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Wages and SMIC (minimum wage), Marine Tondelier

Reductions in social contributions on low wages: End of exemptions above 1.6 SMIC and on overtime

Direction of change: decrease, compared with current law.

The lever. Reductions in employer social contributions on wages close to the SMIC (minimum wage): maintained, refocused, reduced or abolished. Direction rule: ↑ larger reductions (lower contributions on wages).

« Rationaliser les exonérations de cotisations sociales. Nominaliser et désindexer leur montant. Supprimer les exonérations de cotisations inutiles car supérieures à 1,6 smic ou concernant les heures supplémentaires. »1

Translation by the editorsRationalise exemptions from social contributions. Set their amount in nominal terms and de-index it. Abolish exemptions from contributions that are useless because they are above 1.6 times the SMIC or concern overtime.

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

+€14bn

per year for the public accounts, new revenue, range +€13bn to +€16bn.

The calculation

  • Abolition of the general reductions paid above 1.6 times the SMIC (exit point brought down from 3 to 1.6 times the SMIC, reduction unchanged below): Option costed by the source: a gain of €14.3bn (12.7 to 15.8) per year.

Assumption by the editors. Partial costing. Reading adopted: the exit point of the general reductions in contributions brought down from 3 to 1.6 times the SMIC (minimum wage), the reduction remaining the same below that; €15.8bn was paid above 1.6 times the SMIC in 2024 (regime before the single reduction of 2026). Other reading, not adopted: a reduction redesigned to fall to zero at 1.6 times the SMIC, which would also lower the reductions between 1 and 1.6 times the SMIC (higher gain). Not costed: « nominaliser et désindexer » [“set in nominal terms and de-index”] their amount, whose effect depends on future increases in the SMIC. The end of the reduction in contributions on overtime is costed under the “overtime” lever.

Coefficient calculated by the editors from Groupe d'experts SMIC, Rapport 2025 (25 novembre 2025): the position is marked as an assumption by the editors.

Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule

Current law. Since 1 January 2026, the single tapered general reduction (RGDU, decree of 4 September 2025) merges the general reduction and the health and family contribution reductions (bandeaux maladie et famille), with an exit point at 3 times the SMIC. Cost of the general reductions: €75.4bn in 2024, €72.4bn forecast for 2025, €72.3bn in 2026 (Commission des comptes de la Sécurité sociale (Social Security Accounts Committee), October 2025).

Horizon. Full year, €bn per year; positive sign = gain for public finances unless marked « coût » [“cost”]. Net wage increase parameters: 2024 euros (wage bill) and jobs in the second quarter of 2026.

Limits. The Expert Group's scenarios at 2 and 2.5 SMIC (exit at 2 SMIC: about −€6bn; Bozio-Wasmer: +€1.5bn) are costed « une fois les effets emploi pris en compte » [“once employment effects are taken into account”]: these are dynamic costings, cited here as benchmarks and removed from the options of the static cost schedule. Total abolition: 1.3 to 1.9 million jobs destroyed according to the Expert Group. Budget amendments also cite « près de 80 Md€ » [“nearly €80bn”] for all exemptions, a broader scope. Total abolition net of job losses (€40bn to €50bn) is a dynamic costing: it is not an option of the static cost schedule. A cut in contributions announced in euros per year is costed through the parameter in €bn per year: €1 less in contributions = €1 less in revenue, static, before any financing announced elsewhere. The additional income tax resulting from a rise in net wages is not counted. Before 2026, the general reduction (up to 1.6 SMIC) cost €39.4bn and the reduced health and family rates, which went beyond 1.6 SMIC, €36bn (2024, PLFSS 2026, annex 4). Since 2026, the single reduction runs up to 3 SMIC: no source read costs the share paid above 1.6 SMIC under the RGDU. Under the 2024 regime, chart I.24 of the SMIC Expert Group (2025 report) allows it to be estimated at about €15.8bn (reduced health rates €10.8bn and family rates €5.0bn paid above 1.6 SMIC, sum of the labels read by the editors). Option « suppression au-delà de 1,6 SMIC » [“abolition above 1.6 SMIC”] (editors' calculation): €15.8bn as upper bound (2024 regime); €12.7bn as lower bound, if the entire decrease in the cost of the reductions between 2024 and 2026 (€75.4bn → €72.3bn) fell on wages above 1.6 SMIC; midpoint as central value. Parameter in €bn: one euro less in contributions is one euro less in revenue; the additional corporate income tax that mechanically results is not counted (static). Net wage increases defined per employee (rule on public bases, 18 October 2026): same method for all, cost = per-person rule × public base, static, without the additional income tax. Private-sector gross wage bill paid up to 3 SMIC (2024, editors' calculation): €500bn based on the reduced family rate (1.8 points, €9.0bn paid between 1 and 3 SMIC, chart I.24), €494bn combining the reduced health rate (6 points, €26.3bn up to 2.5 SMIC, i.e. €438bn) and the family rate between 2.5 and 3 SMIC (€1.0bn, i.e. €56bn); net wage bill = gross wage bill × net/gross ratio, from 0.7588 (private-sector average, Insee 2024) to 0.7916 (employee deductions of 20.84% for a non-managerial employee up to the ceiling, Urssaf 2026): €374bn to €396bn, 385 as central value. Net wage bill of all private-sector employees: €726bn (Urssaf, 2024) × 0.7588 = €551bn. Uniform gain per employee: 20,957 thousand private-sector salaried jobs (Insee, second quarter of 2026; jobs, not people, including agriculture, temporary work and private household employers). Public employees are not counted (reading « salariés » [“employees”] as private-sector employees, general scheme contributions): if they were, about €2.0bn more per point of net wage (€244.6bn of gross salaries in 2024 × 0.81) or €7.3bn more per €100 per month (6.06 million public jobs).

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 Marine Tondelier

  1. Pour une prospérité écologique, programme des Écologistes, p. 67. Open the document at this page.

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