How to Say Your Age in French
Avoir + Ans, Never Être

Why Avoir, Not Être?

French and English split a class of personal-state expressions differently. English uses the verb “to be” for most of them: I am hungry, I am thirsty, I am cold, I am hot, I am scared, I am 30 years old. French uses the verb avoir (to have) for the same set: j’ai faim, j’ai soif, j’ai froid, j’ai chaud, j’ai peur, j’ai trente ans. The underlying logic is “to have a state” rather than “to be in a state”.

The same logic extends to needs and wants: j’ai besoin de (I need), j’ai envie de (I want / I fancy), j’ai mal à (I have pain in / I hurt). The pattern is so consistent that once you internalise “personal physical or experiential state = avoir”, you will reach for the right verb instinctively. Among Romance languages this is not unusual: Spanish uses tener the same way (tengo treinta años); Italian splits more towards English (ho trent’anni uses avere); Portuguese also uses ter. The avoir-for-states pattern is the inherited Latin habere construction.

Saying je suis trente (literally “I am thirty”) in French sounds the same way I have hungry would sound in English: grammatical-shaped but semantically broken. It is the single most diagnostic French-language mistake, the one that immediately marks the speaker as having translated word-for-word from English without internalising the construction.

Age Reference Table (1 to 100)

Age Ranges: La Trentaine, La Quarantaine

French has a series of feminine collective nouns that describe approximate age ranges, derived from the round tens with the suffix -aine. La trentaine = the thirties (someone aged roughly 30 to 39). La quarantaine = the forties. La cinquantaine, la soixantaine, la quatre-vingtaine in standard French. Belgian and Swiss French add la septantaine (the seventies) and use la nonantaine for the nineties.

Common phrases using these collective forms: il a la quarantaine (he is in his forties), elle approche la cinquantaine (she is approaching fifty), une femme dans la trentaine (a woman in her thirties), les sexagénaires (people aged 60-69), les septuagénaires (70-79), les octogénaires (80-89), les nonagénaires (90-99). The Latinate forms (sexagénaire, septuagénaire, etc.) are more formal and appear in journalism, demographic statistics, and medical writing.

The vocabulary for centenarians is centenaire, used both as adjective and as noun (les centenaires, “people aged 100 or more”). France has roughly 30,000 centenarians as of 2025 according to INSEE. Supercentenaire (110+) is now also a recognised category.

Birthday and Milestone Phrasing

Joyeux anniversaire is the standard happy-birthday greeting. Bon anniversaire is also widely used. The verb for “to celebrate one’s birthday” is fêter son anniversaire. Asking when someone’s birthday is: C’est quand ton anniversaire? or Tu fêtes ton anniversaire quand?.

Significant ages have specific names. Eighteen, the legal majority in France since 1974, is la majorité civile. Sixteen is la majorité sexuelle (age of consent). The milestone age for retirement after the 2023 reform is sixty-four (l’âge légal de départ à la retraite a été porté à 64 ans). The minimum age for various activities is regulated by law: voting at 18 (l’âge du droit de vote), driving at 18 with the standard B licence (le permis de conduire), drinking alcohol publicly at 18, working at 16 with restrictions (l’âge minimum d’emploi).

Ordinal-formed birthdays: a person’s 21st birthday is son vingt et unième anniversaire; their 40th is son quarantième anniversaire. The construction is the ordinal form of the age, not the cardinal: vingtième not vingt. See the dedicated ordinals page for the ordinal forms.

Common Age-Related Phrases

Frequently Asked Questions