Mutual Social Security Cover

Health Care & Carte Vitale
1

Can anyone direct me to, or give me a link, or information on Mutual Social Security Cover in France. We are applying for a Carte de Sejour for myself - Australian wife of a UK born Husband.
The Prefecture has now requested additional paperwork, one of which is
the Certificate of our Mutual Social Security Cover.
As my Husband has only been here since last December. and I since
February,we didn’t know we had to obtain this.

Our source of income here is going to be from one B@B room at our main residence and another property we have just started to rent out as a Gite.

Help would be appreciated as we need to get all this sorted and back to them within the month.

2

What have they asked for exactly (in French)?
What health cover do you have currently?

3

Attestation de la couverture sociale en cours de validite (securite sociale + mutuelle) vous concernant et concernant votre mari.

My Husband can’t locate his UK SS number so we are thinking he has to make the long drive to England and back just to see a Doctor to obtain it.

If we obtain micro entrepreneurial status, will that give us a SS to suffice? (Gite).
Someone also said if he does work fruit picking that will give him one also, but we need this way before picking season starts.

4

I’m not an expert on this but it does sound as if you have a few things to sort out. Carte de séjour applications are not just a formality, they are studied quite carefully; there are boxes you need to tick and if you don’t tick them there is a real danger of being refused.

I guess the reason you’re being asked for your attestations is that you need to prove residence in France, and in order to be officially classed as resident you need to show you have had healthcare in place continuously since you arrived, because this is one of France’s conditions for “legal and stable residence”. The “attestation” they are asking for is the certificate your healthcare caisse issues when your entitlement starts, stating the date on which your rights were opened, and also the date on which they end if for some reason your cover has a time limit on it. Do neither of you in fact currently have any health cover at all in place in France? If you’ve been living here since December but without health cover, the préfecture may decide that you have been here irregularly during this period since the conditions for residence weren’t being met.

I’m not quite sure what the point would be of going the UK to get your OH’s UK national insurance number? Membership of the UK social security system and the NHS is reserved for UK residents only, and your OH’s entitlement to NHS cover automatically ceased when he left the UK to live in France. If he doesn’t have any current EU health cover he’s not actually entitled to go back to the UK and see a doctor. If in fact he’s a posted worker or a UK pensioner with an S1 he should have taken his S1 to CPAM, but from what you say it doesn’t sound as if he is.

The préfecture is asking both of you to prove your entitlement to healthcare, and micro entrepreneur is designed as, and works best as, a one-person business, ie one person runs it and one person obtains health cover. There are options to run a micro as a married couple in which case the spouse has a choice of registering as either a conjoint collaborateur or a conjoint salarié, and most people choose conjoint collaborateur. I don’t see how you could be registered as a salarié as a non-EU citizen without a carte de séjour that permits you to work in France, but whether you need a carte de séjour in order to be registered as a conjoint collaborateur, I don’t know. But in any case, to my mind once you start running a micro as a couple the scheme starts losing its advantages. Depending on your circumstances, micro might still be the best option but you should consider the alternatives and choose the statut that will be best in the long term, rather than rush into registering a micro now and find out further down the line that it was an expensive mistake and you’re paying higher cotisations than you would have under another setup.

You say you’ve already started earning an income from the gite, and it sounds as if this is your main source of income. Is it not registered as a business at all, as yet? Obviously we don’t know the full circumstances but on the face of it, it sounds irregular to be earning your main income from an unregistered business activity. If that is the case you should decide quickly on how to register it and get it sorted, because if the préfecture picks up on irregularities on your carte de séjour application you risk all kinds of queries coming at you.

Don’t take this as “advice” because I don’t know the answers, but I would have thought these are the issues you should be addressing, hope this helps.

1 Like
5

Thank you Anna,

for taking so much time to go into all this explanation as it has highlighted several things.

We have registered with the local Mairie in the Hamlet where the Gite is.

There is so much to read that I get confused in which order things need to be done.
There doesn’t seem to be a Checklist available stating the process to follow to start up a business renting out a Gite.

As a previous Property Manager I swear by Checklists to ensure nothing gets overlooked, missed and/or forgotten.

It appeared, from what I read, that if we didn’t earn over a certain amount that the Tax

set-up wasn’t an urgent issue.

Re: the Healthcare, my Husband just assumed that as an EU citizen he had the right to live here and hadn’t looked into much of anything else as we have been busy looking and buying another property for the Gite.
I have only been here since February.

More sleepless nights and worried days …

Thanks again.

6

The thing is that the process you need to follow depends on personal circumstances, so really it’s not so much a checklist about starting a gite rental business that you need, it’s more that you need to find out what your obligations are when you move from one EU state to another. Yes, EU citizens have freedom of movement within the EU but that doesn’t mean unconditional unregulated movement. They are supposed to follow the EU and national rules. The rules are designed to ensure that nobody ends up without social security protection when they move from state to state, and also to allow states to protect themselves from people moving there and expecting to use the services without contributing. Somebody please explain this to Theresa May.
EU rules on social security and healthcare:

French rules on registering a business:
https://www.rsi.fr/obligation-daffiliation
There are exceptions, for instance if you have gite rental income that is secondary to your day job, you may not need to register the gite as a business, because you would already be affiliated and paying cotisations through your day job. But if as your post suggests your OH intends his status to be “economically active” then by definition his route to social security must be through his professional activity, therefore the business needs to be registered and he needs to be paying social security contributions.

Maybe you need to explain the position to the préfecture sooner rather than later. Or if you haven’t had any better advice, you could try posting on this forum which has several Aussie and other non EU members who are very clued up on carte de séjour applications. Good luck with it and try not to worry, it’ll all work out eventually.

1 Like
7

Yes Anna,

information appreciated and your points understood, thanks.

cheers.