You are British, you work in France on a French employment contract, and you have just been called into a meeting, handed a letter, or told not to come back on Monday. Your residence card, your health cover, your right to stay, and several months of salary now turn on a handful of pages written in French legal language. This guide explains, in English, what a lawful dismissal in France looks like, what money you are owed, and how you challenge an unfair sacking before the French labour court, with the exact legal texts and court decisions your employer and the judge will use.
A dismissal in France, called a licenciement, is a formal procedure under the Code du travail, the French Labour Code. It is not a conversation. It is a sequence of compulsory letters, waiting periods, and reasons, and any missing step can make the dismissal unfair or increase what you are owed. Since Brexit, a British employee is a third-country national, which adds one extra check about your autorisation de travail, your work permit, but once you hold the right to work, your protection against unfair dismissal is exactly the same as a French colleague. Do not sign anything on the spot, keep every envelope with its postmark, and read this guide before the next meeting.
I. I have just been sacked in France after Brexit: was my dismissal lawful and which papers must I check first?
A. Did my employer follow the compulsory dismissal procedure: invitation letter, five-day wait, meeting and dismissal letter?
French law imposes a preliminary meeting, called the entretien préalable, the formal meeting before any dismissal decision. The rule is short and strict. The Labour Code provides: “L’employeur qui envisage de licencier un salarié le convoque, avant toute décision, à un entretien préalable.” That sentence is article L. 1232-2 of the Labour Code. In plain English, an employer who is considering dismissing you must invite you to a meeting before taking any decision. The invitation, called the convocation, must be sent by recorded delivery or handed to you in person against a signed receipt, and it must state its purpose. You have the right to be assisted at that meeting by a colleague or, if there is no staff representative in the company, by an outside adviser from an official list.
The second sentence of the same article is the one employers most often get wrong: “L’entretien préalable ne peut avoir lieu moins de cinq jours ouvrables après la présentation de la lettre recommandée ou la remise en main propre de la lettre de convocation.” That is also article L. 1232-2 of the Labour Code. In English, the meeting cannot take place less than five working days after the recorded-delivery letter is presented at your home or handed to you in person. Working days, called jours ouvrables, mean every day except Sunday and public holidays, so Saturdays count. Keep the envelope and the delivery slip, because the starting point is the presentation of the letter, not the day you collect it from the post office.
The Cour de cassation, the French supreme court for employment cases, confirmed this calculation in a published decision that employment lawyers cite constantly. The court stated: “l’entretien préalable ne peut avoir lieu moins de cinq jours ouvrables après la présentation de la lettre recommandée ou de la remise en main propre de la lettre de convocation.” That quotation comes from Court of Cassation, Social Chamber, 6 September 2023, appeal no. 22-11.661. In that case, an employee of Mango France had been invited to a preliminary meeting by a letter presented at her home on 12 January 2018 and collected on 22 January, with the meeting held on 24 January. The court of appeal had found the procedure irregular, but the Cour de cassation quashed that part, holding: “le délai de cinq jours avait commencé à courir le 13 janvier 2018, le jour suivant la présentation de la lettre recommandée”. In English, the five-day period had started running on 13 January, the day after presentation, so that by the meeting date the employee had enjoyed five full working days. The lesson for you is practical. Count from the day after the postman attempts delivery, include Saturdays, and check whether your meeting respected the five full days. If it did not, the procedure was irregular, which gives you a separate claim for damages even if the dismissal itself had a genuine reason.
After the meeting, the employer must wait again before posting the dismissal. The Labour Code provides: “il lui notifie sa décision par lettre recommandée avec avis de réception.” That is article L. 1232-6 of the Labour Code. In English, the employer notifies you of the decision by recorded delivery with acknowledgement of receipt. The same article adds: “Cette lettre comporte l’énoncé du ou des motifs invoqués par l’employeur.” In English, the letter must set out the ground or grounds relied on by the employer. And it adds: “Elle ne peut être expédiée moins de deux jours ouvrables après la date prévue de l’entretien préalable au licenciement auquel le salarié a été convoqué.” In English, it cannot be posted less than two working days after the scheduled date of the preliminary meeting. Verbal dismissals, dismissals by text message, and dismissals announced only at the meeting have no legal effect. Only the dismissal letter counts, and the grounds written in that letter fix the boundaries of any later court case. The employer cannot invent a better reason before the labour court afterwards.
