Russian speakers in Metz (France): churches, permits

Russian-speaking Metz: what’s here

Metz is a good place to start if you’re after something of your own. Our directory for the city lists churches: 3, and one of them is a parish of Russian tradition where some of the hymns are sung in Church Slavonic. Places that teach Russian: 2, both state schools. There is no Russian shop yet that we could check against a primary source, and for the Russian consulate you have to go to Strasbourg.

The paperwork is close at hand: the Moselle préfecture, OFII, CAF and CPAM are all in Metz itself, and OFII serves three more neighbouring départements from here. Below you’ll find the paperwork, work, housing and trains, with figures and dates.

Vibe South of France grew out of a chat for Russian speakers in Montpellier. Our meet-ups still happen in the South, but the chat has long been shared by the whole of France. Post in the chat that you're in Metz and ask which of ours live nearby.

Metz has 122,572 inhabitants (INSEE 2023 census), and its whole catchment area 378,942. The city has been growing by 0.9% a year since 2017, and two thirds of that growth comes from newcomers: net migration is +0.6% a year, natural increase +0.3%.

Paperwork: the Moselle préfecture, OFII, CAF, CPAM

The Moselle préfecture stands on place Jean-Marie-Rausch, with general reception Mon-Fri 8:30-12:00 and 13:00-16:00 (state directory entry of 24 June 2026). But for a foreign national in Metz something else is more useful to know: since the end of June 2025 residents of the arrondissement de Metz have applied online not only for what goes through ANEF but for the other permit applications too, on the préfecture’s own platform. The préfecture announced this in a news item of 15 July 2025, where the platform is still called Démarches simplifiées; it is now Démarches Numériques. The list includes cases such as a first carte de résident, “liens personnels et familiaux”, employees and temporary workers, entrepreneurs, trainees, au pair and renewal of a récépissé. If the online route fails, the file can be sent by post.

For help with submitting on ANEF there is the point d’accueil numérique e-MERAUDE, where a mediator helps people who can’t register an application on the website. You book by email, pref-panemeraude@moselle.gouv.fr. The mediator doesn’t examine files and doesn’t report on progress, so asking “when will it be ready” is pointless. The PAN page is dated 2 January 2023.

OFII is at 2 rue Lafayette. The directorate covers four départements: Meurthe-et-Moselle, Meuse, Moselle and the Vosges, so the OFII territorial directorate for people in Nancy and Épinal is here too. You come when summoned, and the hours in the state directory date from 2024, so go by what your summons says.

CAF receives at 4 boulevard du Pontiffroy, Mon-Fri 8:30-16:00. CPAM is at 27 rue des Messageries, by appointment only: in your ameli account or on 36 46.

The general procedure is covered in our guides to the titre de séjour, OFII and visa validation, CAF and APL and the Carte Vitale and Sécu.

• Moselle préfecture (Préfecture de la Moselle)place Jean-Marie-Rausch, 57000 Metz · Mon-Fri 8:30-12:00 and 13:00-16:00 · tel. 03 87 34 87 34 · postal address: BP 71014, 57034 Metz Cedex 01

  The hours are those of the general reception, from the state directory entry of 24 June 2026. According to the préfecture’s news item of 15.07.2025, since the end of June 2025 residents of the arrondissement de Metz have also applied online for the permits that aren’t on ANEF, on the préfecture’s own platform (the news item calls it Démarches simplifiées, now Démarches Numériques); if the online route fails, the file can be sent by post. For help with submitting on ANEF there is the point d’accueil numérique e-MERAUDE: book by email at pref-panemeraude@moselle.gouv.fr (préfecture page of 02.01.2023).

  Official site - Moselle préfecture (Préfecture de la Moselle) →

• OFII - Metz territorial directorate (départements 54, 55, 57, 88)2 rue Lafayette, 57000 Metz · Mon-Fri 8:15-12:00 and 13:30-16:45 (state directory entry of 22.08.2024) · tel. 03 87 66 64 98

  The directorate is in Metz itself and covers four départements: Meurthe-et-Moselle, Meuse, Moselle and the Vosges. You come when OFII summons you; the hours come from a 2024 entry, so go by what your summons says.

