France’s administrative divisions are organized into three main tiers of elected local government: 18 regions, 101 departments, and roughly 34,875 communes. Sitting alongside them are intercommunal groupings that pool municipal resources, special-status communities like Corsica, and overseas territories with their own constitutional rules. Every tier has its own directly elected council and its own budget, but none can give orders to another, and in every department a state-appointed prefect keeps national law in force.
The Three Main Tiers at a Glance
The French Constitution recognizes communes, departments, regions, special-status communities, and overseas communities as collectivités territoriales.1Conseil Constitutionnel. Constitution of 4 October 1958 Each one is run by a council elected by direct universal suffrage, funds itself through a mix of local taxes and state transfers, and has legal personality: it can own property, sign contracts, and appear in court under its own name.2Vie-publique.fr. Qu’est-ce qu’une collectivité territoriale ou collectivité locale ?
The tiers are not stacked in a hierarchy. A region cannot overrule a department, and a department cannot overrule a commune.1Conseil Constitutionnel. Constitution of 4 October 1958 Instead, the law hands each tier a distinct set of competences. Broadly:
- Regions handle economic development, vocational training, upper secondary schools (lycées), and regional passenger rail.
- Departments handle social welfare benefits, middle schools (collèges), departmental roads, and fire and rescue services.
- Communes handle primary schools, local zoning, civil registry records, and neighborhood services like parks, streets, and waste collection.
Regions
Regions are the broadest tier and focus on long-range planning. Metropolitan France has 13 regions, including Corsica, and five overseas regions bring the total to 18. Regional councillors serve six-year terms.3Service Public. Regional and Departmental Elections
The current map is fairly new. Until 2016, mainland France had 22 regions. Law No. 2015-29 merged many of them to create larger entities with more economic weight.4Légifrance. Loi n 2015-29 du 16 janvier 2015 relative à la délimitation des régions Brittany, Île-de-France, Pays de la Loire, Centre-Val de Loire, and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur kept their old boundaries. Others were combined: Alsace, Champagne-Ardenne, and Lorraine became Grand Est, for example.
Regional councils build and operate lycées, run vocational training programs for young people and job seekers, and organize regional passenger rail through the TER network, which sits among the largest items in any regional budget. Each region also adopts a strategic economic plan called the SRDEII, which sets its framework for business support, export promotion, and innovation. Regions serve as the managing authorities for European Regional Development Fund money in France, choosing which local projects receive EU financing.5European Commission. European Regional Development Fund
Departments
France has 101 departments: 96 in metropolitan France and 5 overseas. Where regions do strategy, departments do welfare and local infrastructure. Departmental councillors also serve six-year terms.3Service Public. Regional and Departmental Elections
Social Welfare and Roads
The department’s most visible job is social action. The departmental council pays the RSA, a minimum-income benefit for low-income residents.6Gouvernement.fr. Le revenu de solidarité active (RSA) It manages the APA, which covers care expenses for elderly residents who have lost independence. To qualify for the APA, a person must be at least 60, reside in France on a stable basis, and be classified at a certain level of dependency on the national scale.7Service-Public.fr. Personalized Autonomy Allowance (Apa) The department also administers the PCH, a disability compensation benefit that cannot be received alongside the APA.
Beyond benefits, departments build and maintain collèges (middle schools for students roughly aged 11 to 15), keep up the departmental road network, and co-fund the departmental fire and rescue service (SDIS).
The Prefect
Alongside the elected council, each department has a prefect appointed by presidential decree. The prefect represents the central government and coordinates state services across the territory.8Ministère de l’Intérieur. Les préfectures One core prefectural job is legality control: reviewing acts of local governments to check they comply with national law. The prefect does not approve or reject local decisions before they take effect, but can refer an illegal act to the administrative court afterwards.
The prefecture also runs day-to-day state functions in the department: issuing residence permits, managing identity documents, directing emergency operations, and organizing elections.8Ministère de l’Intérieur. Les préfectures The dual system, with an elected council setting local policy and a centrally appointed official enforcing national law, is the defining feature of the department.
Communes
The commune is the oldest and smallest tier, descended from medieval parishes. France has roughly 34,875 communes as of early 2025, far more than any comparable European country. Some are major cities, others are villages with a few dozen residents. Every commune, whatever its size, has the same basic structure: an elected municipal council and a mayor who leads the executive.
The Mayor’s Two Hats
The mayor holds an unusual position in French law, acting simultaneously as head of the commune and as an agent of the central state. As head of the commune, the mayor proposes the local budget, manages municipal staff, and oversees parks, waste collection, and local streets. As an agent of the state, the mayor is the civil registrar, recording births, marriages, and deaths.9Insee. Civil Register The mayor also presides over wedding ceremonies at the town hall and carries certain public-order responsibilities.