For a British reader, three checks come first. First, find the invitation letter, note how it was delivered, and count the five working days to the meeting. Second, find the dismissal letter, check it was sent by recorded delivery at least two working days after the meeting, and read the reasons carefully. Third, keep proof of everything: envelopes, payslips, the contract, emails about your performance, and any minutes of the meeting. If the employer skipped the meeting, sent both letters on the same day, or never gave written reasons, note it immediately, because those defects survive even when the employer later claims you were a poor performer.
Official guidance in French confirms this sequence on the public service website service-public.fr, under the heading on dismissal for personal reasons, and the impots.gouv.fr and travail-emploi.gouv.fr sites explain the related final documents. On the British side, the official gov.uk guidance on living in France reminds British nationals that after Brexit their employment position depends on French immigration permission, which leads to the second question every British employee must ask.
B. Can my employer sack me because I am British, because my work permit changed, or without a genuine and serious reason?
Brexit changed your immigration status, not your employment rights. If you were lawfully resident before 31 December 2020 you should hold a Withdrawal Agreement residence card, and newcomers hold a standard titre de séjour, a residence permit, often with a mention such as salarié, employee, or passeport talent. The Labour Code states the permit rule plainly: “Un étranger autorisé à séjourner en France ne peut exercer une activité professionnelle salariée en France sans avoir obtenu au préalable l’autorisation de travail mentionnée au 2° de l’ article L. 5221-2” That is article L. 5221-5 of the Labour Code. In English, a foreigner authorised to stay in France cannot take salaried work without first obtaining the work authorisation mentioned in article L. 5221-2. The companion article states: “Pour entrer en France en vue d’y exercer une profession salariée, l’étranger présente” That opening is article L. 5221-2 of the Labour Code, which then lists: “Un contrat de travail visé par l’autorité administrative ou une autorisation de travail.” In English, a contract of employment approved by the administration or a work authorisation. In practice, your employer should have checked your right to work when you were hired, and most British residents working on a French contract already hold a card that authorises work without a separate application.
That permit question matters because some British employees are told, wrongly, that the end of a fixed-term permit or a delay in renewing a card is itself a reason for instant dismissal without procedure. It is not. If your right to work has genuinely and definitively expired and no renewal is possible, the contract may be affected, but the employer must still establish the facts in writing, respect loyalty, and in most cases follow a procedure. If your card is in the process of being renewed, the récépissé, the official renewal receipt, usually preserves your right to stay and to work, and a dismissal presented as automatic should be examined with suspicion. Take your residence card, your renewal receipts, and your contract to a lawyer before accepting that you had to be dismissed. A dismissal justified only by your British nationality, or taken in retaliation for asking for a compliant payslip or for pointing out that your permit allows you to work, can be discriminatory and therefore void, which carries the highest level of compensation described in the second part of this guide.
Apart from that immigration check, the test is the same for British and French employees. The Labour Code states: “Tout licenciement pour motif personnel est motivé dans les conditions définies par le présent chapitre.” That is article L. 1232-1 of the Labour Code. In English, every dismissal for personal reasons must give reasons under the conditions set by that chapter. The same article adds: “Il est justifié par une cause réelle et sérieuse.” In English, it must be based on a real and serious cause. Real means the facts are genuine, precise, and verifiable, not a vague complaint about attitude or fit. Serious means they are grave enough to make continuing the employment relationship impossible or at least genuinely difficult. Poor performance must be shown with concrete examples, targets, warnings, and a fair chance to improve. Misconduct, called faute, must be dated and proved, with a distinction between ordinary misconduct, serious misconduct depriving you of notice and standard severance, called faute grave, and intentional harm with intent to damage the company, called faute lourde, which is rare.
