Search for a CAF simulator in English and you will not find one, because it does not exist. What exists is a French-language tool that runs in three steps and returns a real monthly housing benefit figure. The number is not wrong. It is answering a narrower question than the one you asked, and so are the other free simulators the French state publishes for tax, benefits and health cover. Every one of them was built for someone who has already lived a full French fiscal year. This article is for informational purposes only and is not immigration, tax or medical advice; verify current requirements with the relevant French authority or a licensed professional.

Will the number the CAF simulator gives you actually arrive?

The CAF housing simulator never asks whether you hold a valid residence permit, and that unasked question is the one that decides whether the figure on your screen is a benefit or a screenshot. Under the APL rules published by Service Public and verified on 1 July 2026, a foreign national qualifies only with a titre de sejour en cours de validite, a residence permit currently in force. The simulator has no field for it. It will return the same monthly figure to a permit holder and to someone whose card expired in March.

The same page lists failure to produce a valid permit as a ground for suspending payment outright, which means the condition does not only gate the first payment. It gates every renewal after it. An estimate that treats your status as settled is an estimate built on the one variable most likely to move in your first two years in France.

None of this makes the tool dishonest. It makes it French, in the specific sense that it assumes a user whose right to be here is not in question. Our guide to CAF housing benefit eligibility and the OFII condition covers who actually qualifies and how the clawback works, and that ground is not repeated here.

The four simulators, and the field each one does not have

Four official tools cover the money questions an arriving American asks first. Three exist and one does not, and the missing one is the expensive one.

Read down the last column and the pattern is one thing, repeated. Each tool is missing the field that describes an American specifically: a status that can lapse, an income stream that arrives from another country, and a tax history that starts at zero the day you land. The four sections below take those one at a time.

Question 1: does your permit qualify, and would the tool tell you?

Service Public states the condition in one line: you can receive APL as a foreign national provided you hold a residence permit currently in force. There is no waiting period attached to that sentence and no minimum permit duration, which surprises Americans who expect a residency clock. What there is instead is a documentary condition that repeats: the same page lists the failure to supply the justificatifs needed to maintain the benefit, giving a valid permit as its example, among the reasons payment stops.

One category did change. Since 1 July 2026, a student from outside the EU, the EEA or Switzerland holding a study permit can claim APL only in one of three situations: holding a means-tested Crous scholarship, working, or being on an apprenticeship or professionalisation contract. An American graduate student who ran the simulator in May 2026 and again in August 2026 would get the same number from the tool and a different answer from the CAF.

This is the structural point about every French simulator. A simulator prices a situation. It does not adjudicate one. The eligibility test sits in the fiche, not in the form, and the fiche is where the rule changed.

Question 2: twelve months of which income, declared where?

The Service Public page for the CAF housing simulator tells you what to bring before you start, and the list is one item long: the avis d'imposition of every member of the household, so that you can enter net taxable income over the last 12 months. That is the sentence a newly arrived American cannot satisfy. The avis d'imposition is a French tax assessment notice, and in your first year in France there is not one.

What the tool does with a figure you type in by hand

It accepts it. The simulator does not verify anything, and Service Public notes that the information entered is not retained. So the estimate you get is the estimate you built, which is fine as arithmetic and misleading as a forecast, because the CAF does not use your typed figure for long. Housing benefit resources are counted over the last 12 months and refreshed automatically every three months, with no action required from you.

In practice that automatic refresh is where the first-year gap shows up. The refresh pulls from French income data. An arrival whose income for those 12 months was American salary, American pension or American investment income has a French record that reads close to empty, and a real income that does not. The correction arrives later, in the form of a recalculation, and the direction of the correction is rarely in your favour. If you want the monthly picture modelled on your actual income rather than on the figure a French form will accept, that is what our Navigator cost and timeline estimator is built to do.

The assets question Americans answer wrong

APL calculation counts the value of your property and financial assets, and those of everyone in the household, once that value exceeds 30,000 euros. Americans read that as a French assets question and answer it about their French assets. It is not. A US brokerage account, a rental property in Ohio and an IRA are property and financial assets, and the threshold is low enough that a mid-career American who has been saving since their twenties clears it without effort.

The general benefits portal has the same shape. The Ministry of the Economy describes mesdroitssociaux.gouv.fr as covering 58 national and local benefits, free, with no account needed, and it walks you through household, housing, income and then patrimoine, meaning assets. It also states plainly that the results are indicative and do not bind the social security bodies. That disclaimer is doing more work for an American user than for a French one.

Question 3: which country taxes this, and does the simulator know?

The DGFiP income tax simulator states its own limit on the page that hosts it: updated 10 March 2026, it determines your income tax only if you are resident in France. That single clause disqualifies the two moments when Americans most want a number. Before the move, you are not resident yet. In the year of the move, you are resident for part of it.

The international section of the same site is blunter. On its page for non-residents, modified 26 February 2026, the tax administration warns in bold that you will not be able to use the simulator, because for now it computes tax for residents of France only. It then gives the figure the simulator will not: French-source income received after your departure from France is subject to a minimum rate of 20 percent, or 30 percent above the threshold of 29,579 euros of income received in 2025, unless you can show that the average rate on your worldwide income would be lower.

The year of the move splits in two

The same page sets out the split that no simulator models. Worldwide income received before your departure is taxed under the rules for French residents. French-source income received between the departure date and 31 December falls under the non-resident rules. Run in either direction, one tool cannot produce that answer, and the tool that exists refuses to try.

For an American the split runs the other way and gains a second country. The French simulator prices the French side of a year in which you also owe a US federal return, and possibly a state one. Our walkthrough of filing your first French income tax return covers the forms and the treaty mechanics, and the parallel question of breaking state tax residency before you leave is the one no French tool has ever heard of. Modelling both sides of a move year is exactly the kind of question our estimator exists to answer.

