What €200,000 actually buys you across France
The map's price per square metre is not what you will pay — it is the median of what actually sold. What it does show is reach: €200,000 buys about 126 square metres at the national median of €1,593, 211 in the cheapest quarter of communes and 75 in the dearest.
The number on this map is the narrowest possible answer to what a home costs: the median price per square metre of properties that actually changed hands, in communes with at least five recorded sales. It is not the sum you will hand over.
What it measures well is reach — how far a fixed budget travels once you look past the places everyone has heard of. Across the 31,092 communes of metropolitan France carrying a price, the median is €1,593 per square metre, so €200,000 buys about 126 square metres. The spread around that midpoint is the story.
The budget stretches, then it stops
Split every priced commune into four equal bands and the same €200,000 changes shape completely: 211 square metres in the cheapest quarter, 75 in the dearest. Nearly three to one, and it is the largest lever a relocating buyer has — larger than any negotiation on a single house.
The same money, twenty-three times over
Narrow it to the 2,075 communes above 5,000 residents and the range widens. Bohain-en-Vermandois in the Aisne transacts at €624 per square metre, so €200,000 buys 321 square metres. In the 6th arrondissement of Paris, at €14,628, the same money buys 14. Both are France, and both are on this map.
What this figure leaves out
Everything that is not the purchase price. Registration and notary charges fall due on completion and appear nowhere in this layer, as does the annual property tax, which is set locally and outlives the sale by every year you own the place. Neither is published per commune in a form this map could carry, and quoting one national percentage for either would be inventing precision that does not exist.
Two limits sit inside the figure itself. It is a median, so it says nothing about condition — a renovated townhouse and a roofless barn each count once. And communes with fewer than five recorded sales carry no figure at all, which is why parts of rural France are blank rather than cheap.