Becoming a taxi, VTC or ambulance driver in France

Three jobs, three ways in

Before picking a course or a car, it helps to know which door you are walking through. The table sums up what separates the three jobs, as described on the official service-public pages and the texts listed at the bottom of this page.

The VTC route, in order

A future VTC driver goes through seven steps, each covered on its own page:

1. Check the conditions: licence, criminal record, approved doctor.
2. Prepare, with or without a training course.
3. Pass the T3P exam: seven written papers, then a driving test.
4. Apply for the professional card online.
5. Set up your business, registered as a craft activity.
6. Join the VTC register.
7. Fit a compliant car with its sticker.

The complete VTC guide links them up with the traps at each stage. One shortcut disappeared in 2026: the card by equivalence, closed to new applications on 12 August by Decree no. 2026-764.

Before your first fare, a VTC driver’s regulated fees come to €506, excluding training, the doctor and the car. The start-up cost calculator adds your own quotes.

The taxi route and the licence question

A future taxi driver sits the same core papers as a VTC driver. Two papers are specific to taxis, one on knowledge of the local area and local rules, and the driving test also marks billing and the use of taxi equipment, as set out on the taxi exam page. The card only covers the département where the exam was taken, unless the driver completes a course to extend it to up to 4 départements.

The real hurdle is the licence. A free licence comes from the town hall after a waiting list that runs for years in big cities; if issued since 1 October 2014, it cannot be sold and lasts 5 years, renewable. A bought licence costs between €30,000 and €300,000 according to service-public, around €190,000 in Paris, and renting one costs about €3,500 a month in Paris. The guide to becoming a taxi driver compares the three resulting statuses: owner-driver, licence tenant or employee.

Ambulance work: training first, then a job

Ambulance work is not part of the passenger-transport regime for taxis and VTCs, and there is no chambers of trades exam. You enter through a training institute, after selection on file and interview, for a 801-hour State diploma including 245 hours of placements. The 70-hour ambulance assistant course gets you into a crew sooner. Training, the route into the job and pay under the collective agreement each have their own page. One point to know: the 2025 hiring rates for levels 1 and 2 are below the 2026 minimum wage (Smic), which therefore applies instead.

What the driver actually keeps

A self-employed driver has no salary, only takings from which everything else comes out. The net income calculator takes those deductions in the order they really fall.

• VAT at 10 %, once turnover passes €37,500 in the year.
• The platform commission, for a VTC driver who uses one.
• The car: loan or lease, fuel, insurance, servicing.
• The licence, for a taxi driver who rents one or bought it on credit.
• Social contributions: 21.2 % of turnover under the micro scheme, or the Urssaf scale on profit under real profit.

Divided by the hours really spent at the wheel, waiting included, what is left becomes an hourly rate, the only figure you can compare with a wage. The pages on VTC driver earnings and taxi driver earnings apply it to typical cases, and the VAT and status comparison shows whether the micro scheme or real profit leaves you more.

How much a taxi driver earns: your case

Meter takings per week

€

Licence rent per month (0 if you own it)

€

Hours at the wheel per week

h

Estimated net per month, before income tax

€2,663

Net per hour	€13.90
Contributions per month	€1,124
VAT to pay over per month	€523

Micro-enterprise, 46 weeks, example vehicle costs: replace them in the full calculator.

Full net income calculator →

Why our figures come from the law, not from another website

For these searches, many of the top results are written by training centres, company-formation services or insurers whose business is selling a course, a legal structure or a policy. We sell none of those. The site rests on one rule: every regulatory value is read at its official source and written once, in a dated parameter file that every page and calculator reads.

The calculation engine is checked by automated tests: the minimum and maximum contributions Urssaf published for 2026, the VAT thresholds, the vehicle criteria and the exam marking scheme are replayed at every build, and the site is not published if any of them drifts. The method page lists those checks and what the calculators cannot do.

That choice shows when a rule changes. Access to VTC work through experience ended on 12 August 2026, yet many pages still explain how to use it. Here the rule in force appears with its date and its decree.

What changed in 2026

The calculators on this site

Five full tools, plus a small calculator on every guide:

• net income per month and per hour;
• the cost of getting into the job;
• VAT and the choice of status;
• whether a car qualifies as a VTC;
• the renewal calendar for the card and the register.

They all run in your browser: nothing you type is sent to a server.

Every page also exists in French, the language of the exam, the forms and the prefecture. Reading both versions side by side is a good way to learn the vocabulary you will meet in the written papers.