The APS: staying in France after your studies

Your student permit ends with your degree, but your job search doesn’t. The APS gives you one more year in France to find work or start a business.

People still call it the APS — autorisation provisoire de séjour — but the document you actually apply for is called “recherche d’emploi ou création d’entreprise” (often shortened to RECE). Search for that name on official sites; searching for “APS” will get you outdated pages.

Who can get it

You need a diploma at master’s level or equivalent, obtained in France. That includes a licence professionnelle, a Mastère Spécialisé, or an MSc labelled by the Conférence des Grandes Écoles.

• Already in France: you must hold a valid student or student-mobility titre de séjour, and have earned the diploma within the last 12 months.
• Applying from abroad: you can apply up to 4 years after finishing your degree, as a long-stay visa (VLS-TS) marked recherche d’emploi/création d’entreprise.

One year, and it does not renew

The permit lasts 12 months and cannot be renewed. That single fact should shape how you use it: at the end of the year you either move to another status or you leave. Treat the deadline as real from day one, not from month nine.

When and how to apply

From inside France, apply in the two months before your student permit expires — online through the ANEF portal, or at your prefecture. Don’t wait for the last week; if your permit lapses before a decision, you lose the right to stay while it’s processed.

From abroad, apply for the visa through the France-Visas portal at your local French consulate, then validate it online within 3 months of arriving. An unvalidated VLS-TS is not a residence permit.

What you’ll need

• Your current student permit, or a validated long-stay visa
• Passport (identity pages, plus the visa page)
• A justificatif de domicile less than 6 months old
• Three ID photos
• Proof of health insurance
• Your diploma, or an official attestation de réussite if it hasn’t been issued yet
• If you’re starting a business: a description of the project
• A signed undertaking to respect the principles of the Republic

Cost: €150 if you apply in France (a €50 stamp plus a €100 tax), or €100 to validate the visa if you arrived from abroad.

The work rule that catches people out

This is the part most people get wrong. The APS is not a general work permit. You may take a salaried job, but it must meet both conditions:

1. It is related to your studies, and
2. It pays more than €2,800.53 gross per month (the 2026 figure — it’s indexed to the SMIC and rises most years).

The upside: the 60% annual cap that limited you as a student — 964 hours a year — no longer applies. A qualifying job can be full-time from the start.

The logic is that the APS year is for searching. The moment you find a job that clears both bars, you can begin it immediately rather than waiting for a change of status to be approved.

What comes next

Before the twelve months are up, you move to a permit that matches what you found. The 2026 thresholds:

Applying for the salarié card from an APS has one real advantage: the situation de l’emploi test is waived, so your employer doesn’t have to prove the role couldn’t be filled by someone already in the French labour market. That removes the single biggest obstacle to hiring you.

One thing that changed in 2026

Since 1 January 2026, a first application for a multi-year permit requires passing a civic exam and proving French at A2 level. A ten-year resident card requires B1.

This does not apply to the APS itself — it’s a one-year temporary card, and the requirement is for multi-year permits. But it very much applies to what comes next: the Talent cards in the table above are multi-year, so plan for the exam during your APS year rather than discovering it at the deadline. Applicants aged 65 and over are exempt, as are people with a medical certificate showing testing isn’t possible.

Before you apply

• Check your diploma is genuinely at master’s level or equivalent — this is the most common rejection.
• Diarise the two-month application window now, before your student permit expiry sneaks up.
• If you’re aiming at a Talent card afterwards, book the civic exam early.
• Verify the salary thresholds on the official page below before relying on them. They are indexed and they move.