French Americans or Franco-Americans (French: Franco-américains) are citizens or nationals of the United States who identify themselves with having full or partial French or French-Canadian heritage, ethnicity and/or ancestral ties. They include French-Canadian Americans, whose experience and identity differ from the broader community.

The state with the largest proportion of people identifying as having French ancestry is Maine, while the state with the largest number of people with French ancestry is California. Many U.S. cities have large French American populations. The city with the largest concentration of people of French extraction is Madawaska, Maine, while the largest French-speaking population by percentage of speakers in the U.S. is found in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana.

Country-wide, as of 2020, there are about 9.4 million U.S. residents who declare French ancestry or French Canadian descent, and about 1.32 million per the 2010 census, spoke French at home. An additional 750,000 U.S. residents speak a French-based creole language, according to the 2011 American Community Survey.

Franco-Americans are less visible than other similarly sized ethnic groups and are relatively uncommon when compared to the size of France's population, or to the numbers of German, Italian, Irish or English Americans. This is partly due to the tendency of Franco-American groups to identify more closely with North American regional identities such as French Canadian, Acadian, Brayon, Louisiana French (Cajun, Creole) than as a coherent group, but also because emigration from France during the 19th century was low compared to the rest of Europe. Consequently, there is less of a unified French American identity as with other European American ethnic groups, and Americans of French descent are highly concentrated in New England and Louisiana. Nevertheless, the French presence has had an outsized impact on American toponyms.

Some Franco-Americans arrived prior to the founding of the United States, settling in places like the Midwest, Louisiana or Northern New England. In these same areas, many cities and geographic features retain their names given by the first Franco-American inhabitants, and in sum, 23 of the Contiguous United States were colonized in part by French pioneers or French Canadians, including settlements such as Iowa (Des Moines), Missouri (St. Louis), Kentucky (Louisville) and Michigan (Detroit), among others. Settlers and political refugees from the Kingdom of France, including Huguenots, also settled alongside French-speaking Flemish Walloons in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, which later became New York City. While found throughout the country, today Franco-Americans are most numerous in New England, northern New York, the Midwest, Louisiana, and northern California. Often, Franco-Americans are identified more specifically as being of French Canadians, Cajuns or Louisiana Creole descent.

A vital segment of Franco-American history involves the Quebec diaspora of the 1840s–1930s, in which nearly one million French Canadians moved to the United States, mainly relocating to New England mill towns, fleeing economic downturn in Québec and seeking manufacturing jobs in the United States. Historically, French Canadians had among the highest birth rates in world history, explaining their relatively large population despite low immigration rates from France. These immigrants mainly settled in Québec and Acadia, although some eventually inhabited Ontario and Manitoba. Many of the first French-Canadian migrants to the U.S. worked in the New England lumber industry, and, to a lesser degree, in the burgeoning mining industry in the upper Great Lakes. This initial wave of seasonal migration was then followed by more permanent relocation in the United States by French-Canadian millworkers.

Louisiana Creole people refers to those who are descended from the colonial settlers in Louisiana, especially those of French and Spanish descent but also including individuals of mixed-race heritage (cf. Creoles of Color). Louisiana Creoles of any race have common European heritage and share cultural ties, such as the traditional use of the French language and the continuing practice of Catholicism; in most cases, the people are related to each other. Those of mixed race also sometimes have African and Native American ancestry. As a group, the mixed-race Creoles rapidly began to acquire education, skills (many in New Orleans worked as craftsmen and artisans), businesses and property. They were overwhelmingly Catholic, spoke Colonial French (although some also spoke Louisiana Creole) and kept up many French social customs, modified by other parts of their ancestry and Louisiana culture. The free people of color married among themselves to maintain their class and social culture.

The Cajuns of Louisiana have a unique heritage, generally seeing themselves as distinct from Louisiana Creoles despite a number of historical documents also classifying the Acadians' descendants as Créoles. Their ancestors settled Acadia, in what is now the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and part of Maine in the 17th and early 18th centuries. In 1755, after capturing Fort Beauséjour and several other French forts in the region, British authorities demanded the Acadians swear an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, which the majority refused to do. In response, the British deported them to the Thirteen Colonies in the south in what has become known as the expulsion of the Acadians. Over the next generation, some four thousand Acadians made the long trek to Louisiana, where they began a new life. The name Cajun is a corruption of the word Acadian. Many still live in what is known as the Cajun Country, where much of their colonial culture survives. French Louisiana, when it was sold by Napoleon in 1803, covered all or part of fifteen current U.S. states and contained French and Canadian colonists dispersed across it, though they were most numerous in its southernmost portion.