Redundancy, called licenciement pour motif économique, is a separate regime. It cannot be based on your person but must result from genuine economic difficulty, technological change, a reorganisation needed to safeguard competitiveness, or the closure of the business. The employer must try to redeploy you internally, respect a strict order of dismissals in small collective cases, and offer the redeployment leave or the tailored redeployment scheme. A British employee working in Paris for a French subsidiary of a UK group is often told the English parent has cut budgets. That alone is not enough. The judge looks at the French company and, for groups, at the sector and the relevant market, and checks the redeployment efforts letter by letter. A dismissal letter that says only that your position is abolished, without figures, without redeployment offers, and without mention of the redeployment scheme, is vulnerable.
Finally, watch for disguised dismissals. If you are pressed to sign a rupture conventionnelle, the mutual separation agreement, in the same meeting where you are told you are sacked, or if you are told to resign or you will get a bad reference, do not sign. A mutual separation requires two separate meetings, a cooling-off period, and approval by the employment administration, and a resignation must be clear and unequivocal. Forced resignations and agreements signed under threat are regularly set aside by the courts. Ask for time, take the documents home, and get advice.
II. How much money am I owed after a dismissal in France and how do I challenge it before the labour court?
A. What notice, severance pay, paid holiday and final papers must a British employee receive with the last payslip?
Every dismissal ends with money and papers, and British employees often leave both unclaimed because the French names are unfamiliar. The notice period is called the préavis. Unless you are dismissed for serious misconduct, you are entitled to the notice provided by your contract, your collective agreement, called the convention collective, or local practice, usually from one to three months depending on seniority and status. The Labour Code states: “Lorsque le salarié n’exécute pas le préavis, il a droit, sauf s’il a commis une faute grave, à une indemnité compensatrice.” That is article L. 1234-5 of the Labour Code. In English, when you do not work the notice, you are entitled, unless dismissed for serious misconduct, to pay in lieu of notice. If the employer releases you from working it, that release must not reduce the wages and benefits, including accrued holiday pay, you would have received up to the end of the notice. In practice, check whether your dismissal letter says the notice is worked, paid in lieu, or split. If you were told to leave the building on the day and your final payslip shows no notice payment, query it in writing immediately.
Next comes the statutory severance pay, called the indemnité légale de licenciement. The Labour Code provides: “Le salarié titulaire d’un contrat de travail à durée indéterminée, licencié alors qu’il compte 8 mois d’ancienneté ininterrompus au service du même employeur, a droit, sauf en cas de faute grave, à une indemnité de licenciement.” That is article L. 1234-9 of the Labour Code. In English, an employee on an open-ended contract, dismissed with eight months of continuous service with the same employer, is entitled, except in the case of serious misconduct, to severance pay. The minimum amount is set by regulation. The regulation states: “Un quart de mois de salaire par année d’ancienneté pour les années jusqu’à dix ans” That is article R. 1234-2 of the Labour Code. In English, one quarter of a month’s salary per year of service for years up to ten. It adds: “Un tiers de mois de salaire par année d’ancienneté pour les années à partir de dix ans.” In English, one third of a month’s salary per year of service from ten years onwards. The reference salary is the most favourable of the average of the last twelve months or the last three months, including bonuses pro rata, and many collective agreements, particularly in banking, consulting, chemicals, and the Syntec agreement for engineers and consultants, provide a higher contractual severance, called the indemnité conventionnelle, which you must compare line by line with the legal minimum.
A concrete example helps. Take a British account manager in Paris with four years of service and a gross reference salary of 3,500 euros. The legal minimum is one quarter of a month per year, so 875 euros times four, which is 3,500 euros. With twelve years of service, the calculation is one quarter for the first ten years plus one third for the last two years. On the same salary, that is 8,750 euros for the first ten years plus about 2,333 euros for the last two, roughly 11,083 euros, before any more generous collective agreement. Add unused paid holiday, called the indemnité compensatrice de congés payés, any pro rata bonus, overtime, and the profit-sharing balance where relevant. All of this must appear on the solde de tout compte, the itemised final settlement receipt, accompanied by the certificat de travail, the employment certificate, and the attestation France Travail, the official statement for the unemployment authority formerly called Pôle emploi, without which you cannot register for the allocation chômage, the unemployment benefit. Do not sign the final receipt under pressure. You have six months to contest it, and signing with a reservation preserves your rights.
