I love living in Paris. I have been here since 2018 and I am not leaving anytime soon. That said, plenty of people online sell Paris as a postcard, and the gap between the postcard and the lived reality is where new arrivals get burned. This is the 2026 version of my honest dislike list, written after six full years.
If you want the balanced version, I keep the pros and cons updated separately. This post is the venting.
Rent eats your salary, even on a decent income
A junior consultant in Paris making 45,000 euros gross takes home roughly 2,800 euros a month. A reasonable one-bedroom in a livable arrondissement is 1,400 to 1,800 euros. That is half your take-home before you have eaten or paid your phone bill.
Rent control caps annual increases, which is genuinely helpful once you sign a lease. But the entry ticket is brutal. You also need a guarantor, a dossier with six months of payslips, and the speed to commit on a flat 24 hours after viewing it. I covered the apartment hunt in more detail in my mistakes post, and it remains the single biggest reason new arrivals quietly hate their first year.
French administration is its own job
Renewing my residence permit took six months in 2024. The prefecture website went down twice during my appointment booking window. I had to print my entire dossier in triplicate even though everything was uploaded online.
This is not a one-off. Every interaction with the French state, the tax office, the social security office, your mutuelle, the housing benefit CAF, follows the same pattern. You produce paper. You wait. You produce more paper. You wait some more. Eventually you get what you wanted.
If you come from a place where admin is a 20-minute online task, this is a culture shock. The only strategy that works is to over-document, never throw a piece of paper away for at least 10 years, and treat admin as a recurring chore, not a project you finish.
The weather from November to March
Paris is not cold. It does not really snow. The temperature stays in the 3 to 9 degrees Celsius range most of winter. What it does do is sit under a grey sky for four straight months.
I notice it in my mood every year. I take vitamin D in October. I book one warm trip in February no matter what is happening at work. I run a sunrise lamp in the morning. None of these tricks fully solve it. If you are coming from anywhere sunny, build winter survival into your budget and calendar from day one. Otherwise February will hit you hard.
Making French friends is a multi-year project
This is the social trap nobody warns you about. French people build their close circle in school and university and then largely close the gates by 25. They are warm, generous, and curious once you are in. The work to get in is real.
In my first two years I made plenty of foreigner friends. Most of them left. By year three I was rebuilding from scratch with people who were also exhausted from rebuilding from scratch. By year five I had finally built a stable mixed circle of French friends and long-stay foreigners.
If you come planning to be here for one or two years only, brace for a thinner social life than you imagined. If you are here for five or more, the second half is much better than the first half. I went deeper into this in my piece on moving abroad being hard.
Taxes feel heavy once you earn more
When I was an intern and then a junior, taxes were a footnote. As my income climbed they became impossible to ignore. The marginal rate above 80,000 euros gross is around 41 percent on income tax alone, and that is before social charges.
I do not hate the principle. My taxes pay for the safety net I use and for the streets I walk on. But there is a real moment, somewhere around your second promotion, when you look at your payslip and feel the gap with what a friend in the US is taking home. That gap is one of the honest reasons people leave France in their mid-thirties, and it is worth knowing before you commit.
If you are considering France versus the US specifically for a master’s first, I wrote a comparison piece on France versus the US for the MiM that lays out the longer-term economics.
The metro is wonderful and also gross
The Paris metro is one of the densest, most useful networks in any major city. It is also dirty, often broken, sometimes scary at night, and increasingly slow on the older lines that have not been refurbished.
Lines 1, 14, and the new 15 are excellent. Lines 4, 8, 13 in rush hour are a separate experience that I would not wish on a guest. The summer heat in the carriages is genuinely dangerous in July and August. If you are choosing where to live, your line matters as much as your arrondissement.
A reminder for honesty: I still use it twice a day, and I will defend it against most other cities. But it is not the romantic Amelie metro.
The bigger picture
Most of these dislikes are real, and most are also survivable. Paris is a long city. The first year is hard, the second year is friction, and from the third year on the trade-offs make sense if you have made the right early moves. I covered the deeper reasons that keep me here in what it is really like to live in Paris.