The 20 best-rated places for a second home in France
The same five pillars, re-weighted towards what a second-home buyer actually optimises for: climate, surroundings and services over investment return.
- Drawn
- Jul 31, 2026
- Ranked from
- 5,137 municipalities
- Excluded, provisional
- 282
- Scoring model
- 2026.12-momentum-v1
| # | Municipality | Province | Population | Lifestyle score | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Livry-sur-Seine | Seine-et-Marne | 2,207 | 85/100 | A+ |
| 2 | Plouguenast-Langast | Côtes-d'Armor | 2,429 | 80/100 | A+ |
| 2 | La Fère | Aisne | 2,845 | 80/100 | A+ |
| 4 | Renazé | Mayenne | 2,521 | 79/100 | A |
| 4 | Beautor | Aisne | 2,718 | 79/100 | A |
| 4 | Callac | Côtes-d'Armor | 2,233 | 79/100 | A |
| 4 | Rostrenen | Côtes-d'Armor | 3,132 | 79/100 | A |
| 4 | Le Mené | Côtes-d'Armor | 6,412 | 79/100 | A |
| 9 | Tergnier | Aisne | 13,504 | 78/100 | A |
| 9 | Hendaye | Pyrénées-Atlantiques | 17,621 | 78/100 | A |
| 9 | Saint-Gobain | Aisne | 2,304 | 78/100 | A |
| 9 | Péronne | Somme | 7,444 | 78/100 | A |
| 13 | Ham | Somme | 4,510 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | Frévent | Pas-de-Calais | 3,348 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | Hesdin-la-Forêt | Pas-de-Calais | 2,218 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | Plémet | Côtes-d'Armor | 3,728 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | Formerie | Oise | 2,109 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | Châteauneuf-du-Faou | Finistère | 3,650 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | Nesle | Somme | 2,314 | 77/100 | A |
| 13 | San-Nicolao | Haute-Corse | 2,037 | 77/100 | A |
What this table leaves out, and why
- 282 municipalities were dropped for a provisional grade. Where one of the five pillars has no data for a town, the site fills it with a neutral value and marks the grade provisional. That is fair on the town's own page, where the marker is visible. In a ranking it is not: a town competing on two measured pillars and three neutral ones would place on the strength of what we do not know about it.
- 29,469 were below the population floor of 2,000 inhabitants. Percentile scores are unstable where a single amenity or a single housing development moves the whole figure, and those places sort to the top of an ungated list.
- Tied towns share a rank. Scores are published as whole numbers and they saturate at the top of a table, so several towns here hold the same score and therefore the same position. Where a tie has to be broken to fit twenty rows, it is broken alphabetically — which is arbitrary, and is why the rank is shared rather than invented.
- The ranking is within France, not across Europe. Each pillar is a percentile against that country's own distribution, so a Spanish 80 and an Italian 80 are two statements about two different populations. Pooling them would rank countries, not towns.
- This is a municipality, not a house. Everything here describes the place — its climate, its hazards, its services, its market. It says nothing about any individual property in it.
Computed under scoring model 2026.12-momentum-v1. A ranking published under a different model version is not directly comparable with this one — the weights or the inputs changed, so a town moving between two editions may be the model moving rather than the town.
Using it
Free to reproduce, in whole or in part, with attribution to Terragrado and a link to this page or to the methodology. The CSV carries the same rows plus the edition, the model version and a link to each town's page, so a reader can check any line of it.
Showing one of these towns on your own site? There is an embeddable grade badge for that.