The 35-Hour Week, RTT, Mutuelle Obligatoire, Tickets Restaurant — French Payroll Has 200 Variables. All Automatable.
Your first employee starts Monday. Before you can generate their payslip, you need to know five things simultaneously.
Which convention collective applies to your business. France has approximately 700 of them — industry-specific agreements that set contribution rates, leave rules, and salary minimums on top of standard labor law. Which one governs a restaurant is different from which one governs a cleaning company. Get it wrong, and the payslip is wrong.
Whether RTT applies. RTT — réduction du temps de travail, the extra paid days off generated when employees work more than 35 hours per week — has its own accrual rules, carry-over limits, and employer contribution obligations that vary by convention collective.
What your mutuelle rate is. Mutuelle obligatoire is mandatory supplementary health insurance. Since 2016, every employer must offer it and co-fund at least 50% of the premium. The rate depends on your company structure and the contract you hold with your insurance provider.
Tickets restaurant — meal vouchers — are optional, and the rules are strict if you offer them. There is a legal maximum (€13.09 per voucher as of 2024) that limits how much the employer can deduct. Above that, the benefit becomes taxable.
And the current URSSAF contribution rate for your specific employee category. URSSAF — the agency that collects social security contributions — sets those rates, and they change. In 2024, total employer and employee charges were 45.25% of gross salary for employees who are not in management roles (those in management, called cadres, have different rate structures).
Five rules, applied simultaneously, before you have entered a single salary number.
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200 variables, all rules
None of this is a mystery. Every one of those 200+ variables is a published rule: a rate, a threshold, a calculation formula defined by URSSAF, by the convention collective, or by law. The 35-hour week is a rule. RTT accrual is a rule. The mutuelle co-contribution minimum is a rule. The ticket restaurant taxable ceiling is a rule.
Rules do not require human judgment. They require accurate knowledge of all the rules that exist, and consistent application of them on every payslip.
French payroll has 200 variables. Every single one is a rule. Rules do not require intuition — they require a calculation engine that knows all of them.
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The cost of a wrong line
Miss a mutuelle rate, miscalculate RTT, leave out a mandatory mention — the penalty is €450 per employee per payslip. Not per audit.
Seven mandatory zones on every payslip are required by law: identification information, employment details, salary base, gross-to-net calculation, employer contributions, employee contributions, and net to pay. Miss one required line in any zone, and the payslip fails compliance. Miss it for all five employees, and the penalty is €2,250 for that month's payroll.
Late or incorrect DSN — the Déclaration Sociale Nominative, the monthly declaration filed electronically to URSSAF that covers every employee — costs €58.88 per employee per month in penalties. For a business with 8 employees, one late DSN is €471. Three consecutive late DSNs is €1,413.
Stakes are not abstract. They are specific, named, and apply the month the error occurs.
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Most errors are omission errors, not calculation errors
The employer who hires their first employee and looks up the URSSAF contribution rate online will usually apply it correctly. What they will miss is the RTT entitlement their convention collective grants beyond the legal minimum, or the updated ticket restaurant ceiling that changed in January, or the mutuelle contribution zone that reclassified their company size.
These are not failures of arithmetic. They are failures of rule completeness — not knowing all 200 variables exist, let alone their current values.
Unlike the employer trying to keep rules in their head, a calculation engine does not forget that RTT accrual changed when the employee switched from full-time to part-time. It does not miss the convention collective provision that requires an additional employer contribution for employees in their first year. It applies every rule, on every payslip, every month, because the rules are encoded and the execution is automatic.
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The price of rule knowledge
Payfit processes payroll for over 10,000 French companies at €150–400 per month per company. That revenue is built on one product: a calculation engine that knows all 200+ variables in French payroll law and applies them correctly.
An independent payroll specialist in France charges €30–80 per payslip for manual processing. They carry the rule knowledge in their head, in their reference documents, and in their experience. The knowledge is real and valuable. Most of it is the memorised content of publicly available URSSAF publications, convention collective texts, and annual government updates — applied consistently.
Such an engine reads those same documents, applies those same rules, and produces identical, legally correct results. The complexity that makes French payroll feel like specialist territory is entirely rule-based. Once encoded, it runs automatically. The question is whether the encoding is free or whether it costs €150–400 per month.
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Payroll on Monday morning
You hire a new employee. You enter their contract type, their gross salary, their convention collective, and their start date. Liberté applies the correct convention collective rules, calculates RTT entitlement, sets up the mutuelle contribution at the rate for your company, and includes the standard mandatory mentions in the 7 required payslip zones.
At month-end, you review and confirm. Payslips are generated. The DSN — covering all employees — goes out automatically to net-entreprises.fr, the government's portal for employment declarations, via a direct machine-to-machine connection. URSSAF receives it. The deadline is met.
Not once did you look up a single URSSAF rate. You did not check the ticket restaurant ceiling. You did not verify which RTT formula applies under your convention collective. The calculation engine knows those rules. You approved the output.
This is what happens when 200 rules are encoded once and executed correctly every time: payroll goes from a recurring compliance scramble to a monthly review of numbers you trust.
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On the cases that still need a specialist
Liberté handles all standard French payroll variables — the 200+ that apply to the vast majority of employment contracts in France. Edge cases still exist: genuinely unusual convention collective provisions, multi-employer situations, complex expatriate payroll, specific industry contribution schemes that require manual interpretation.
For a restaurant owner, a cleaning company, a freelance agency, or an association with salaried staff — small businesses of under 10 employees (called TPE, très petite entreprise) and medium-sized businesses up to 250 employees (PME, petite et moyenne entreprise) — those edge cases are rare. Standard employment contracts are fully automatable. For complex situations, an accountant's advisory role remains genuinely useful. Liberté does not replace expert judgment. It replaces rule application.
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Rule application vs. specialist judgment
Every payroll specialist who processes standard French employment contracts is applying published rules. The convention collective is a published document. The URSSAF contribution rates are published annually. The RTT calculation formula is in the labour code.
They are not inventing calculations. They are remembering them — or looking them up — and applying them correctly. That is exactly what a calculation engine does, without forgetting, without error, and without charging €400 per month for 8 employees whose payroll follows standard rules.
All of this complexity is real. The 700 conventions collectives are real. The 200 variables are real. None of them require human memory to apply. They require an engine that was built to know all of them.
We built that engine. You enter the salary. The rest runs itself.