How the figures for Paris are worked out

The anchor is the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, which publishes an average monthly rent by bedroom count. The figures used here are for July 2026.

Paris rents are legally capped, which makes this the only section on the site where the published reference figure is a binding maximum rather than an observation. The encadrement des loyers sets a ceiling per square metre for each combination of zone, property type, room count, construction period and furnishing, and a rent above it is unlawful and recoverable.

The figures here are derived from the published per-square-metre medians at typical sizes — around 38 m² for a one-bedroom and 60 m² for a two-bedroom. Note that the French convention counts rooms rather than bedrooms: a T2 is a one-bedroom flat. Furnished lets carry a higher legal ceiling than unfurnished ones, which is why so much of the market is furnished.

Room shares are less established in Paris than in Britain — the colocation market exists but the stock is small flats rather than large houses, so a four-bedroom share is rare. The figures come from listing samples on the colocation platforms and are indicative rather than a published series.

Paris rents are legally capped. The encadrement des loyers sets a binding maximum per square metre for each combination of zone, property type, number of rooms, construction period and whether the flat is furnished — so unlike anywhere else on this site, an advertised rent above the ceiling is unlawful and recoverable. Furnished lets carry their own higher ceiling, which is why so much of the market is furnished.

Sources: Préfecture de Paris encadrement des loyers reference rents, arrêté of 12 June 2026, in force from 1 July 2026; OLAP (Observatoire des loyers de l'agglomération parisienne) median rents by zone; SeLoger, PAP and Leboncoin visible listing samples across the agglomeration, July 2026. Last reviewed 2026-09-07.

Île-de-France Mobilités publishes no open routing API, so there is no journey planner to query. Every time on these pages comes from a reviewed static matrix instead: one figure for each of the 30 areas against each of the 8 destinations, 240 in total. Nothing here calls out to a live service, and nothing claims to.

The figures are typical weekday-morning door-to-door times — walking to the station, waiting, riding, and walking off at the other end. Métro headways of two to four minutes at peak mean the waiting term is small here in a way it is not in any British city outside London.

The assumed speed behind the distance fallback is the highest on this site, and Paris earns it. What the model does not capture is RER reliability: the A and B lines carry more passengers than the entire Manchester network and a bad morning on either adds half an hour that no timetable predicts. For anything relying on the RER, treat the figure as a good day.

Treat a five-minute difference between two areas as noise.

Île-de-France used to price in five concentric zones and abolished them for the Navigo pass in 2015 — a monthly pass now costs the same whether you travel one stop or out to the edge of the region. That is excellent for commuters and useless as a description of centrality, because the fare no longer encodes distance at all. So centrality is described directly here, in terms of the périphérique and the métro network rather than a tariff.

So centrality is described directly, in the terms someone moving here actually reasons in:

Central (0–2 km)

The first eleven arrondissements and the quartiers along the river. You walk to most things and take one métro to the rest, and you pay for it in floor area — a central Paris one-bedroom is smaller than a British studio.

Inner (2–5 km)

The outer arrondissements: Montmartre, Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont, Butte-aux-Cailles, Batignolles, Passy. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes to the centre, still inside the boundary, and where most Parisians actually live.

Outer (5–10 km)

Outside the périphérique but on the métro: Montreuil, Saint-Ouen, Pantin, Boulogne, Vincennes. Twenty-five to forty minutes in, materially cheaper, and functionally part of the city — Montreuil is routinely called the 21st arrondissement.

Fringe (10 km+)

The wider Île-de-France, reached on the RER and Transilien rather than the métro. Cheaper again and a different proposition: you are commuting into Paris rather than living in it.

There is no council tax in France for a tenant in their main home. The taxe d'habitation was abolished on principal residences in 2023 and now applies only to second homes — on which Paris levies a substantial surcharge. For a British reader this is the single most pleasant surprise in the whole move.

The taxe foncière, the other French property tax, falls on the owner and is not recoverable from the tenant. What you do pay is the provision sur charges, quoted separately from rent and reconciled annually, plus the household waste tax which landlords may lawfully pass on and generally do.

One genuinely compulsory cost that has no British equivalent: home insurance. A French tenant must hold it and prove it annually, and failing to do so is grounds for terminating the lease.

Sources: Loi de finances 2020 and subsequent, on the abolition of taxe d'habitation for main residences; Décret n°87-713 on charges récupérables, for what a landlord may lawfully pass on; Loi ALUR on deposit caps and tenant agency fees; Île-de-France Mobilités published Navigo tariffs for 2026. These are secondary sources: confirm any charge that matters to your own budget with the authority itself. Last reviewed 2026-09-07.

Each area carries 10 scores from 0 to 10: lively, green space, nightlife, café density, gym density, walkability, food scene, young professionals, safety, transport. They are comparable between the areas covered here and nowhere else: a 7 for nightlife means seventh-decile among these 30 areas, not on any absolute scale.

These are editorial judgements, informed by transport data, published crime and deprivation statistics and local knowledge. They are not survey results and they are not derived from a formula.