Living in Montpellier

The expat scene: English speakers here are well organized for a city this size. BCA Montpellier has run social and cultural activities for anglophones since 1991, the American Women's Group of Languedoc-Roussillon covers the wider region, and Montpellier Internationals hosts a weekly French and English language exchange. Le Bookshop is the city's English-language bookstore and a useful notice board, and on the French side AVF runs the standard newcomer welcome group. Most of it goes quiet in August.

Healthcare: CHU de Montpellier is the regional university hospital and the biggest employer in the region, attached to a medical faculty that is the oldest in Europe, with Saint-Éloi, Lapeyronie and Gui de Chauliac as the main sites. After about three months of legal residence you register with CPAM, get a carte vitale and pick a médecin traitant, and most people then add a mutuelle to cover what the state doesn't. Doctolib is how everyone books, and it's worth asking at a pharmacy for English-speaking doctors, since pharmacists know who's taking new patients.

Remote work: Internet runs about $35 a month and fiber is standard, which is as cheap as anywhere we've looked. Coworking is easy to find, from converted warehouses out in Port Marianne to small rooms around the center. The time zone is the real question, since Montpellier is six hours ahead of New York.

Schools: Bilingual options exist, but they're small and mostly private. AIS School teaches in French and English from nursery through the IB, the International School of Montpellier up in Saint-Clément-de-Rivière takes children to age eleven, and there's another bilingual school out at Baillargues. Public schools evaluate new arrivals and place them with language support.

Limited mobility: This is one of the easier French cities to manage on wheels. The ground is flat, the trams were built with level boarding, and the mapped data shows one of the densest sets of wheelchair-accessible places of any city we've covered; one wheelchair user who wrote up a visit said it was the first French city where he'd seen so many other wheelchairs. The exception is the Écusson, where medieval lanes get narrow and rough and a single step into a café is still common. Registered drivers park free on the street, and Palavas-les-Flots has a ramped beach with a floating chair for getting into the water.

Retirement: Montpellier fits retirees about as well as any city in France, being flat, warm and walkable, with free transit once you're a resident and hospitals that are genuinely good. France has no dedicated retirement visa, so most retired Americans arrive on the long-stay visitor visa and live on passive income. Start with our retirement visa guide and the full France guide if you're still comparing cities, or read up on the French long-stay visa itself.