Most cost articles give you a single scary number and leave you to argue with it. This one gives you a model instead: three buckets, real French figures in each, and a way to assemble them into a budget that fits your boat rather than someone else's. Get the model right and you can price any boat, any region, any wintering choice, without trusting a slogan like the broker's 10 percent rule.
The three buckets are berthing, lay-up and refit. They behave completely differently, and the commonest budgeting mistake is treating them as one line.
Bucket one: berthing, the annual constant
Berthing is the big, predictable, postcode-driven number. It is set the day you choose a region, not the day you sail, and it dwarfs everything else over a year.
The spread across France is enormous. For a 12-metre boat on an annual afloat berth:
- Port Napoleon near Marseille, a working no-frills base: from around 3,150 euros
- a typical French Mediterranean annual berth averages near 5,159 euros
- Nice sits around 7,410 euros
- Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat reaches roughly 9,879 euros
- on the Atlantic, Port Medoc near Bordeaux lists around 2,163 euros
For a 10-metre boat across French ports, the annual figure runs roughly 2,235 to 2,856 euros. Water and electricity usually meter on top of these.
The single decision that controls this bucket is region. The gap between a Cap Ferrat berth and an Atlantic one is around 7,000 euros a year of postcode, the same point I make in the annual running costs of a boat in France. If your budget is tight, you set it by choosing where to keep the boat, and almost nothing you do afterwards moves the number as much.
Bucket two: lay-up, the winter choice
Come autumn you face a fork: stay afloat or come ashore. They cost differently and protect the boat differently.
Afloat through winter is cheaper in cash but harder on the boat and the insurance. Many policies impose lay-up inspection conditions, and a breached condition turns a cheap premium into worthless paper, a trap I cover in leaving your boat afloat in France over winter. The cash cost is mostly the berth you are already paying plus any winter power for a dehumidifier.
Ashore is dearer but kinder. Hauling out adds the lift and relaunch, around 35 to 120 euros each on a small boat and more on a heavy one, plus the standing. On open-air hardstanding around 3.70 euros per square metre per month, a 12-metre boat's six-month winter runs near 1,000 euros for the standing alone, before handling and the pressure wash. A full ashore winter for a 12-metre boat, doing its own antifoul, lands somewhere between 1,500 and 1,900 euros with repairs excluded.
Some yards bundle this. An 8-metre boat with ashore storage and unlimited handling runs around 3,052 euros a year at Port Adhoc Paimpol in Brittany, 3,080 at Leucate on the Mediterranean and 3,310 at Bayonne-Anglet, a package that folds berth, lift and standing into one figure. Whether bundling beats a separate berth plus haul-out depends on how you use the boat, and the yard detail is in wintering ashore in France.
Bucket three: refit, the lumpy long-term reserve
This is the bucket people forget, and the one that ambushes them. Refit is not an annual cost, it is an irregular series of big-ticket hits that you must average into an annual reserve or they arrive as a crisis.
The recurring annual maintenance is modest and predictable:
- antifoul paint and rollers, DIY: 250 to 400 euros
- anodes: 60 to 120 euros
- engine service, DIY: 150 to 250 euros, or double that at a yard charging around 60 euros an hour
The lumpy items are what hurt. Standing rigging on a sailing boat wants renewing every 10 to 15 years, and a re-rig on a 12-metre boat runs into several thousand euros in one hit. A new mainsail and genoa together can be 4,000 to 6,000 euros. An engine rebuild dwarfs everything. The honest move is a sinking fund of perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 euros a year, set aside on top of running costs, so the year the rigging is due does not arrive as a four-figure shock. The full schedule of what wears out and when is in the cost of keeping a boat seaworthy in France.
Assembling the model: a 12-metre Atlantic year
Put the three buckets together for a 12-metre sailing boat, Atlantic-based, DIY-minded, hauled out each winter:
- berthing: around 2,800 euros
- lay-up ashore (lift, standing, relaunch, wash): around 1,700 euros
- refit and recurring maintenance, averaged: around 2,800 euros, of which about 1,300 is the sinking fund
- insurance: around 1,200 euros
- the French TAEMUP tax: around 300 euros
- fuel, gas and sundries: around 800 euros
That totals roughly 9,600 euros a year, a touch higher than a bare running figure because the refit bucket is properly funded rather than ignored. The same model on the Riviera, with a yard doing the work, crosses 14,000 without difficulty.
A 10-metre version
Shrink the boat and every bucket shrinks with it:
- berthing: around 2,500 euros
- lay-up ashore: around 1,200 euros
- refit and maintenance, averaged with a smaller sinking fund: around 2,000 euros
- insurance: around 900 euros
- TAEMUP: around 250 euros
- fuel and sundries: around 600 euros
Roughly 7,450 euros a year for a 10-metre Atlantic boat run sensibly. The shape is identical to the 12-metre model, just scaled, which is the point of having a model rather than a number.
The lines that sit outside the three buckets
Three costs do not fit neatly into berthing, lay-up or refit, but they belong in the model.
Insurance is the first. French yacht cover broadly runs 0.5 to 2 percent of insured value a year, so a 120,000 euro boat costs somewhere between 600 and 2,400 euros, driven by cruising area, claims history and the winter arrangement. Read the lay-up conditions, because a breached one voids the cover.
Tax is the second. A French-flagged boat, or one based here under certain conditions, owes the annual TAEMUP, calculated from hull length and engine power and due by 31 March. For a modest cruiser it is a few hundred euros, and it surprises foreign owners who assumed the berth was the only recurring French charge. Its trigger is the boat's flag and basing, not your nationality, the same logic as the VAT status of a boat in EU waters.
The third is the metered services that ride on top of the berth. Water and electricity often bill by consumption rather than coming bundled, and a boat plugged in over a damp winter running a dehumidifier can run up a power bill that catches people out. Treat these as a separate small line, not as part of the berth.
How to use it
Take the three buckets and fill them with your own figures:
- pick your region first; it sets the berthing bucket and most of the total
- decide afloat or ashore for the winter, and read your insurance conditions before you do
- fund the refit bucket as a yearly sinking amount, not as a hope that nothing breaks
- add insurance, the TAEMUP if your boat is French-flagged or based here, and a sundries line
- then add 15 percent, because the boat will find a way to spend it
Built this way, the budget holds no surprises and you can compare a Riviera berth against an Atlantic one, or chartering against owning, on like-for-like numbers. The owning-versus-chartering version of this sum is worked through in the cost of chartering versus owning over five years, and the day-to-day economies that keep all three buckets smaller are in how to cruise France on a tight budget.
