Casablancaculture & etiquette

You need one to stay beyond three months, and you apply at the commissariat or préfecture de police covering your address, not at a central office. The card itself is cheap and issued in around thirty-five days. What actually costs people months is the file: a legalised lease or an attestation d'hébergement, an attestation de résidence from the moqata'a, a medical certificate less than three months old, a criminal-record extract from your home country, and legalised copies of everything. Start assembling those before you fly, and get the home-country police certificate while you are still in the country that issues it.

The dirham is not freely convertible. An ordinary resident dirham account can be spent in Morocco but the money cannot be sent back out. A convertible-dirham account, or a foreign-currency account, holds money you brought in from abroad and keeps its right to leave. If you are paid from outside Morocco, you want the convertible account and you want to fund it by importing foreign currency with the exchange receipts kept. Converting into an ordinary account is a one-way door, and it is the mistake foreigners here most regret.

Moroccan law requires a foreign national's employment contract to be approved by the labour ministry, and before that the employer must obtain an ANAPEC attestation certifying no suitable Moroccan candidate was found — or that an exemption applies. The process now runs through the ministry's TAECHIR platform. It is the employer's job, but it is your problem: the ANAPEC step alone can take a couple of months, and a carte de séjour with the 'travail' mention is issued on the strength of the visaed contract.

A foreign licence is valid in Morocco for one year from the date you take up residence. NARSA will exchange it for a Moroccan one if your country has a reciprocity agreement with Morocco — France, Spain, Belgium, Italy and Germany among them — on production of your carte de séjour or its récépissé plus a residence certificate less than three months old. Fees run to a few hundred dirhams. Miss the window, or come from a country without an agreement, and you take the Moroccan theory and practical tests like a new driver.

CFC status is granted to companies serving markets outside Morocco: regional headquarters, financial firms, professional services. Qualifying companies get a corporate tax holiday for their first five years and a preferential rate afterwards, and their employees can elect a flat 20% rate on Moroccan-source employment income instead of the progressive scale, for a maximum of ten years. The 2026 Finance Law confirmed 20% for both — older write-ups quoting 15% are out of date. None of it changes your immigration status, and none of it makes your dirhams convertible.

This is not Marrakech. There is no medina tourism economy softening the edges, the architecture is French colonial art deco going quietly to seed rather than restored riads, and the beaches west of the Corniche are working coast. What it has instead is jobs, a real professional middle class, the best restaurants in the country, and a genuine indifference to whether you are a foreigner — which after a month in a tourist city is a relief.