Net-entreprises.fr Processes 28 Million DSN Declarations Per Month. Their Direct Connection Handles Them All.
Twenty-eight million.
That is how many DSN declarations — the monthly payroll and social contribution filings that every French employer submits for each employee — net-entreprises.fr receives every month through its direct computer-to-computer connection. Not from a few large corporations. From approximately 2.5 million companies of all sizes, from a sole trader with one employee to Renault with tens of thousands. Liberté connects to that same system. When your monthly declaration goes in, it joins the same infrastructure handling all of France's payroll filings.
What a DSN Is and Why It Cannot Be Skipped
DSN — Déclaration Sociale Nominative — is the monthly declaration every French employer with at least one employee must file. It covers payroll amounts, social contribution calculations, sick leave events, contract changes, and terminations for each employee. URSSAF (the agency that collects your social contributions), the pension funds, and the health insurer all receive their portion from the same single submission. One filing. Six government agencies reached simultaneously.
Two deadlines per month: the 5th for companies with 50 or more employees, the 15th for smaller ones. Miss the deadline and the penalty starts immediately: €58.88 per employee per month on the outstanding declaration. For a restaurant with 6 employees, one missed DSN costs €353. No warning letter. No grace period. The penalty clock starts when the system has not received your filing.
Every declaration must follow a standardized format — published openly by URSSAF — that tells software exactly how to structure payroll data for government submission. Field names, data types, mandatory and optional sections, validation rules: all documented publicly. There is nothing proprietary about the format. Any software builder can read the specification and create compliant software.
The Infrastructure Behind the Filing
A consortium of French social protection agencies — including URSSAF, the pension funds, and the health insurers — operates net-entreprises.fr. These are the very agencies whose data the platform collects. No private company controls this infrastructure. 28 million filings per month. 18 million French private-sector employees covered. One government platform.
Renault filed more than 41,000 DSN entries for its French workforce in 2024 — each one through net-entreprises.fr's direct connection. A bakery in Nantes with three employees filed 36 DSN entries the same year through the same system, with the same validation rules, to the same government destination. Both receive identical confirmation receipts. The infrastructure does not distinguish between one of France's 40 largest listed companies and a neighbourhood bakery.
Your monthly payroll declaration goes to the same system as Renault's. Same validation. Same receipt. Same price: free.
The Toll on a Free Road
Payfit — a French payroll startup connecting employers to this free public infrastructure — last reported a €1.5 billion valuation. Sage's French payroll products generate an estimated €200 million annually from French small business subscriptions. Both connect to net-entreprises.fr. Both charge €22–30 per employee per month for the privilege.
The connection specifications are published openly on net-entreprises.fr's developer portal. The filing format is freely available. Registration as a filing agent has defined requirements any compliant software can meet. The system accepts submissions from any authorized software. What these vendors sell is an interface wrapped around public infrastructure — priced as if the underlying filing system were proprietary.
For a restaurant owner in Bordeaux, that monthly subscription pays for access to a government system their social contributions already fund.
Accountants managing payroll for multiple clients have been filing through net-entreprises.fr for years. Most do not explain to clients that the direct connection is what handles the filing, or that the software they pay for is largely a wrapper around that public infrastructure. The infrastructure is invisible by design. Liberté makes it visible — and then makes it free.
What Liberté Does When It Files Your DSN
Submitting a monthly DSN through Liberté: your payroll is entered, Liberté generates a structured file following the government's required format, the file goes directly to net-entreprises.fr, the system validates it against France's payroll rules, and a confirmation receipt comes back within seconds. URSSAF updates their records. Pension funds update theirs. Health insurer confirms enrollment. Six agencies updated from one action.
You see a confirmation receipt you can keep and reference if anything is ever disputed.
Direct submissions also avoid a practical problem: DSN deadlines create traffic spikes around the 5th and 15th of each month. Employers logging into web portals to file at the last minute compete with everyone else filing at the same time. Software filing directly goes straight to net-entreprises.fr's processing queue — no web portal slowdowns. Filing before deadline day eliminates last-minute failure risk entirely.
URSSAF also has a published policy: if net-entreprises.fr experiences verified outages, deadline extensions are granted automatically. This policy exists because direct filing is the official channel — URSSAF cannot penalize employers for a government infrastructure failure. The system's own reliability protections are built around protecting direct filers.
The Same Infrastructure. For Everyone.
Beyond DSN, net-entreprises.fr handles the full suite of mandatory employer filings: DPAE (the pre-hiring declaration, with a €1,068 fine per undeclared employee), sick leave declarations for CPAM (the public health insurer), contract termination notices for France Travail (the national employment agency, formerly Pôle Emploi), and apprentice enrollments. All mandatory. All using the same public connection. All accessible to registered software at no infrastructure cost.
Liberté connects to the full suite — same system, same reliability, same zero subscription required.
France registered 1.1 million new auto-entrepreneurs and small business creators in 2024. Each employer who hires their first employee faces a monthly declaration obligation that costs €22–30 per employee per month with existing software. That cost compounds: one employee for a year costs €264–360 just in declaration software fees, before any accountant involvement.
Each month, France's payroll infrastructure processes your employees' data alongside Airbus and Total. Same system. Same validation. Same acknowledgment.
Until Liberté, you paid for the bridge. The bridge was always free.