Strasbourgculture & etiquette

If you work in Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin or Moselle you are enrolled in the régime local d'assurance maladie automatically — there is nothing to sign up for. An additional employee contribution, held at 1.30% of uncapped earnings for 2026, buys reimbursement at roughly 90% on consultations and dental care instead of 70% and 60%, full cover of hospital costs including the daily hospital charge that everyone else pays out of pocket, and full cover of scheduled medical transport. It applies to employees and contractual public agents working here; tenured civil servants and the self-employed are outside it. The practical consequence is that the standard French mutuelle sold nationally is over-specified for you.

Complementary health insurance in France is priced to fill the gap the state leaves. In Alsace-Moselle the régime local has already filled most of it, which is why local insurers sell cut-down policies designed to sit on top of it. If you take a national employer scheme designed for Lyon or Nantes without asking whether an Alsace-Moselle version exists, you are paying twice for the same cover. Ask your employer specifically what its scheme assumes, because payroll teams based elsewhere frequently do not know the régime local exists.

Under article L3134-13 of the Code du travail, Good Friday is a public holiday here — but only in communes possessing a Protestant temple or a mixed church, a condition Strasbourg comfortably meets — and the second day of Christmas, 26 December, is one throughout the three departments with no such condition attached. That is two days more than the rest of the country. The same local law makes Sunday and public holiday closing considerably stricter than elsewhere: article L3134-2 states a flat prohibition on employing staff in industrial, commercial and artisanal businesses on Sundays and public holidays, with derogations rather than the other way round. Plan the weekly shop for Saturday. Newcomers from Paris are consistently caught out by a genuinely closed Sunday.

France and Germany still operate a frontier-worker tax regime. Live in Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin or Moselle and work in a German commune lying wholly or partly within 30 km of the border, returning home as a rule each day, and your salary is taxable in France rather than Germany. You are allowed up to 45 days a year working outside the zone or not returning home before the status is lost, and home working inside the border zone is not counted against that. Your employer needs the exemption certificate on file or German wage tax will be withheld anyway. Social security, separately, follows the German employer.

Alsace and Moselle keep the livre foncier, a land register maintained at the tribunal judiciaire under the supervision of a land registry judge, rather than the service de publicité foncière used in the rest of France. Registration is checked by a magistrate and an entry carries a presumption of accuracy — a rebuttable one, so contrary proof is admitted, but still a genuinely stronger position than elsewhere. It also means the procedure, the timescales and the professionals differ — if you buy here, use a notaire who practises in Alsace-Moselle rather than one who does not, because this is not a formality they can improvise.

Tram line D has run across the Rhine to Kehl since 2017, on an ordinary Strasbourg transport ticket. That makes German supermarkets, doctors, restaurants and the Black Forest railway a fifteen-minute ride rather than an expedition, and it materially changes what the city is. It also means the two extra public holidays, the Sunday closing and the German shopping calendar interact in ways worth learning early — Sunday is closed on both sides, but German shops keep different hours and holidays from French ones.