Two British-specific points deserve attention. First, unemployment benefit depends on affiliation in France, not on National Insurance in the United Kingdom. If you worked and paid contributions in France, you apply to France Travail with the employer attestation. Periods worked in the United Kingdom before Brexit or after can sometimes be aggregated under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement coordination rules, but you will need the U1 portable document from HMRC and patience, so register in France promptly and declare honestly. Second, tax and social charges on severance are partly sheltered but not fully exempt. The legal minimum and, within limits, the contractual severance are exempt from income tax and partly from social contributions, while amounts paid to settle a dispute have their own thresholds. Keep the severance breakdown for your next French tax return, forms 2042 and 2047, and for your UK self-assessment if you remain dual resident, because the France-UK double tax treaty allocates taxing rights but does not make the payment invisible.
If any of these sums are missing, write to the employer by recorded delivery, setting out each head of claim with figures and attaching payslips. That letter interrupts arguments later about bad faith and starts the paper trail the labour court will read. Keep the proof of posting. Many cases settle at this stage once the employer sees the calculation.
B. How do I bring an unfair dismissal claim before the prud’hommes, within what deadline, and what can the judge award?
The labour court, called the conseil de prud’hommes, is the specialist court for employment disputes. It sits in panels of employer and employee judges, with a professional judge breaking ties. For a British claimant living in France, jurisdiction is usually the prud’hommes of the place where you worked, where the company is registered, or where you were hired if you worked from home. Proceedings start with a claim form, called the requête, setting out your identity, your employer’s identity, the facts in chronological order, and each claim with figures. Since 2020 the first stage is a conciliation hearing, called the bureau de conciliation et d’orientation, where a settlement can be approved. If there is no settlement, the case moves to the judgment panel, called the bureau de jugement. Hearings are in French, so as a British litigant you may be assisted by a lawyer, and if your French is limited you should arrange interpretation and have key documents translated. Bring the contract, the invitation and dismissal letters with envelopes, payslips for the last twelve months, the final settlement documents, medical certificates if relevant, and a timeline of events.
The deadline is the point most British claimants underestimate, because in England an employment tribunal claim must be started within three months. In France the period is longer but strict. The Labour Code provides: “Toute action portant sur la rupture du contrat de travail se prescrit par douze mois à compter de la notification de la rupture.” That is article L. 1471-1 of the Labour Code. In English, any claim about the ending of the contract is time-barred twelve months after notification of the ending. Notification means the date you receive the dismissal letter, not the end of the notice or the last day in the office. Claims about wages and performance of the contract during employment generally have two years, but the challenge to the dismissal itself, the request for damages for dismissal without real and serious cause, and most nullity arguments linked to the dismissal must be filed within twelve months. Do not wait for ACAS-style conciliation to run its course as in England. There is no ACAS early conciliation in France. File in time and conciliate inside the court timetable.
If the judge finds the dismissal was for a cause that was not real and serious, the judge can propose reinstatement, called réintégration, with preserved seniority and benefits. In practice reinstatement is rare because one side usually refuses it. The Labour Code then provides: “Si le licenciement d’un salarié survient pour une cause qui n’est pas réelle et sérieuse, le juge peut proposer la réintégration du salarié dans l’entreprise, avec maintien de ses avantages acquis.” It continues: “Si l’une ou l’autre des parties refuse cette réintégration, le juge octroie au salarié une indemnité à la charge de l’employeur, dont le montant est compris entre les montants minimaux et maximaux fixés dans le tableau ci-dessous.” That wording is article L. 1235-3 of the Labour Code. In English, if the dismissal was for a cause that was not real and serious, the judge may first propose reinstatement with preserved benefits, and if either side refuses, awards the employee compensation paid by the employer, between the minimum and maximum amounts in the scale table. This is the Macron scale, called the barème Macron, a table that sets compensation by years of service and company size. For example, with four years of service in a company with at least eleven employees, the range runs from three to five months of gross salary, while very short service carries a lower floor. The judge chooses within the range according to the harm suffered, age, difficulty finding work, and breach of procedure, and can add the statutory severance already described, which sits outside the scale.
