You hired your first employee in France full of hope, and a few months later the situation has turned sour. Sales are late, the fit is wrong, instructions given by video call from London, New York or Dubai are ignored, and every French contact tells you that firing someone here is a legal minefield. From abroad, the temptation is strong to send a short email ending the contract, stop paying the salary and move on. That single email can cost you a year of salary in damages before the French labour court, the conseil de prud’hommes, plus the unpaid severance, notice and accrued leave you owed anyway. French dismissal law does not forgive improvisation, but it rewards employers who follow the written procedure step by step. This guide explains, in plain English, how a foreign-based founder or parent company dismisses a French employee on an open-ended contract, known as a CDI (contrat à durée indéterminée), without creating a losing court file, how to compute every euro owed on the last payslip, when a negotiated separation called rupture conventionnelle is the smarter exit, and how the labour court reviews the case if the employee sues. It covers only private-sector employees working in France under French law, whether hired by your French subsidiary, your SAS or SARL, or directly by the foreign company registered with URSSAF, the French social security collection agency. Every French acronym is explained on first use. The legal rules cited below were verified against the official texts in force on 21 September 2026, and the two court decisions quoted were read in full. If you are still at the hiring stage, start with our pillar guide on setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, from bank account and Kbis to VAT and first hire, then come back here when separation becomes unavoidable.

I. The dismissal procedure you must follow to the letter, even from thousands of miles away

French law starts from a simple principle that surprises many foreign employers: every dismissal for personal reasons, meaning any reason linked to the employee rather than to economic difficulties, must rest on what the statute calls a real and serious cause. Article L1232-1 of the Labour Code states this in one sentence: “Il est justifié par une cause réelle et sérieuse.” Those five words carry the whole case. Real means the facts exist, are verifiable and precise enough to be checked by a judge, not a vague feeling that the collaboration is difficult. Serious means the facts are grave enough to make continuing the contract impossible, or at least to justify ending it. Poor performance can qualify, but only if you can show concrete examples, dated warnings, missed targets set in advance and support offered to the employee. A personality clash, a loss of trust stated in general terms, or the wish to replace the employee with someone cheaper never qualifies. Because many foreign founders discover this rule only when they receive a writ, the practical advice is blunt: before launching any procedure, write down five to ten dated facts with the evidence attached to each, emails, appraisals, warnings, figures, and ask yourself whether an outside judge reading only that file would find the dismissal justified. If the answer is no, consider the negotiated route described in section B below rather than forcing a dismissal that will fail. The cause you choose also determines the rest of the procedure, because the dismissal letter fixes the boundaries of any later dispute, and a judge will refuse to consider motives invented after the letter was sent.

A. Why the invitation to the preliminary meeting and the dismissal letter decide the whole case

The dismissal procedure for personal reasons has three mandatory steps, and skipping or rushing any of them creates an automatic penalty even when the underlying reason is solid. Step one is the invitation to a preliminary meeting, called entretien préalable. Article L1232-2 of the Labour Code provides: “L’employeur qui envisage de licencier un salarié le convoque, avant toute décision, à un entretien préalable. La convocation est effectuée par lettre recommandée ou par lettre remise en main propre contre décharge.” The letter must state its purpose, and the decisive time limit follows: “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.” Five full working days, not counting Sundays and public holidays, must separate the presentation of the letter from the meeting. From abroad, the classic mistake is to send the invitation by ordinary email or to hold the meeting by video call the next day. Email is not one of the two methods the statute recognises, and a meeting held too early poisons the rest of the file. The safe method is a registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt sent to the home address, or hand delivery against a signed receipt if someone you trust is on site in France. During the meeting itself, the employee may come with a staff member or, in small companies with no staff representatives, an outside adviser from an official list, and you must state the reasons under consideration and listen to the explanations. You do not have to hold the meeting in person if you cannot travel: you may give a written mandate, called a pouvoir, to a person who belongs to the company or, for a small structure, to a local counsel or HR provider who will conduct the meeting in your name. That representative must carry proof of the mandate, must be able to explain the file, and must take notes, because the employee will later describe the same meeting to the court. Never announce the dismissal at the end of the meeting. The law requires the decision to come later, after reflection, and any letter sent the same day proves the meeting was a sham.

