We consider the facilitated exclusion process, which is a nonergodic, kinetically constrained exclusion process. We show that in the hydrodynamic limit, its macroscopic behavior is governed by a free boundary problem. The particles evolve on the one-dimensional lattice according to jump rates which are degenerate, since they can vanish on non-trivial configurations and create distinct phases: indeed, configurations can be totally blocked (they cannot evolve under the dynamics), ergodic (they belong to an irreducible component), or transient (after a transitive period of time they will become either blocked or ergodic). We additionally prove that the microscopic separation into blocked/ergodic phases fully coincides with the moving interface problem given by the hydrodynamic equation.