You have the house. The grass grows four inches a week from April, the gutters need doing, the windows want cleaning twice a year, and the car needs its contrôle technique. At home you had a man for all of it. Here you know nobody, and the one person you have been given the number for never answers.
This is one of the quieter frustrations of a move to France, and it catches people who sailed through the notaire and the mortgage without blinking. It is also entirely solvable, and the solution is cheaper than almost everyone expects — because of one piece of French tax law that most new arrivals have never heard of.
Start with that, because it changes what you should be willing to pay.
The half you get back
France has a scheme called services à la personne, and it gives you a tax credit of 50 per cent on household help: cleaning, ironing, gardening, grass cutting, small DIY, help with a computer, childcare.
It is a credit, not a deduction. That matters enormously. If you pay no French income tax at all — and plenty of new arrivals on a modest pension do not — you still get the money. It is refunded rather than set against a bill.
The ceilings are generous for ordinary use. In 2026 the general limit is 12,000 euros of spending a year, giving up to 6,000 euros back, rising by 1,500 euros for each child at home. Within that there are sub-limits worth knowing: gardening is capped at 5,000 euros a year, and small DIY at just 500 euros — with the odd further rule that a bricolage job must be no longer than two hours to qualify at all.
For most people with a house and a garden, none of those ceilings will ever be troubled. Five thousand euros of grass cutting is a lot of grass.
And you no longer wait a year for it
This used to be the catch: you paid out all year and got the credit back the following summer. Not any more.
There is now an immediate advance. You register the person through the official system, and the state takes its half off at the moment you pay, every time. You are never out of pocket waiting.
The effect is startling when you see the arithmetic. Pay someone 100 euros of wages and the social contributions come to around 62 euros, so the true cost is about 162. The credit takes half of that away at source, and what actually leaves your bank account is about 81 euros.
Read that again, because it is the single most useful thing in this article. Employing someone properly, with contributions paid and everything declared, costs you less than handing them the same money in cash. Eighty-one euros instead of a hundred, for the same wage in their pocket.
The black economy in rural France exists because people assume the opposite. They are wrong, and it costs them.
What it costs an hour
Rates vary by region and the coast is dearer than inland, but the shape is consistent.
The legal floor is the minimum wage plus a further ten per cent that must be added for paid holiday — which in practice puts the lowest lawful rate somewhere around 10.70 euros net an hour as things stand in 2026. Nobody good works for the floor.
In the countryside of Brittany, Normandy and the Vendée you should expect to agree somewhere between 12 and 15 euros net an hour for cleaning or garden work with someone you employ directly. After contributions and the credit, that is really costing you about 10 to 12. A competent, reliable person who turns up is worth the top of that range and more, and the mistake is haggling over fifty cents and then losing them.
Going through an agency is different. They handle the paperwork, they cover absence, and you will pay something closer to 20 to 30 euros an hour for it. The same 50 per cent credit applies, so the real cost halves — but it is still appreciably more than employing someone yourself. For a weekly clean, direct employment wins. For occasional, complicated or urgent work, an agency can be worth every cent.
Grass is often quoted by the job rather than the hour, and that usually suits both sides better. Agree a price per cut and how often, and put the first and last month of the season in writing.
Where to actually find people
AlloVoisins is the one most people land on, and it works. You post what you need, when and roughly what you will pay, and people nearby reply. Posting is free for you — the subscriptions are aimed at tradespeople who answer a lot of requests — and the range is genuinely wide: gardening, cleaning, furniture assembly, moving heavy things, lifts, pet sitting, small repairs.
Two sensible habits with it. Compare the total for the job rather than the hourly rate, because travel, materials and taking rubbish away can sit outside a quoted figure. And for anything technical, ask what their status is and whether they are insured, because the people answering range from a registered artisan to a neighbour with a trailer.
Leboncoin has a services section and is still where a great deal of rural France does business, particularly for garden and clearance work.
Local Facebook groups are better than any website in a small commune. Look for the group named after your town, or anything with "entraide" in the title. A post there gets answered by people with a reputation to protect among neighbours, which is worth more than any star rating.
The mairie. Walk in and ask. This is the step people from a city find hardest and it is the most effective one there is. They know who cuts grass, who cleans, who is reliable and who is not, and in a village of four hundred people they will tell you.
The boulangerie noticeboard is not a joke. It is still, in a great many communes, the real jobs market.
The car is a different animal
You asked about the car, and it sits outside all of the above, because vehicle repair is not a service à la personne. No tax credit, no CESU.
What matters here is simply that you use someone registered. A proper garage gives you an invoice, and that invoice is what gives you a legal guarantee on the work and a leg to stand on if something fails. A man who does it on his drive for cash gives you neither, and if the job goes wrong on a car you then try to sell, the absence of history costs you more than you saved.
The French system is more forgiving than people expect: independent garages are usually markedly cheaper than the franchised dealer and perfectly competent for servicing and the contrôle technique, and a local one you stick with will look after you. We go through how the whole business works, including what to watch for when you buy, in buying a car in France.
Getting it right the first time
A handful of things make the difference between help that lasts years and a succession of people who stop answering.
Agree the rate as a net figure, per hour or per job, and say so explicitly. Confusion between gross and net is the commonest row in domestic employment here, and it is entirely avoidable in one sentence.
Be specific about what the job includes. "The garden" means one thing to you and another to the person quoting. Say whether it covers the hedge, whether cuttings are taken away, how often, and what happens in August.
Pay promptly and pay the proper rate. In a rural commune your reputation as an employer travels faster than you do, and it decides whether the next person takes your call.
And do declare it. Apart from costing less, there is the question nobody thinks about until it happens: if somebody falls off a ladder in your garden and they are not declared, you are the one exposed, and your house insurance will not be interested.
One more reason to bother
There is a side effect worth naming. The person who cuts your grass knows a roofer. The cleaner's brother-in-law does chimneys. Six months of paying someone properly and on time will get you a better address book than two years of searching online, and in rural France that address book is the thing that actually makes a house easy to own.
What a French house costs to run across a year, help included, is set out in the annual cost of owning a house in France.
If you are buying or building with us and wondering who will look after the place — particularly if it will stand empty between visits — ask us. After thirty-six years and twelve hundred projects we know the reliable people in the communes we build in, and an introduction costs you nothing. Book a free half-hour and we will point you at them. You can also reach us on WhatsApp or by email for a same-day answer.