will always make your life in Paris richer, but the city increasingly also functions in English. There’s a centuries-old industry of French-language classes for foreigners in Paris, with schools popping up and dying all the time. Many are advertised on fusac.fr.

The traditional, state-approved place to learn French is the Alliance Française cultural centre at 101 Boulevard Raspail, which teaches classes at all levels from “complete beginners”. It doubles as a good place to meet other freshly arrived foreigners. 

Another popular hub for networking and meeting other arrivals is Meetup, which hosts events of all kinds, from business networking to dance, many of them in English. 

Lost in Frenchlation functions as a cinema club for Anglophones. Its pitch, in its own words, is “screening classic and recent French films with English subtitles, often followed by Q&As with the film crews, and hosting drinks before each screening so that the international crowd can meet each other and native Parisians”. It’s also a good way to start discovering French cinema.

Paris is full of English-speakers, and lots of the ones on the street whom you might take for tourists actually live here. If you are looking to get into local Anglophone life, younger English-speakers traditionally congregate in certain bars, such as The Bottle Shop on Rue Trousseau in the 11th, or British pubs with sports on TV such as The Bombardier (2 Place du Panthéon), The Highlander (8 Rue de Nevers) or the Irish pub chain O’Sullivans (in various places). Désordre on the Rue de la Folie-Méricourt, named for the Joy Division song “Disorder”, is a post-punk music-themed bar in the 11th, with DJs on the weekends, which attracts many Anglophones. At the other end of the social spectrum is the American Church at 65 Quai d’Orsay.

Unlike other big cities such as London, New York and Hong Kong, running clubs for Anglophones don’t occupy the same social role in Paris, perhaps because jogging isn’t exactly socially approved here, or because a pack of a dozen joggers would be enough to block most dinky Parisian streets.   

Other practicalities

France doesn’t have a specific visa for digital nomads. Americans, Britons and Canadians can spend 90 days in France without a visa but cannot legally work without one. Self-employed people who “want to create or participate in a commercial, industrial, artisanal or agricultural activity or work in a liberal profession in France” can apply for a one-year long-stay visa. High-value “international talents”, either employed or self-employed, can get “talent visas” for up to four years. There are also special visas for tech employees, founders and investors.

Digital nomads generally only pay tax in France if they spend at least 183 days a year here. One simple tax status is “auto-entrepreneur”, for self-employed people in service-based activities earning up to €77,700 a year. Sarah Dalglish, an American registered auto-entrepreneur who was a longtime freelance researcher in Paris, says: “French administration can be really challenging but this is easy. You just declare your revenues quarterly, your social-security contributions are automatically calculated and you don’t have to keep books.”

Paris is a serious business city. Schalk cautions: “The myth that the French don’t work very hard is obviously a myth.” But don’t work so hard as to forget you’re in Paris. “I have a market on my street,” Schalk says. “You can step out of your door and be transported in a few minutes — so you have to make sure you step out of the door.”  

Have you worked — or are you working — as a digital nomad in Paris? We’d love you to hear about your experiences in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter

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