Communes with the means can set up a municipal police force. Its officers handle local public-order matters, traffic, and bylaw violations, but they work separately from the national police and gendarmerie, which deal with criminal investigations and serious security.
Planning and Local Services
Communes are responsible for primary school buildings and for the Plan Local d’Urbanisme (PLU), the zoning document that controls land use and building permits inside municipal boundaries. The PLU decides where housing, commercial, and agricultural zones sit and what can be built in each. Communes also manage municipal heritage sites, sports facilities, and cemeteries. These services are funded through local property taxes, business taxes, and state transfers.
Intercommunal Groupings
With tens of thousands of communes, many very small, France long ago built a way for towns to pool resources. Communes join together into public establishments for intercommunal cooperation, known by their French acronym EPCI. These bodies have their own tax-raising powers and manage shared services that individual communes could not afford alone, such as sewage treatment, public transit, and economic development zones.
The law recognizes several types, mainly distinguished by population thresholds and mandatory powers:10Collectivités Locales. Les groupements intercommunaux
- A communauté de communes is the most basic form, with no strict population minimum, common in rural areas for shared services like waste and local roads.
- A communauté d’agglomération groups at least 50,000 residents around one or more central towns of at least 15,000 (with the threshold dropping if the central town is the department capital).
- A communauté urbaine covers urban areas of at least 250,000 residents, with broader mandatory powers over housing, transport, and urban planning.
- A métropole is the most powerful form, for urban areas exceeding 400,000 residents within a broader employment zone of over 650,000, and takes on competences that would otherwise belong to the department or region.
Nearly every commune in France now belongs to an EPCI. The 2015 NOTRe law accelerated consolidation by requiring departments to redraw their intercommunal maps and, in most cases, set a floor of 15,000 residents per grouping.
Subdivisions That Are Not Local Governments
Not every line on the administrative map is a collectivité with an elected council and a budget. Two categories exist purely as organizational tools.
Administrative arrondissements divide each department into zones led by a sub-prefect who reports to the departmental prefect. The sub-prefect acts as the state’s local contact point for communes in the area. Arrondissements have no elected council and no budget of their own.
Cantons are electoral districts used for departmental council elections. Each canton elects a pair of councillors, one man and one woman, to the departmental council. The canton has no administrative role beyond drawing voting boundaries.
Paris, Lyon, and Marseille are also internally divided into municipal arrondissements, each with a locally elected council and mayor. This was created by the 1982 PLM law to give neighborhoods in these very large cities some local representation.11Légifrance. Loi n 82-1169 du 31 décembre 1982 relative à l’organisation administrative de Paris, Marseille, Lyon Arrondissement councils manage delegated budgets for neighborhood services but cannot raise their own taxes, and they are not independent communes. Major decisions on infrastructure, urban planning, and city finances stay with the central city hall.
Corsica and the Overseas Territories
Some parts of France sit outside the standard region-department-commune template.
Corsica has been a collectivité à statut particulier since 2018, replacing the former Corsican territorial collectivity and its two departments (Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Corse) with a single government exercising both regional and departmental powers.12Vie-publique.fr. Quel est le statut de la Corse The Assembly of Corsica elects a separate executive council with its own president, creating a sharper split between the deliberative and executive branches than mainland regions have. The Assembly votes the budget and manages competences spanning education, culture, transport, infrastructure, housing, economic development, tourism, agriculture, energy, and water.
Overseas France splits into two constitutional categories, plus one outlier.
Under Article 73, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, and Mayotte function as overseas departments and regions. National laws apply automatically, though they can be adapted to local circumstances.1Conseil Constitutionnel. Constitution of 4 October 1958 Residents vote in national elections and access the same social programs as metropolitan France. Some of these territories have merged their regional and departmental councils into a single assembly. Réunion is excluded from certain autonomy provisions that apply to the others.
Under Article 74, French Polynesia, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Wallis and Futuna each have a status tailored by a specific organic law, setting out which national rules apply and what powers the local government holds.1Conseil Constitutionnel. Constitution of 4 October 1958 French Polynesia has broad autonomy over taxation, labor law, and commercial regulation. None of these collectivities may legislate in areas the Constitution reserves to the national government, such as nationality, criminal law, defense, and currency.
New Caledonia sits in a category of its own, with a sui generis status shaped by the 1998 Nouméa Accord and a local citizenship distinct from general French citizenship. Its final constitutional status remains unresolved.