Note: this article builds on our previous explanations of key employment contract terms in France, to provide a more in-depth overview for UK and international companies.
Here, we will explain the following:
- Working hours and overtime
- Forfait-jour agreements
- Employee absence
Working hours and overtime
French contracts of employment require specific rules for working hours. The standard legal working time in France is 35 hours per week (or 151.67 hours per month), and any deviation from this must be explicitly stated.
The legal part-time minimum is 24 hours per week, except under specific circumstances or as permitted by the company’s convention collective. A part-time contract must also show how the employee’s working hours are spread across the week or month, with the hours for each day shown in a written schedule. Any changes to this schedule must be notified to the employee at least seven days before taking effect.
Overtime is referred to as heures supplémentaires in a full-time contract. As part-time employees cannot exceed the standard 35-hour working week, they do not work ‘overtime’ as such. Instead, hours worked beyond the part-time contract are called heures complémentaires.
Overtime and additional hours must either be paid at a higher rate, or compensated for with paid time off. Regardless of what is written in the contract, strict limits also apply. Employees cannot work more than 10 hours in a single day, or 48 hours in a single week (or an average of 44 hours per week over any 12-week period). Part-time employees are often contractually required to work up to one-tenth of their contracted weekly or monthly hours as heures complémentaires.
Note that part-time rules are particularly stringent. If the requirement for heures complémentaires is not clearly stated in the contract, the employee may refuse to work them altogether. Furthermore, a part-time contract can be automatically reclassified to full-time if the employee equals or exceeds 35 hours of work per week, with associated cost implications for the employer.
Forfait-jours agreements
A forfait-jours agreement allows certain employees (usually executive staff, or cadres) to swap the 35-hour working week for a set number of days per year, typically 218. A company agreement or appropriate convention collective provisions are required to establish this type of agreement.
Individual terms for working under forfait-jours are either set out in the contract, or in a separate document, known as the convention individuelle de forfait. This document is usually issued as an amendment to a pre-existing contract.
A forfait-jours contract or document must include:
- the amount of extra rest days accrued throughout the year, and how this number is calculated,
- a reference to the mandatory annual interview,
- information about optimal workload management and the right to disconnect,
- mandatory daily and weekly rest periods, and
- (if applicable) the specificities of a forfait en heures agreement, which may be weekly, monthly or annual (as opposed to en jours, which must be annual).
Employee absence
Absence clauses in French employment contracts tend to focus on statutory frameworks and reporting deadlines. For example, in terms of sickness absence, the contract will usually state that the employee must inform the company and provide a medical certificate (avis d’arrêt de travail) within 48 hours. Note that there is no self-certification for sickness absence in France.
In many cases, further and more detailed absence provisions (including sick pay structures) will be set out in the company’s convention collective.
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