Free camping and aires in France

An aire is a stopover a French commune has set aside for motorhomes. Most are a levelled bit of ground with marked bays, a drinking water tap and a drain for emptying tanks. Some have nothing but the ground. What they almost never have is a reception, a barrier or anyone to talk to, and that is the point: you arrive, you park, you leave.

They exist because communes worked out that a passing motorhome spends money in the bakery and the bar even if it pays nothing to sleep. An aire is tourist infrastructure, not a campsite, and the rules follow from that. Stays are short. Awnings, chairs and washing lines are generally not welcome, because that is camping, and camping happens at campsites.

Aires are common enough in rural France that in much of the country you can plan a day’s driving around finding one. France has around 34,000 communes and no official national register of aires, so plan around the ones you can see on a map or on a commune’s own site rather than around a national total. Any precise national figure you are quoted comes from an aggregator, not an authority.

Aire de services and aire de stationnement

These are two different things that often share a car park, and confusing them is the most common way an English-speaking traveller ends up with full tanks and nowhere to sleep.

An aire de services is the machinery. A borne is the service pillar: drinking water, usually a drain for grey water, and a point for emptying the cassette or the black tank. Some bornes add a 230V socket. You pull alongside, do the job, and move off. A service point is not a parking space and is not somewhere to spend the night, and on a busy aire in August somebody will be waiting behind you.

An aire de stationnement is the parking. Marked bays, sometimes on tarmac, sometimes on gravel or grass, where you are permitted to stay overnight.

Many communal aires are both, which is why the distinction gets lost. But a motorway aire may have a borne and no right to sleep on it. A village car park signed for motorhomes may have bays and no water within a kilometer. Plan the service stop separately from the overnight stop and you will not be caught out.

What free actually means here

Free on a French aire usually means free to park. It does not reliably mean free to fill up.

The typical arrangement is an open car park with no charge for the night and a borne that wants money: a jeton, a token you buy from the mairie, the tourist office or a village shop, or increasingly a coin or card slot. Bénéjacq in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques publishes the ordinary version of this on its own commune site: water and electricity on jetons, bought at the mairie or in the shops on Place de la Fontaine (verified 2026-07-20).

The practical consequence is about opening hours, not money. A jeton costs very little. A mairie in a small commune may be open three mornings a week, and it will certainly be shut on Sunday, when a lot of people arrive. If your water plan depends on a token, buy the token before you need the water.

Some communes go the other way and give everything away. Aube in the Orne runs around 20 free places with no mention of tokens at all (verified 2026-07-20). Both patterns are normal. Neither is predictable from the map.

How long you can stay

There is no national time limit on an aire. The commune sets it and posts it.

24, 48 and 72 hours are the numbers you will see, and 48 is the most common. Bénéjacq posts 48 hours. That is a local decision, repeated independently by thousands of communes until it looks like a rule, and it is not one. The sign at this particular entrance is the only figure that binds you, so read it when you pull in and work to that.

What French law does say sits further out. Article R417-12 of the Code de la route makes parking abusif once a vehicle stays continuously at the same point on a public road or its dependencies for more than seven days, or for a shorter period where that period has been fixed by arrêté of the authority holding police powers. Abusive parking is a second-class fine, and the vehicle can be immobilized and impounded (Légifrance, verified 2026-07-20). Two things follow. Seven days is an outer bound on parking anywhere on the public road, not a permission to overstay a two-night sign. And the phrase “fixed by arrêté” is the whole story of French motorhome rules in five words: the local order wins.

The mairie sets the rules, and the arrêté municipal is the instrument

If you remember one structural fact about France, make it this one. The rules that govern where you sleep are made at commune level by the maire, and the instrument is the arrêté municipal, a municipal order.

Article R111-34 of the Code de l’urbanisme is the clearest statement of the mechanism. Camping outside developed sites can be banned in defined zones by the local urban plan, and the maire can also ban it by arrêté where the practice would harm public health, safety or public order, natural or urban landscapes, protected views, natural habitats, or farming and forestry. The same article adds the part travelers should care about most: those bans are only enforceable if they have been made public by posting at the mairie and by signs at the usual access points to the zone (Légifrance, verified 2026-07-20).

Read that last clause again. French law itself makes the sign the operative document. A ban that has not been posted and signed is not enforceable against you, and a ban that has been is. That is not a disclaimer we are adding at the bottom of the page. It is how the rule is built.

Camping and parking are not the same thing

Note also what French law is not doing here. R111-34 governs camping. R417-12 governs parking. A motorhome parked in marked bays with nothing deployed is parking; the same vehicle with the awning out, chairs on the grass and the step down starts to look like camping, and the two are not judged the same way. The central government’s own consumer-facing guidance on this family of vehicles covers caravans and mobil-homes in private gardens and does not address roadside motorhome parking at all (service-public.gouv.fr, verified 2026-07-20), which is a fair signal of how local the question is.

In practice: park in the marked bays, keep everything inside the van, and the question does not come up.

Seasons

August is the crunch. French domestic holidays concentrate hard in August, and coastal aires in Brittany, the Vendée, Charente-Maritime, Languedoc and the Var are the first to fill. In season a number of coastal and resort communes restrict motorhome parking, price it, or close aires to overnight use, and they enforce it hardest when they are busiest. Restrictions like that are set commune by commune, so check the commune’s own site before you commit to a coast in August, and have a second aire inland in mind for the nights you arrive late.

Winter is the opposite problem and it is better documented. Inland and upland aires shut the water off so the pipes do not freeze, and some close the site entirely. The bays can stay open with a dead borne, which is the trap. Aube in the Orne publishes its own dates: open all year, water distribution closed from December 1 to March 1 (verified 2026-07-20). Every commune sets its own window and can change it without notice, so fill the tank while you know the tap works.

June and September are the easy months in most of the country. The aires are running, the water is on, and you are not queueing for a bay.

If you are in a tent

Then aires are not for you, and the word you need is bivouac. France treats bivouac and camping as different activities with different rules, and the distinction is strict enough to be worth reading before you go: bivouac means one night, minimal kit, up at dusk and gone at dawn, and the official definition excludes anything motorized. Start with the French bivouac rules.

Before you rely on any of this

The posted sign at the entrance and the commune’s current guidance beat this website, always. Aires close for works, for a village fête, for a market day, or for the winter, and rarely with notice. If the aire is barriered or the sign contradicts what you read here, the sign is right.

New to the word itself? Start with what an aire actually is. To see how France compares with the countries either side of it, read free camping in Europe.

Where the numbers here come from: 1,890 French aires, each with a page here, 1,866 of them from DATAtourisme under the Licence Ouverte and 24 from OpenStreetMap. The map shows those and nothing else, so every pin on it has a page behind it. A further 2,041 designated places are logged and not yet written up, which is why a blank stretch of map means unwritten rather than empty. What the data covers, and what it does not