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Working time and labour law, Gabriel Attal

Overtime: Abolish the legal cap on overtime (220 hours a year)

Direction of change: increase, compared with current law.

The lever. Rules on hours worked beyond the statutory working time: pay premium, exemptions from tax and social contributions, annual quota. Direction rule: ↑ overtime more advantageous or easier (ceiling, exemptions, pay premium).

« Je proposerai de supprimer le plafond d’heures supplémentaires fixé par le Code du travail, aujourd’hui fixé, à défaut d’accord collectif, à deux cent vingt heures par an et par salarié. »1

Translation by the editorsI will propose abolishing the overtime ceiling set by the Labour Code, currently set, in the absence of a collective agreement, at two hundred and twenty hours per year per employee.

Encoding

Position linked to an option of the cost schedule, with no parameter to set: see the costing.

Costing

Announced by the candidate

not announced

The programme does not cost this measure.

Published costings

none

No external costing of this position recorded to date.

Our calculation

€0bn

per year for the public accounts, zero cost.

The calculation

  • Abolition of the annual overtime quota (220 hours in the absence of an agreement), no static budgetary cost: Option costed by the source: a cost of €0bn per year.
Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule

Current law. Statutory pay premium of 25% then 50% (Labour Code, Art. L3121-36, unless otherwise agreed). Income tax exemption up to €7,500 per year (CGI (General Tax Code), Art. 81 quater) and an 11.31% reduction in employee old-age contributions. An amendment abolishing the ceiling was adopted at first reading in the National Assembly on 25 October 2025: according to concurring sources, the ceiling remains in the final act (Journal officiel text not cited).

Horizon. Full year, €bn per year, in 2025-2026 euros

Limits. The tax cost has « ordre de grandeur » [“order of magnitude”] reliability. Annex 2 of the PLFSS 2025, cited elsewhere, gives €2.485bn. Static: the likely fall in declared hours is not counted. Abolition of the €7,500 ceiling: the only costing found comes from an accounting firm (€1bn) and is not used. The €2.31bn cost of the reduction in employee contributions comes from annex 4 of the PLFSS 2026 (€2,306m forecast for 2026, not compensated). The flat-rate deduction of employer contributions for companies with fewer than 250 employees also costs €872m in 2026 (compensated). The PLF 2026 raises the cost of the income tax exemption (120146): €2,144m actual in 2024, €2,250m forecast for 2026, against €1,787m forecast for 2025 in the PLF 2025, after a change of method (+€0.3bn): the « fin-exoneration-ir » and « fin-deux-exonerations » options use €2.25bn and €4.56bn. Abolishing the annual overtime quota has no static cost: with unchanged hours, nothing changes for public finances; the effect works through additional hours, which the cost schedule does not count.

How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.

This lever in the method · Costing for Gabriel Attal

  1. attalpresident.fr, chantier « Travail & salaires » (page non datée). Read the programme page.

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