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French visa appointments from the UK

Since 1 August 2026, short-stay French visa appointments at the Wandsworth (London) and Manchester centres are allocated to you automatically. You no longer pick a slot.

Two steps, in this order

Applying for a French Schengen visa from the UK has always involved two separate systems, and getting them the wrong way round is the most common early mistake.

  1. France-Visas — the French government's own portal. You complete your application form here first and receive a reference number.
  2. TLScontact — the appointed service provider. You create an account, attach your France-Visas reference, and request an appointment.

TLScontact does not decide your visa. It takes your documents and biometrics and passes them to the consulate, which makes the decision.

What changed on 1 August 2026

At the Wandsworth (London) and Manchester centres, choosing an appointment slot online was replaced by automatic allocation. Once your application is validated it goes into a queue, and an appointment is assigned to you based on availability. You are told by email.

You have 12 hours to pay the service fee and confirm. That is half the window Germany allows, and it can expire while you are asleep. From the moment you join the queue, check the registered inbox — and its spam folder — at least twice a day.

There is also a time limit on the queue itself. If you have not been allocated an appointment within 60 days, your data is purged and you have to register a new account and request an appointment again.

Arrangements at other French centres in the UK are not necessarily the same as at Wandsworth and Manchester. Check the position for the centre you intend to use before you plan around it.

What this means for appointment alerts

On an allocation system nothing is published for a monitoring service to spot. There is no calendar, no released slot, and no advantage in hearing about one sooner. We therefore do not sell appointment notifications for French short-stay applications at Wandsworth or Manchester.

If a provider offers you alerts, priority access or a guaranteed appointment date on this route, that offer does not match how the route now works.

What actually helps

  • Complete France-Visas carefully. Errors there follow you through the whole process, and a validation failure means you are not in the queue at all.
  • Register as early as you can, up to six months before travel.
  • Treat the 12-hour window as the critical deadline. Have the service fee payment method ready before you are allocated anything.
  • Diarise day 55. If nothing has been allocated by then, you are approaching the 60-day purge and will need to start a fresh registration.
  • Prepare the document set properly, including travel medical insurance meeting the €30,000 minimum cover requirement.

Our help on this route is guidance and document preparation. We cannot influence when the system allocates you an appointment, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Start at France-Visas, the official French government portal, then TLScontact Wandsworth (London).

Last reviewed: . Official appointment arrangements change; always confirm on the official source before acting.

Common questions

Not at Wandsworth or Manchester. Since 1 August 2026 appointments there are allocated automatically based on availability once your application is validated.

12 hours to pay the service fee and confirm. If you miss it the appointment is not held for you.

If no appointment has been allocated within 60 days your data is purged and you need to register again on the TLScontact website to request a new one.

France-Visas first. Complete the government application form and get your reference, then create a TLScontact account to request the appointment.

Not at Wandsworth or Manchester, because appointments are allocated rather than released. We do not sell alerts for those routes.

Schengen rules require travel medical insurance with a minimum of €30,000 cover, valid across the Schengen area for the whole trip.

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