The Cour de cassation confirmed that this scale system, combined with the separate remedies for null dismissals and procedural breaches, provides adequate and dissuasive compensation under international law. In a recent published ruling the court recalled: “si le licenciement d’un salarié survient pour une cause qui n’est pas réelle et sérieuse, le juge octroie au salarié une indemnité à la charge de l’employeur, dont le montant est compris entre des montants minimaux et maximaux fixés par ce texte.” That quotation is taken from Court of Cassation, Social Chamber, 9 April 2025, appeal no. 24-13.958, which cites articles L. 1235-3, L. 1235-3-1 and L. 1235-4 and holds that these provisions reasonably compensate the unjustified loss of employment and deter employers. For your case, the message is that the scale applies to ordinary unfair dismissal, but it does not cap every claim. Separate damages remain available for a flawed procedure, for late or missing final documents, for moral harassment, and for the cases of nullity described next.
Nullity, called nullité, is the strongest remedy and escapes the scale. The Labour Code provides: “L ‘article L. 1235-3 n’est pas applicable lorsque le juge constate que le licenciement est entaché d’une des nullités prévues au deuxième alinéa du présent article” That is article L. 1235-3-1 of the Labour Code. In English, the scale does not apply when the judge finds the dismissal tainted by one of the nullities listed in the second paragraph. The same article adds that where the employee does not seek reinstatement or reinstatement is impossible, the judge awards compensation: “qui ne peut être inférieure aux salaires des six derniers mois.” In English, which cannot be less than the salary of the last six months. The listed nullities include breach of a fundamental freedom, moral or sexual harassment, discriminatory dismissal, dismissal after whistleblowing, dismissal linked to maternity or paternity, and dismissal for exercising the right to strike or standing as a staff representative. A British employee sacked the week after announcing a pregnancy, after reporting safety breaches, or because of English origin should plead nullity expressly and claim the six-month floor, not the ordinary scale. The evidence standard is demanding, so gather contemporaneous messages, medical notes, and witness statements early.
Practically, frame your claim in layers. First, procedural defects: missing or late invitation, short five-day period, missing reasons, early posting. Second, absence of real and serious cause on the facts, with your evidence attached. Third, where the facts support it, nullity with the six-month minimum. Fourth, quantified financial claims: notice, severance top-up to the collective agreement, holiday pay, and delivery of corrected documents under a daily penalty, called astreinte. Many prud’hommes cases settle at conciliation or on the steps of the judgment hearing once the employer prices the scale, the severance top-up, and the procedural damages together. Any settlement, called a transaction or a conciliation record, should state the gross and net amounts, the tax and social treatment, the date of payment, the handover of corrected papers, confidentiality limits, and an express waiver limited to the dispute, so that your residence renewal and unemployment registration are not affected.
Conclusion
A dismissal in France stands or falls on paper. For a British employee, the winning file contains the invitation letter with its envelope, the five-day count to the meeting, the dismissal letter with its stated reasons, proof of your right to work, payslips, and a precise calculation of notice, legal and contractual severance, and holiday pay. Challenge the procedure, contest the cause as not real and serious, reserve nullity where the facts allow it, and file before the prud’hommes within twelve months of receiving the dismissal letter. With that file in order, you negotiate from strength, whether the outcome is a corrected settlement or a judgment that applies the Macron scale or the six-month nullity floor.
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If you have just received an invitation to a preliminary meeting or a dismissal letter in France, do not wait for the twelve-month deadline to run. Our firm offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to review your letters, count your deadlines, and calculate your notice and severance.
Call Maître Reda Kohen on +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page. We assist British employees across Paris and the Île-de-France with dismissals, settlement negotiations, and claims before the labour court.