  Official site - OFII - Metz territorial directorate (départements 54, 55, 57, 88) →

• CAF de la Moselle (benefits) - siège de Metz4 boulevard du Pontiffroy, Metz (the state directory gives the postal form of the address: 57774 Metz Cedex 9) · Mon-Fri 8:30-16:00

  APL housing benefit and family allowances. Phone 32 30, Mon-Fri 9:00-16:30. Entry updated on 23 October 2026. Other CAF reception points in the département are in Forbach, Sarreguemines and Thionville.

  Official site - CAF de la Moselle (benefits) - siège de Metz →

• CPAM de la Moselle (health insurance) - siège de Metz27 rue des Messageries, Metz (the state directory gives the postal form of the address: 57751 Metz Cedex 9) · by appointment

  The Sécu and the Carte Vitale. CPAM sees people by appointment, booked in your ameli account or on 36 46. The state directory entry dates from March 2024, so we don’t give hours. The directory shows no other CPAM reception points in Metz itself.

  Official site - CPAM de la Moselle (health insurance) - siège de Metz →

• France Travail (job centre) - agencies in MetzMetz Gare: 3ter rue Gambetta, 57000 · Metz Blida: 3 avenue de Blida, 57000 · Metz Sébastopol: Technopole, 5 rue des Dinandiers, 57070 · nearby, in Montigny-lès-Metz: 325 rue de Pont-à-Mousson, 57950 · all Mon-Fri 8:30-12:30; the three city agencies without an appointment

  Registering as a jobseeker and help with the search. Phone for jobseekers 3949: Mon-Fri 8:00-19:00, Saturday 9:00-12:00. Metz is on the list of all three city agencies, and the directory doesn’t say which one covers your address: ask on 3949. Entries updated on 23 October 2026.

  Official site - France Travail (job centre) - agencies in Metz →

Addresses with a “Cedex” or BP are postal: letters go there, but you visit the street address at the start of the line.

Work in Metz: who’s hiring

In the METZ employment pool (180 communes of the Moselle) employers have 11,560 hiring projects for 2026. They call almost half of those hires, 49.0%, hard to fill (43.8% for France). Only 18.9% are seasonal, against 32.2% nationally: hiring here is mostly year-round. The figures come from France Travail’s BMO 2026 survey, carried out in late 2025, which means employers’ intentions, not open vacancies.

The last two rows share fifth place. If you want work for the whole year, look at home care and cleaning for private households: they are hardly seasonal at all, and employers struggle to find people. In this table the hardest to find is a kitchen assistant, at 76.1%.

Unemployment in the Metz employment area in the second quarter of 2026 was 7.9% (7.2% a year earlier), exactly the same as for the Grand Est and a little below mainland France (8.1%); for the Moselle département it is 7.8% (INSEE, provisional). For comparison, the same table has Nancy at 7.6% and Forbach at 12.3%. Metz itself has 82,161 jobs (2023 census): 48.6% in trade, transport and services, 39.4% in public administration, education, health and social work, and 6.0% in industry.

Who needs a work permit and how to register with France Travail is in our guide working in France; the SMIC and median pay are in salaries in France. We don’t post job ads, but you can always ask in the chat which of our people work in your field.

Housing: renting, buying and HLM

On ANIL’s model, a flat in Metz costs €13.38/m² a month and a T1-T2 €15.60/m². It is a forecast from Q3 2025 listings for a reference unfurnished flat with charges included: 52 m² for all flats and 37 m² for a T1-T2. These figures don’t show the rents in signed leases; they are closer to what landlords ask in their ads. The source is credited the way the dataset requires: “Estimations ANIL, à partir des données du Groupe SeLoger et de leboncoin”.

In money terms (our own arithmetic: the rate times the reference size), a 52 m² flat comes to roughly €696 a month and a 37 m² T1-T2 to about €577. The model for Metz draws on 25,684 listings.

The suburbs don’t help much here: in most neighbouring communes the rates are almost the same as in the city, and a T1-T2 in Longeville-lès-Metz and Le Ban-Saint-Martin is even €1.5/m² dearer. Only Ars-sur-Moselle is noticeably cheaper.

