Americans in France by region

The headline

These are people who hold American nationality and no French nationality, who usually live in France. They are not Americans in general, and the census misses short stays. The section on what INSEE counts says who is in and who is out.

Region by region

The file gives all 17 regions that INSEE codes: 13 in metropolitan France and 4 overseas. Mayotte is not in it. The thin line on each bar is the 95% interval: INSEE says the true value falls inside it 95 times in 100. Overseas regions and counts under 250 have no interval, for reasons given below.

How the interval is made: INSEE publishes a table of the coefficient of variation by size of count (fiche-precision.pdf (September 2023), communes of 10,000 inhabitants or more in metropolitan France, RP2018). We read the band of each count and apply INSEE's rule, count × (1 ± 2 × coefficient of variation). INSEE built the table for whole communes and says it also gives an idea for targeted populations spread evenly. Treat the intervals as a guide and not as exact bounds. Below 250 people the table gives only "more than 8.0%", so we show no bounds. The table is for metropolitan France, so the overseas regions have none. "People in file" is the number of people behind the count, before weighting.

The 36 départements with a count of their own

INSEE names the département in this file only where it has 700,000 inhabitants or more. 36 départements qualify. Together they hold 27,020 of the 33,707 people, or 80.2%. A count rests on few people when the département is small: we mark those based on fewer than 30 people in the file as too small to quote.

Too small to quote: Morbihan (28 people in the file), Vendée (23 people in the file), Pas-de-Calais (17 people in the file), Loire (20 people in the file) and La Réunion (2 people in the file). Their counts are in the table so that the totals add up, and nobody should cite them alone.

The 64 départements we cannot name

For the other 64 départements INSEE gives no code, only the region. They hold 6,685 people between them. We therefore show no map and no figure for any one of them. By region, the départements without a count of their own are:

• Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Ain, Allier, Ardèche, Cantal, Drôme, Haute-Loire, Puy-de-Dôme and Savoie.
• Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. Côte-d'Or, Doubs, Jura, Nièvre, Haute-Saône, Saône-et-Loire, Yonne and Territoire de Belfort.
• Bretagne. Côtes-d'Armor.
• Centre-Val de Loire. Cher, Eure-et-Loir, Indre, Indre-et-Loire, Loir-et-Cher and Loiret.
• Corse. Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Corse.
• Grand Est. Ardennes, Aube, Marne, Haute-Marne, Meuse and Vosges.
• Guadeloupe. Guadeloupe.
• Guyane. Guyane.
• Hauts-de-France. Aisne and Somme.
• Martinique. Martinique.
• Normandie. Eure, Manche and Orne.
• Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Charente, Charente-Maritime, Corrèze, Creuse, Dordogne, Landes, Lot-et-Garonne, Deux-Sèvres, Vienne and Haute-Vienne.
• Occitanie. Ariège, Aude, Aveyron, Gers, Lot, Lozère, Hautes-Pyrénées, Pyrénées-Orientales, Tarn and Tarn-et-Garonne.
• Pays de la Loire. Mayenne and Sarthe.
• Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Hautes-Alpes and Vaucluse.

Mayotte does not appear in the file at all.

What INSEE counts and what it leaves out

The count is of nationality, not of birthplace. The file codes each person's current nationality, and code 840 stands for "Américains (USA)". An American-born person who is now French is not in it. A person born elsewhere who holds only American nationality is.

A person with French and American nationality is counted as French. INSEE treats anyone of French nationality who holds another as French, and the form used until 2024 did not let people say they had two. For the 2023 census INSEE adds that the foreign nationality of a person who is both French and foreign is not recorded. Dual nationals are therefore missing from this count. For someone who holds two foreign nationalities, INSEE keeps the first one given.

The census counts people who usually live in France, whatever their nationality. It does not count foreigners who are only here for a few days or weeks, cross-border workers, people living here for a limited time of under a year, such as students or seasonal workers, or foreigners housed in an embassy or a consulate. A one-semester study abroad student is out. So is a visitor on a 90 day stay.

