Tiles are cheaper at home, the van is going anyway, so why not fill it. Since Brexit that is a customs question with two sides, and the honest headline is that neither customs service describes your exact case. Here is what each of them does publish, with the date on it, and where the gap sits.
Both governments write about two kinds of traveller. One is a person bringing back personal purchases. The other is someone taking goods out to sell or to use in their business. A private owner driving materials to a house they own is neither, and no source on this page addresses it.
That gap is why this page does not end with a number you can rely on. What it can do is show you the figures on both sides, so the question you put to customs is a specific one.
France sets an allowance per traveller for goods brought in from outside the EU, and it depends on how you travel. By car, which is how materials travel, the figure is lower than by air: €300 against €430.
Autre mode de transport (voiture, train, vélo, etc.) : 300 €Above the allowance there is a second ceiling. Up to €700 per traveller or consignment, a flat-rate duty can be applied; beyond it the full common customs tariff comes into play.
The duty-free value of the goods subject to the flat-rate import duties shall not exceed EUR 700 per consignment or per travelerBritain looks at the same van from the other end, and its published route is written for business goods. The simple online declaration has two ceilings, and for building materials the weight one bites first: £2,500 in value, but only 1,000 kg in weight. You have 5 days before you leave to make it.
less than 1,000kg in totalAnd on the business route there is no allowance at all, which is worth reading carefully because it is a statement about business goods and not about your bathroom.
There is no duty free allowance for goods you're taking out to sell or use in your business.Er is geen getal omdat de vrijstelling niet bestaat: de Britse voorlichting zegt met zoveel woorden dat er geen vrijstelling is voor goederen die je meeneemt om te verkopen of in je bedrijf te gebruiken. Dat is een uitspraak over ZAKELIJKE goederen, en juist daarom is het geen antwoord voor de particulier die zijn eigen huis verbouwt.
Ask French customs and HMRC before you load, not after. Both publish contact routes on the pages linked above, and a specific question with a value and a weight in it gets a usable answer.
All figures checked on 2026-08-18, each with the date its own source carries.
Working out what the job costs in the first place: renovating a house in France.
Neither customs service publishes a rule for exactly that. The French guidance covers personal purchases a traveller brings in, the British guidance covers goods taken out to sell or use in a business, and a private owner carrying materials to their own house is described by neither. That is why this page prints both sets of figures and tells you to ask rather than guessing on your behalf.
On the British side there are two ceilings for the simple declaration, one for value and one for weight, and building materials are heavy. A pallet of tiles reaches a weight limit long before it reaches a value limit.
None of the sources on this page says. That is a real gap in the guidance rather than something we left out, and it is one of the reasons to put the question to customs directly.