There’s no rent cap in Metz. According to the service-public page F1314 (checked on 1 August 2026), outside the Paris region the encadrement des loyers applies in Bordeaux, part of Grenoble-Alpes Métropole, Lille with Hellemmes and Lomme, Lyon with Villeurbanne, Montpellier and the Pays Basque. Metz isn’t on that list. How to put together a rental file without a French guarantor is in our guide to renting in France.

Buying an apartment in Metz: notaries’ prices for 2024

In our other guides we calculate sale prices ourselves from the open DVF database. That won’t work for Metz: Alsace and the Moselle keep their own land register (livre foncier), and these départements are absent from DVF altogether; we checked the 2024 and 2025 files. So the source here is different: the Alsace-Moselle notaries’ statistics for 2024 (the March 2025 issue). Its prices are medians, excluding duties, commissions, costs and furniture, and can’t be compared with the DVF figures of other cities.

The median price of a second-hand flat in Metz in 2024 was €2,290/m², 4.4% lower than a year earlier. For the Moselle as a whole it was €2,030/m² (-1.3%). A second-hand house in Metz sold at a median €248,900 (-3.1%). And the spread between districts is wider than between Metz and its neighbours:

One more figure from the same issue, useful if you’re thinking of buying with a mortgage: with repayments of a third of the average salary over 20 years, in 2014 you could buy a second-hand flat of 60 m² in the Moselle, and in 2024 only 45 m² (calculated with no down payment). The source is credited as the notaries ask: “Notaires de France”. Taxes and the notaire when you buy are in our guide to property in France.

Social housing (HLM) in Metz

At the end of 2025 Metz had 8,961 active applications for social housing, and during 2025 1,129 households got a home: about 7.9 applications for every one housed (our own calculation). Of those housed, 661 households, more than half, waited less than a year.

Across Metz Métropole about 12.4 thousand applications are in the queue, 1,898 households got a home in 2025, and for those who did, the application was 14 months old on average. The délai anormalement long (the official “abnormally long wait”) in the Moselle is 18 months. After that you can turn to the DALO commission, but the wait alone is not enough: you also have to show that your current home doesn’t fit your needs or means. You apply at demande-logement-social.gouv.fr; the procedure is in our guide Social housing (HLM). SNE data (data.logement.gouv.fr) as of 27.03.2026.

Just for us: churches, Russian at school, the consulate, shops

Churches

Trois-Saints-Hiérarques is the main address for anyone looking for a service in the Russian tradition. It belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, vicariate of parishes of Russian tradition; the parish was founded in 2004 and follows the new calendar. On its website the parish also describes itself in Russian: “православная церковь русской традиции” (“Orthodox church of Russian tradition”). The main language of the services is French, but some of the hymns are sung in Church Slavonic, to Slavic melodies. By the service plan on the parish’s website (the week of 10-18 October 2026) there is an all-night vigil on Saturday at 18:00, the hours on Sunday at 10:00 and the liturgy at 10:30. How to find it: the premises are provided temporarily by the city hall, and the entrance is from the pedestrian passage between 1 rue des Tanneurs and 2 rue du Champé, which is easy to miss from the street.

Saint-Martin-Saint-Silouane, 32 rue Saint-Gengoulf. The parish has existed since 1990 and says of itself that French, Romanian, Russian, Georgian, Greek and Moldovan worshippers pray there. According to the parish’s website it belongs to the Romanian Orthodox Deanery of France, that is, to the Romanian Metropolis, and we don’t present it as a Russian parish. The liturgy with matins is every Sunday at 10:00 all year round, except for three weeks in August, and vespers on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 18:30.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic community worships in the Grand Séminaire de Metz, 4 avenue Jean XXIII, on the first Sunday of the month at 10:30. A detail people get wrong: the service is not in the church by the entrance but in the chapel inside the seminary. This is from the diocese’s list of parishes (March 2026), and it asks you to confirm the time and place.

• Paroisse orthodoxe des Trois-Saints-Hiérarques
  Ecumenical Patriarchate, vicariate of Russian tradition
  services in: French, Church Slavonic
  1 rue des Tanneurs / 2 rue du Champé, 57000 Metz
• Centre pastoral de l'Église gréco-catholique ukrainienne à Metz
  single source
  Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
  services in: Ukrainian
  Grand Séminaire de Metz, 4 avenue Jean XXIII, 57000 Metz
• Paroisse orthodoxe Saint-Martin-Saint-Silouane (Metz)
  Romanian Orthodox Church
  32 rue Saint-Gengoulf, 57000 Metz

Checked: 20 October 2026

Every city and every jurisdiction is in our directory of churches.