The census is a survey spread over five years. INSEE says the figures show an average situation over the five years more than a picture of one day. RP2023 is built from the annual surveys of 2021 to 2025, and its reference date is 1 January 2023. The 2021 survey in communes of 10,000 inhabitants or more was replaced by a pseudo-survey built from 2016 data.

Each person in the file carries a weight, the number of people the person stands for, with many decimals. INSEE says to add the weights with all their decimals, and that is what we do, rounding only the sum to a whole number. That is why a count here can differ by a unit or two from the sum of its parts. The census is also a sample in the larger communes, which is where the margin of error comes from.

Why this count cannot be set against older ones

This page shows no change over time. INSEE says the 2024 annual survey used a new way of collecting answers, with a questionnaire people can fill in on a phone. It counted more people and identified immigrants more reliably, so data from 2024 onward cannot be compared directly with earlier data. RP2023 contains the surveys of 2024 and 2025. Counts of Americans from the 2019 or 2020 censuses, or from maps built on them, are a different vintage, and the gap between them and this page is not a trend.

The page Americans in France: the official numbers sets out the other counts, from permits and from Social Security, and what each one measures.

How to cite these figures

INSEE publishes its public data under the Licence Ouverte 2.0. It allows free reuse, including commercial use, if the source is shown as "Source : Insee", if the date of the last update is given when it is known, and if the meaning of the data is not altered. INSEE's page for the file is dated 28 October 2026. A citation:

Source : Insee, recensement de la population 2023, fichier détail « Individus localisés à la région », exploitation principale et complémentaire, fichier publié sur insee.fr (https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/9004831), consulté le 28 October 2026.

The counts on this page are INSEE's weights summed by us, and the intervals are our application of INSEE's rule. INSEE has not reviewed them. To cite this page:

EasyFranceNow, "Americans in France by region: the 2023 census count", https://easyfrancenow.com/data/americans-in-france-by-region, data read 28 October 2026.

Download all the figures as a CSV. Each row is a region or a département, with its count, the people in the file, the interval and the day it was read.

Methodology

• The file. INSEE's "Individus localisés à la région en 2023" (17,702,858 rows, one per person recorded in the census). We read the publication page, the dictionary of variables and the documentation on 28 October 2026, and the file itself from the zip INSEE publishes.
• The count. The sum of the weight (variable IPONDI) of every row whose detailed nationality (NAT49) is 840, by region (REGION) and by département (DEPT). INSEE says that in this file the nationalities most represented nationally and regionally are shown apart. The Americans are shown apart in all 17 regions.
• The départements. The file names a département only for those of 700,000 inhabitants or more, and codes every other one 99. We keep the 36 named ones. The 64 others appear only inside their region's count.
• Per 10,000 residents. The weighted count divided by the weighted number of people in the same file for the same region, so both come from the same census.
• The interval. INSEE's note on the precision of census results (September 2023): the true value lies in 95 cases out of 100 in count × (1 − 2 × CV) to count × (1 + 2 × CV), with CV read from its table by size of count. The table is for communes of 10,000 inhabitants or more in metropolitan France and dates from the 2018 census.
• Definitions. From INSEE's notes on nationalities and immigration (June 2026), how to use the census (June 2026) and the series break in the measure of immigrants (4 June 2026).
• What we do not do. We add no figure of our own beyond the sums, shares and intervals described here. We do not split the départements INSEE leaves grouped, and we do not give a total of Americans in France whatever their legal status. The extract we rebuild the page from is in the project, as is the script that makes it.

Their age, work, qualifications and housing are on Who the Americans in France are. City pages: Americans in Paris and Americans in Nice. Guides that rely on these figures: renting in Paris as an American and renting in Nice as an American. How we check facts in general is on how we verify.

What each number means: the definitions of every measure on these pages, from the publishers' own metadata.