This communication is part of a Phd research (defended in December 2012) on processes and trends of repopulation in French rural areas (Pistre, 2012). The main focus has been on migration dynamics and profiles of newcomers which have brought rural demographic increases since the 1970s and 1980s. Spatial concomitance of various processes (suburbanization, counter-urbanization, ‘neo-ruralization’, rural gentrification, touristic and residential development…) and linked installations of diverse populations (active and retired people, whitecollars and blue-collar workers, families and couples, people from the city and those already from the country, natives and foreigners…) has been the real engine of the growing demographic renewal of French rural territories. We propose to deepen the study of migrations to rural areas focusing on the birth place of newcomers, to evaluate the importance of rural return migrations in the French national context. Return migrations are increasingly studied among international migrations (Ni Laoire, 2007; Conway et al., 2009) but less in a quantitative way into internal migrations towards rural areas (Cribier et al., 1992; Lundholm, 2012). Moreover, this approach allows extending more classical analyses on ages and social compositions of the new French rural populations (Sencébé et al., 2007; Pistre, 2011a). It also follows some aims of demographic and spatial researches on residential mobility developed during the 1990s and 2000s, which sought to refine individual characteristics of migrants, taking into account of residential trajectories and including the specificities of departure and arrival places (Brun, 1993; Bonvalet et al., 1998). At last, studying residential mobility to French rural areas through birth places complements previous analyses on residential steps and trajectories presented at Ecqtg 2011, combining statistical assessments and more qualitative interpretations of the reasons for moving (Pistre, 2011b). Statistical and cartographic data analyses are based on census data from 1968 to 2007 to study the evolution of return migrations for different kinds of rural areas; a steady and regular decline in this type of residential mobility is observed. From the birth commune of migrants1, several spatial levels of return migrations are defined and examined, considering the ‘administrative territories’ (e.g. same commune, bassin de vie, department, from another bassin de vie, département) and the distances traveled by the migrants (e.g. less and more than 100 km). Sociodemographic indicators and factors (age, social group, household structure) are also used to analyse by statistical explorations and modellings the profiles of people ‘returning home’ in the French rural areas.