Question 4: what is the contribution nobody built a simulator for?

The cotisation subsidiaire maladie runs at 6.5 percent, and there is no official simulator for it anywhere on a gouv.fr domain. According to CLEISS, the French public body for international social security, the CSM is owed in 2026 by people whose professional income from work in France is below 9,612 euros and whose capital or property income exceeds 24,030 euros, those two thresholds being 20 percent and 50 percent of the annual social security ceiling of 48,060 euros for 2026. The base is capped at eight times that ceiling, or 384,480 euros.

Who this actually catches

Read that against a typical early retiree profile and the exposure is obvious. Someone who moved to France on a visitor visa, is not working here, and lives on investment income meets both conditions at once. The bill is not withheld and it does not appear in any estimate. It is called annually by URSSAF, which publishes the current thresholds and the payment calendar on its own PUMa page, and that page is where to confirm the timing before you budget for the year.

The step before the cost: cover is not automatic on arrival

There is a second thing the health simulators do not tell you, and it is a sequencing point rather than a money one. CLEISS notes that entitlement under the protection universelle maladie is not automatic in several situations, including on arrival in France, and that the person concerned has to request it using form S1106. The residence criterion itself is three months of stable and regular residence. Our guide to registering with CPAM as an American covers what that file has to contain.

This is the friction peak of the whole subject. Four tools, three of which return a number that assumes a French history you do not have, and the fourth of which does not exist and covers the largest single line. If you would rather see the whole first-year picture priced once, with your permit type, your income sources and your arrival date as the inputs, our Navigator produces the cost and timeline estimate the official tools each decline to attempt.

Where the numbers and the notices come apart

Three patterns show up often enough in the French administrative literature to be worth naming before you rely on any output.

The prefill is the first. Both mesdroitssociaux and the CAF portal offer FranceConnect sign-in, which pulls what the social bodies already know about you. FranceConnect authenticates through an existing French account: impots.gouv, Ameli, the La Poste digital identity, MSA, France Identite and a small number of others. A first-year arrival holds none of them, so every field is manual, and manual entry is where the assets question and the 12-month income question get answered from memory.

The gap between rights opening and cash arriving

The second is timing. Service Public gives the average processing time for a complete APL file as 36.5 days, and states that the benefit is due from the first day of the month following your application, with payment on the 5th. Move in on 15 October and rights open in November for a first payment on 5 December. Nothing is backdated to your lease start, which means the simulator's monthly figure and your first-quarter cash position are two different numbers.

The third is that the results are explicitly non-binding. Both the Ministry of the Economy and Service Public say so in the same words: indicative, and no commitment from the organisations concerned. A simulator output is not a decision, cannot be appealed, and is not evidence in a recours. The thing that can be contested is the notification, and the window for that is two months from the date of the decision rejecting your claim.

The order that wastes the least time

Given all three, here is the sequence that wastes the least time:

1. Settle the status question first. Confirm your permit type qualifies before you price anything, because it is binary and the tools are silent on it.

2. Run mesdroitssociaux for breadth, not precision. It tells you which of the 58 benefits your household shape even touches.

3. Run the CAF housing simulator with the income you will actually declare, not the income a French record currently shows.

4. Skip the DGFiP simulator until the year you file as a resident. Before then it will refuse you, and the refusal is correct.

5. Price the CSM by hand from the URSSAF thresholds, or accept that you have a line item with no number in it.

Which of these four you can settle yourself

This week, before you run anything, write down your permit type, the date it expires, and the country each income stream comes from. Those three facts are what every official simulator quietly assumes and none of them collect.

Two of the four you can handle alone. The housing simulator is arithmetic once you know your own income, and mesdroitssociaux is a breadth check that costs a few minutes and no account. The other two are where self-service stops. The tax side involves two jurisdictions and a treaty, and the DGFiP will not model it for you; the CSM has no tool at all and arrives as a separate annual URSSAF call. If your first year in France involves a mid-year move, income from more than one country, or investment income with no French salary behind it, that is the point where an estimate built by hand stops being reliable.

Our Navigator is the version of these four calculations that takes American inputs: your permit, your arrival date, your US and French income sources, and the assets the French forms will ask about. It produces the cost and timeline estimate in one pass, so you are not reconciling three French tools and a gap.

FAQ

Can I run the CAF housing simulator before I have a French address?

You can open it, but the result will not mean much. Service Public describes the tool as intended for a future tenant or resident, and the calculation runs on your rent and your household composition. Without a lease you are guessing the two inputs that move the number most. Run it once the lease is signed.

Will FranceConnect fill in my income if I only arrived this year?

No. FranceConnect signs you in through an existing French account such as impots.gouv, Ameli, MSA or the La Poste digital identity, and it prefills what those bodies already hold. A first-year arrival has no French record for them to return, so the fields stay empty and you complete them manually.

Are simulator results binding on CAF or URSSAF?

No. Both the Ministry of the Economy and Service Public state that simulator results are indicative and do not commit the social security organisations. Only a written decision creates rights or obligations, and only that decision can be contested, within two months of the notification rejecting your claim.

Does my US brokerage account count in the housing benefit calculation?

Yes, if the household total is high enough. APL calculation takes into account the value of property and financial assets held by you and everyone living with you once that value exceeds 30,000 euros. Nothing in the rule limits it to assets located in France, so US accounts and US property are inside the test.

Why does the tax simulator refuse me when I am the one moving to France?

Because it was built for residents. On its non-resident page, modified 26 February 2026, the DGFiP warns that you cannot use the impots.gouv.fr simulator, since for now it calculates tax only for residents of France. Until you are resident, the correct reference is the minimum rate of 20 percent or 30 percent above 29,579 euros of 2025 income.