Taking a helper abroad

I am going to France to give birth and want to take my helper but understand that I need to apply for a visa.


Does anyone have any experiance in this or adivse.

Is it a difficult process? Is it worth it?


please any advise would be great

Hi, I went through the process of applying for a visa to take our helper to France for 4 weeks. It was unsuccessful - not that they turned me down but they never responded to my application. I spent many hours and thousands of dollars trying to get everything they required together.


It is a very difficult process and I wouldn't recommend doing it if you don't speak french. If you do you may be able to negotiate through it more successfully than I did!


You are essentially applying to become an employer in France and your helper an employee. They require forms to be sent to two different govt agencies in france and the helpers contract translated to french by a certified translator which accompanies one of them. These 2 depts. then approve your applications and send back the stamped forms. You then provide all this stuff to the french consulate and they then decide whether to grant a visa. The process is not very well explained on the french consulate website and actually differs from what I was told by the french consulate visa dept.


You must begin the process AT LEAST 3 months before you leave and in fact I would suggest more like 4-5 months to allow for difficulties and slow response times.


Keep in mind you are legally required to pay your helper French minimum wage while working in France, and they are not allowed to work more than 35 hours a week (or whatever the standard working week is).


They will not grant a tourist visa to your helper either so that's not an option.


Good luck!

sounds like a nightmare but we have a lot of french in our building and quite a lot of them take their helpers on holidays with them (to France and other European countries) so guess it does work for most of them?

Maybe not everyone informs immigration that the helper will be working and she goes on a tourist visa as part of the familly.

i think that might be the way forward - when we took our helper to NZ, we were told in NZ commition to apply for tourist visa for her as if we are taking her on holidays to NZ - end of... might make things easier for both sides i suspect.

ldsllvn - you had no problems getting your helper into NZ on a tourist visa? How long could she accompany you for? I am curious about that for future reference.


I asked the french consulate about getting a tourist visa and was told that it wasn't an option, but mostly likely by that point because of the questions I'd been asking they knew she would be working. Probably worth a shot.


I suspect that if you speak french the whole process is probably much easier though. When I ran into problems I couldn't call the french-speaking agencies in france to get answers.

Katie, we took her with us for 2 wks and was no problem at all. Visa ready the next day i think. Am pretty sure longer would have been fine too... Taking her to Australia this dec, so will see how that goes!!

the french do not reply and they are not obliged to give reasons about visa rejections! we recently got rejected but luckily they only chopped the application date on my DH's visa so we went to get a schengen visa from the italian consulate and was successful. my friends are telling me to either try to fly direct to paris and just give all the proof that she will leave (their worst fear) or fly to some other schengen state, then travel by land to wherever u want as there should be no 'internal borders' between schengen states now.....

This thread is quite old but I thought I'd post this info for anyone looking for answers.


The French government / consulate have reassessed their process for domestic helper working visas. It's still quite involved (they are french after all) but instead of the negative response we were expecting - our helper's working visa came through a week after we sent off the request.

Here's the link to the page that has all the relevant info.


Read More


The most difficult part of the process was trying to find the correct "department" in france to email the scanned form (you need to apply to the area you will be staying in the longest)


Definitely worth a try for those who want a "holiday" :)