Applying for a family-ties carte de séjour? First requests are moving online (from July 2026)
From 1 July 2026 a new ANEF wave moves first applications for liens personnels et familiaux and regularisation off paper and onto the online portal.
For years, a first carte de séjour based on family ties in France (liens personnels et familiaux) meant assembling a paper dossier and posting it, or dropping it at a counter. That is changing. As of 1 July 2026, a new wave of ANEF dematerialization moves several first-application procedures that used to travel by post onto the online portal instead.
What moved online on 1 July 2026
- Liens personnels et familiaux, first application only. Renewals for this category were already largely handled elsewhere; this wave is about the very first request.
- Admission exceptionnelle au séjour (the regularisation route).
- NATO military personnel and their family members.
This follows the same direction ANEF has taken since 2020: renewals, changes of address, and duplicata went online first, and first-issue dossiers are being added category by category. The point of the change is to end the postal lottery, where a dossier could sit unopened for weeks with no proof it arrived.
How the online application works
You sign in to the portal at administration-etrangers-en-france.interieur.gouv.fr with FranceConnect (Impôts, Ameli, La Poste, and others) or a dedicated ANEF account. You fill the form, then upload each document as a clear PDF or photo. Every notification the préfecture sends you afterwards arrives as a message inside the portal and as an email to the address you registered. The deadline on any request counts from the portal message date, not from when you happened to read the email, so check the portal weekly once your file is in.
Don't file it twice
If your category has moved online, submit it online only. Posting a paper copy of the same request as a backup creates a duplicate that agents can see, and the usual result is both files stalling while someone works out which one is real. Pick the channel your préfecture currently asks for, and use only that one.
Whichever way you file, the hard part comes later, when the préfecture writes back asking for one more document or handing you a decision in dense French. Upload that letter to Mes Papiers and we'll tell you what it is, what it wants, and by when, so a first application you finally got submitted doesn't stall on a reply you didn't understand.