🇫🇷 France

Invalidity pensions: necessary developments, promoting return to work (Social security 2025, chapter XIII)

Original title: Les pensions d’invalidité : des évolutions nécessaires, un retour à l’emploi à favoriser (Sécurité sociale 2025, chapitre XIII)

Chapter of the French Court of Audit's May 2025 social-security report. The general scheme paid invalidity pensions to just over 700,000 people in December 2023, costing €7.5bn plus €0.3bn in supplementary allowance. The Court calls return to work a major savings lever: 1% of category-1 recipients leaving invalidity for adapted work would save €14m a year in benefits.

Release of the 8th Agefiph-Ifop barometer on perceptions of employment and disability

Original title: Parution du 8e baromètre Agefiph-Ifop sur les perceptions emploi et handicap

Agefiph's release (2025) of the 8th Agefiph-Ifop barometer, surveying the public, employees, recruiters, business leaders and disabled people in France. Recruiters' main stated barrier is the financial and technical cost of adapting the workstation (43%), yet only 10% of hires require one. 59% of recruiters say they are ready to hire disabled people, rising to 91% where the firm has a disability officer. Attitude survey data.

Employment of persons with disabilities and business performance

France Stratégie policy brief (Baïz, Menestrier, Bruneau, 2020) using an econometric panel of French companies (2012–2016) subject to the 6% disabled-employment obligation. It finds that greater effort to hire disabled workers does not penalise firms' economic and financial performance, once size, location and sector are controlled. In 2016 only 19% of obligated companies met the legal rate.

Towards a job guarantee? — Final report of the independent scientific committee evaluating the experiment 'Territories with zero long-term unemployment' (TZCLD)

Original title: Vers une garantie d’emploi ? - Rapport final du comité scientifique de l'évaluation de l’expérimentation « Territoires zéro chômeur de longue durée » (TZCLD)

Final report (Sept 2025) of the independent scientific committee chaired by Yannick L'Horty, supported by DARES and the Haut-commissariat à la Stratégie et au Plan, on France's job-guarantee experiment for the long-term unemployed. It finds a +74 percentage-point employment effect over 24 months (21% of employees are disabled jobseekers), but a first-year net public cost of €11,300–13,700 per FTE, excluding hard-to-monetise avoided social costs.

Employment and unemployment of disabled people – Dashboard 2025

Original title: Emploi et chômage des personnes handicapées – Tableau de bord 2025

Agefiph's annual labour-market dashboard (published July 2026). Unemployment among disabled people fell to 11.5% in 2025 and the number of disabled people in work reached 1.4 million, nearly 5% of all employment. Job-retention cases rose 5% to about 27,900, and supported-employment platforms served nearly 11,700 people (+15%).

Between two and three disabled people in five are in employment in 2022, depending on the disability approach used

Original title: Entre deux et trois personnes handicapées sur cinq ont un emploi en 2022, selon l'approche du handicap retenue

DREES/DARES Études et Résultats (Nov 2025, Marc Collet and Suzanne Scott) using the Autonomie survey. Employment among disabled people depends on the definition: three in five with significant functional limitations work, versus two in five of those administratively recognised. People disabled under all three approaches are employed far less often (29% vs 66%).

Disability in figures — 2024 edition

Original title: Le handicap en chiffres — édition 2024

Overview in 55 fact sheets: in 2022, in metropolitan France, 14.5 million people aged 15 or over (28%) declare at least one severe functional limitation; 20 professions account for 32% of employment among people with recognised disabilities, compared with 23% of employment without recognised disability; over three years, the number of adapted enterprises increased by 9%.

Policy in favour of employment inclusion of people with disabilities

Original title: La politique en faveur de l'inclusion dans l'emploi des personnes en situation de handicap

Public-policy evaluation by France's Cour des comptes (January 2026) of disability employment policy. Direct aids for insertion into ordinary work are estimated at €1.3bn; in 2024, 28% of companies subject to the 6% quota employed no disabled worker, and derogations cut the real target to 5.1%. Only 18.5% of firms with 250+ staff have a trained disability lead.

The governance of disability employment policy

Original title: La gouvernance de la politique d’emploi des personnes en situation de handicap

IGAS inspection report (No. 2024-053R, January 2025; Emilie Fauchier-Magnan, Geneviève Gueydan) on governance of France's disability employment policy, including the State–Agefiph agreement and the France Travail–Cap emploi merger. In 2023 nearly 3.1 million active people had administrative disability recognition, with 12% unemployment vs 7% overall; it proposes simplifying the web of national agreements.

Mental health of workers in France: a cost of 25 billion euros per year

Original title: La santé mentale des actifs en France : un coût de 25 milliards d'euros par an

Study by the economics consultancy Asterès, published in November 2025 and commissioned by MGEN and La French Care. It estimates the tangible cost of mental ill-health among working-age people in France at €24.7bn for 2022: €14.8bn falls on health insurance, €7.6bn on employers (lost output from sick leave and deaths, using the friction-cost method) and €2.3bn on complementary insurers. In 2022, 3.4 million workers were affected.