French Employment Law for Expats: CDI, Rupture Conventionnelle & the 35-Hour Week (2026)

The 35-hour week is real, the five weeks of holiday are real, and the RTT days on top are the part nobody outside France believes. French employment law delivers Europe’s most generous time entitlements alongside a dismissal regime that is formalistic, procedural, and — since the 2017 Macron reforms — more predictable than its reputation suggests, because damages for unfair dismissal are now capped on a published scale. Around this sits the convention collective, which quietly governs more of your contract than your contract does, and the rupture conventionnelle, the negotiated exit that has become the default way French employment relationships actually end. This guide covers the 2026 position: CDI and CDD, conventions collectives, working time and RTT, the dismissal procedure and the barème, redundancy, the rupture conventionnelle, and how the prud’hommes work.

What contracts exist, and what does the convention collective add?

The CDI (contrat à durée indéterminée) is the default and the norm. The CDD (fixed-term) is permitted only for defined reasons (replacing an absent employee, temporary activity increase, seasonal work), has maximum durations and renewal limits, and requires a 10% precarity premium on expiry — and if misused, a court will requalify it as a CDI with all the consequences. There is no French equivalent of the casual, at-will engagement that our US chapter describes.

Above the Code sits the convention collective — the sectoral agreement (SYNTEC for consulting and tech, Métallurgie for engineering, and hundreds of others) that binds every employer in scope. It sets minimum salary grids by classification, notice periods (often longer than statutory), severance formulas (frequently more generous than the Code), additional leave, and sometimes bonus structures. Your convention collective is printed on your payslip; read it, because it is the real contract.

Cadre status (roughly, professional/managerial classification) matters enormously in France: it determines your pension scheme contributions, your notice period (typically three months rather than one or two), your severance, and often your working-time arrangement — the forfait jours, under which you are paid for a number of working days per year rather than hours, and receive RTT days in compensation. Most expat professionals are cadres.

How does working time actually work — 35 hours, forfait jours, RTT?

The legal working week is 35 hours. Hours beyond it are overtime, paid at premium rates, and subject to annual quotas. But most professionals do not work an hourly week at all: they are on a forfait jours — an annual days-worked agreement (typically 216–218 days) that exempts them from hourly limits in exchange for RTT days, autonomy, and a duty on the employer to monitor workload and ensure the right to rest and disconnect.

The result: a typical French cadre holds five weeks (25 working days) of statutory paid holiday plus 8–15 RTT days plus 11 public holidays — a total time entitlement unmatched in this series, and one that genuinely shapes French professional life (August, in particular, is a national closure).

The right to disconnect (droit à la déconnexion) has been law since 2017: companies above 50 employees must negotiate arrangements ensuring employees can disconnect outside working hours. It predates the Australian and Portuguese equivalents in our other chapters and is enforced through the workload-monitoring obligations attached to the forfait jours — an employer who cannot show it monitored a cadre’s workload can see the forfait invalidated and face retroactive overtime claims.

How does dismissal work, and what does it cost?

Every dismissal requires a cause réelle et sérieuse — a real and serious cause — either personal (performance, misconduct, incapacity) or economic (redundancy). And every dismissal requires the procedure: a written convocation to a preliminary meeting (with at least five working days’ notice and the right to be assisted), the entretien préalable itself, then a reasoned lettre de licenciement sent no earlier than two working days later, setting out the grounds precisely — because the employer cannot later rely on grounds the letter omitted.

Costs: notice (one to three months, per the convention collective — three is standard for cadres), statutory severance (indemnité de licenciement) of at least a quarter of a month’s pay per year for the first ten years and a third thereafter, with conventions collectives frequently paying substantially more, plus accrued holiday. Faute grave (serious misconduct) removes notice and severance; faute lourde (intent to harm) removes more.

If the dismissal lacks real and serious cause, the employee claims damages under the barème Macron — the capped scale introduced in 2017, running from about one month’s pay at one year of service to roughly twenty months at long seniority. The scale survived challenges before the Cour de cassation and made French dismissal risk quantifiable for the first time. Note the exceptions: dismissals that are null (discrimination, harassment, whistleblowing, pregnancy, union activity) fall outside the barème entirely, with uncapped damages and possible reinstatement — which is where the real exposure now sits.

What is the rupture conventionnelle, and why does everyone use it?

Introduced in 2008 and now the dominant exit mechanism, the rupture conventionnelle is a negotiated mutual termination of a CDI: the parties meet (the employee may be assisted), agree terms, sign a standard form, observe a 15-calendar-day withdrawal period, and submit it for administrative homologation by the labour authority (which has 15 working days to object).

The employee receives at least the statutory severance (often negotiated well above it) and — the decisive feature — retains full entitlement to unemployment benefits, which a resignation would forfeit. The employer gains certainty: a homologated rupture conventionnelle is very difficult to challenge afterwards.

This is why it has become the default way professional French employment ends: it converts a legally fraught dismissal into a negotiated commercial transaction. For the employee, the negotiating levers are the severance amount, the notice/departure date, garden leave, and reference terms. Never sign one in the first meeting; the 15-day withdrawal period exists precisely because the law expects reflection. And do the arithmetic on unemployment benefit — France’s is generous enough (up to 57% of prior salary, for months) that it materially changes what package you should accept.

What about redundancy, and the économique procedure?

Licenciement pour motif économique requires genuine economic grounds (difficulties, technological change, reorganisation necessary to safeguard competitiveness, or cessation of activity — assessed at the level of the group’s sector of activity, including internationally), plus objective selection criteria (seniority, family situation, qualities, disability), plus a reclassification obligation: the employer must genuinely search for alternative roles within the group before dismissing.

Collective redundancies (10+ dismissals in 30 days in companies of 50+) trigger a PSE (plan de sauvegarde de l’emploi) — a formal social plan negotiated with employee representatives and validated by the administration, including redeployment measures, training and enhanced severance. PSEs are heavily negotiated, expensive, and slow; French collective redundancy is not something a foreign parent should attempt without specialist counsel.

Every company above 11 employees must have a CSE (comité social et économique) — the elected employee representative body — with information and consultation rights over reorganisations, working conditions and economic decisions. Failing to consult the CSE where required is the délit d’entrave, a criminal offence. Foreign employers routinely underestimate this; French courts do not.

How do the prud’hommes work — and what should expats document?

The conseil de prud’hommes is the labour court: composed of elected employer and employee representatives (not professional judges) in equal number, with a professional judge breaking deadlocks. Proceedings begin with a mandatory conciliation phase, are free to initiate, and take — realistically — one to two years, with appeal adding more.

Limitation periods: 12 months to challenge a dismissal, three years for salary claims, five years for discrimination and harassment. The 12-month dismissal window is short by European standards; diarise it immediately.

Documentation, as in every chapter of this series: the contract, the convention collective (identified on your payslip), payslips (which itemise everything and are legally required to be precise), the convocation and the lettre de licenciement (which fixes the grounds the employer may argue), any written warnings, and a dated log. French labour litigation rewards the party with the documents, and the dismissal letter — a document the employer writes and cannot subsequently amend — is the single most important piece of paper in the case.

Frequently Asked Questions