Russian at school

Lycée Georges de la Tour (cité scolaire), 1 place Maud’huy. A state lycée that lists Russian among its languages as LV2 and as LV3. If your child started Russian at the collège, this is the address where they can continue up to the baccalauréat.

Collège Ernest-Jacques Barbot, 2 avenue de Lattre de Tassigny. According to ONISEP, Russian is on the collège’s list of languages, but we haven’t confirmed at what level or in which year, and found nothing about Russian on the collège’s website. Ask the collège itself before you enrol.

• Collège Ernest-Jacques Barbot - Russian at a collège (single source). 2 avenue de Lattre de Tassigny, 57000 Metz.
• Lycée Georges de la Tour (cité scolaire) - Russian at a lycée. 1 place Maud'huy, 57000 Metz.

Checked: 20 October 2026

Our directory for Metz has no Saturday Russian school for children that we could check yet. If you know such a group, tell us in the chat and we’ll check it and add it to the directory of Russian schools. How to enrol a child in a French school is in our guide school and nursery in France.

Consulate and shops

There are no consulates in Metz. The Moselle belongs to the district of the Consulate General of Russia in Strasbourg, 6 place Sébastien Brant: enquiries on consular matters Mon-Thu 11:00-14:00, collection of ready documents (except visas) Mon, Tue, Thu and Fri 12:00-14:00, strictly by prior appointment. What else Strasbourg has for our own people is gathered in the guide to Strasbourg. The embassies of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan are in Paris. Phone numbers, websites and how to book are on the pages Russians in France, Ukrainians in France and Post-Soviet diasporas in France.

Our directory for Metz has no Russian shop yet. Online shops that deliver across France are gathered in the directory of Russian shops, and what to use in place of the tvorog you can’t find in a supermarket is in our guide on tvorog. If you know a shop with our kind of food in Metz, tell us and we’ll check it.

Getting around: the train to Paris and the weather

On the SNCF Connect timetable for Sunday 25 October 2026 the direct TGV INOUI trains from Paris Est left at 10:40, 13:39, 15:24 and 17:40 and took 1 h 23 min - 1 h 24 min; the OUIGO at 16:16 took 1 h 25 min. The other journeys that day involved changes, up to 4 h 43 min, which is why the average, 2 h 08 min, is so long. This is one day’s timetable, so check yours before you travel. What awaits you in Paris, from consulates to Russian schools, is in our guide to Paris.

The city is served by the Le Met’ network; we haven’t yet confirmed the price of a single ticket for 2026, so ask in the chat.

About the weather. By the 1991-2020 normals at the Metz-Frescaty station the yearly average is 11.1 °C, with 713.5 mm of rain, and it rains (1 mm or more) on about 118 days a year. The winter is a real one: January averages 2.7 °C, and there are 60.9 frost days a year on average, twice as many as in Rennes. In temperature Metz is almost the same as Strasbourg (11.4 °C), but with more rain. The station’s records are +39.7 °C (25 July 2019) and -23.2 °C (17 February 1956). Météo-France has no sunshine-hours data for this station. The climate sheet is in the sources at the bottom.

Our people in Metz and the chat

We haven’t held a meet-up in Metz yet, and we don’t know how many chat members live in Lorraine. Our community began with a single barbecue near Montpellier on 31 May 2025, and everything since is in Events.

What is the chat good for in Metz? Questions about the préfecture, CAF, housing and work are much the same for everyone, and someone has already walked your path, even in another département. Say you’re in Metz and ask who’s nearby: who takes their child to Russian lessons at Georges de la Tour, how applying on the préfecture’s platform went. If you’d like to get our people together, suggest a meet-up: that’s how it all started for us.

See also: All cities · Strasbourg · Reims · Paris · Relocation to France · Titre de séjour step by step · Renting in France · CAF and APL · Social housing (HLM) · Directory of churches · Russian schools · Russian shops · Russians in France · Montpellier, where community meet-ups take place