France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told Ouest-France this week that he has presented the Prime Minister with a “major catch-up plan” aimed squarely at the long queues for residency cards at prefectures. Published on 6 April 2026 and updated on 7 April, the minister’s outline centres on the emergency recruitment of 500 full-time-equivalent contract staff—about a 20 % boost to the current headcount handling immigration files. In recent years prefectures have struggled to keep pace with demand, particularly for renewals of the ‘carte de séjour’. Official data show renewals jumped 7.6 % in 2025, driven by family-reunification cases and by the first wave of five-year Brexit Withdrawal-Agreement (WA) cards that now have to be replaced. Britons will see some 40,000 WA cards come up for renewal this year, while first-time residency cards for Americans climbed 14.3 % in 2025. Processing times of six to eight months have become common and, as Nuñez bluntly admitted, applicants sometimes “lose their jobs when their residence permits are not renewed on time.” Beyond extra staffing, the ministry wants to double the validity of stored biometric data from five to ten years, sparing applicants an extra prefecture visit and back-office handling. It is also looking at limiting address-change notifications for long-term residents. Critically for corporate mobility managers, Nuñez has ordered an audit of recurring technical failures on the France-Visas portal, whose outages have repeatedly frozen renewal submissions and triggered status gaps for employees.
![France to hire 500 extra staff to clear residency-card backlog]()
At this juncture, companies and individuals may also turn to independent facilitators for support. VisaHQ, for example, offers an online France hub (https://www.visahq.com/france/) where users can review the latest residency-permit requirements, receive document checklists and obtain hands-on assistance with assembling error-free files—services that can save precious weeks when prefectural queues lengthen.
Stakeholders have welcomed the gesture but stress that sustainable improvement will require investment in digital infrastructure and clearer performance targets for each prefecture. Immigration lawyers contacted by The Connexion say that uneven regional practices remain a pain-point for multinational HR teams who must plan assignments months in advance. If the plan is fully financed in the next budget revision, new staff could be on site before the summer peak. For employers, the message is two-fold: start renewal dossiers as early as the system allows and build a contingency buffer into assignment schedules until the extra manpower is in place. International assignees already in France should continue to download their ‘récépissé’ (temporary extension) as soon as it is available to avoid lapses in social-security and payroll records.
At this juncture, companies and individuals may also turn to independent facilitators for support. VisaHQ, for example, offers an online France hub (https://www.visahq.com/france/) where users can review the latest residency-permit requirements, receive document checklists and obtain hands-on assistance with assembling error-free files—services that can save precious weeks when prefectural queues lengthen.
Stakeholders have welcomed the gesture but stress that sustainable improvement will require investment in digital infrastructure and clearer performance targets for each prefecture. Immigration lawyers contacted by The Connexion say that uneven regional practices remain a pain-point for multinational HR teams who must plan assignments months in advance. If the plan is fully financed in the next budget revision, new staff could be on site before the summer peak. For employers, the message is two-fold: start renewal dossiers as early as the system allows and build a contingency buffer into assignment schedules until the extra manpower is in place. International assignees already in France should continue to download their ‘récépissé’ (temporary extension) as soon as it is available to avoid lapses in social-security and payroll records.