Step two is the dismissal letter itself, and it deserves the care of a court pleading because it will become exhibit number one before the prud’hommes. Article L1232-6 of the Labour Code requires notification “par lettre recommandée avec avis de réception”, states that “Cette lettre comporte l’énoncé du ou des motifs invoqués par l’employeur”, and adds the second decisive time limit: “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.” Two full working days after the scheduled date of the meeting, even if the employee did not attend. The letter must describe precise facts, dates, places, figures, prior warnings, rather than conclusions. Compare a vague formula such as your work is unsatisfactory with a verifiable account: written targets set on 12 January and recalled on 3 March, covering fifteen qualified appointments per week, four booked in February and six in March, with written warnings on 20 February and 10 March producing no improvement. Only the second version gives the judge something to verify. The labour ministry publishes official template letters, modèles, that you may use, and using them avoids forgetting a mandatory mention. Since a 2017 reform, an employer who realises the letter is too vague may clarify the motives afterwards, at his own initiative or at the employee’s request, within a short decree-set time limit, and Article L1235-2 of the Labour Code provides that the letter, as clarified where applicable, “fixe les limites du litige en ce qui concerne les motifs de licenciement”, meaning the court will judge you only on the motives written in that letter. The same article prices procedural mistakes: where the dismissal has a real and serious cause but the procedure was breached, for example no proper invitation or no meeting, “le juge accorde au salarié, à la charge de l’employeur, une indemnité qui ne peut être supérieure à un mois de salaire.” One month of salary for a missed step, on top of everything else. For a foreign employer, the operational checklist is therefore short and rigid: registered letter for every step, count working days on a calendar that includes French public holidays, keep every postal receipt and acknowledgment, mandate a representative in writing if you cannot attend, and have the dismissal letter reviewed before posting, because once posted it cannot be rewritten, only clarified within the narrow legal window.

B. When the negotiated exit called rupture conventionnelle is safer than a dismissal

Many foreign employers discover the rupture conventionnelle, the negotiated termination by mutual agreement, only after launching a conflictual dismissal, yet it is often the cleanest way to part with a first employee when the working relationship is broken but neither side wants a court battle. Article L1237-11 of the Labour Code sets the foundation: “L’employeur et le salarié peuvent convenir en commun des conditions de la rupture du contrat de travail qui les lie.” The same article adds two warnings that matter enormously in practice: “La rupture conventionnelle, exclusive du licenciement ou de la démission, ne peut être imposée par l’une ou l’autre des parties.” It cannot be imposed, and it excludes dismissal and resignation, which means you may not use it as a disguised dismissal forced on an employee under threat, nor as a way to dodge the dismissal procedure while telling the employee he is fired. The process runs in four stages. First, at least one meeting between employer and employee to agree on the conditions, above all the termination payment, which by law cannot be lower than the statutory severance described in Part II below, and very often in practice sits between that floor and two or three months of salary for short seniority. The employee may be assisted, and so may you. Second, a fifteen calendar day cooling-off period, délai de rétractation, during which either side may withdraw by letter, starting the day after signature. Third, an application for official approval, homologation, to the DREETS, the regional directorate for employment, labour and solidarities that acts as the local labour authority. Article L1237-14 of the Labour Code is categorical: “La validité de la convention est subordonnée à son homologation.” Without approval, the agreement is void and the contract continues. The authority has fifteen working days from receipt to check consent and the minimum payment, and silence means approval. The request is now filed online through the official TéléRC portal, which a representative in France can handle with a mandate, and the employee receives unemployment benefits from France Travail, the public employment and benefits agency, exactly as after a dismissal, which makes the offer acceptable to many employees. Fourth, the contract ends on the agreed date, at the earliest the day after approval. Any dispute over the agreement, its approval or its refusal goes to the prud’hommes, and the employee has twelve months from approval to sue.

The decisive advantage for a foreign employer is risk control: there is no cause to prove, no dismissal letter to defend, and the total cost is known and capped in the signed agreement. The decisive trap is consent. A rupture conventionnelle signed after pressure, threats, harassment or deceit can be cancelled by the court, and cancellation means the separation is reclassified as a dismissal without real and serious cause, with the full Macron scale damages described below. The Cour de cassation, the supreme court for labour matters, policed this boundary in a full-text verified ruling of 23 January 2019, appeal number 17-21.550, available on the official court website at Cour de cassation, chambre sociale, 23 January 2019, no. 17-21.550. The court of appeal had cancelled the agreement simply because the employee had suffered moral harassment, without requiring proof of a defect in consent. The Cour de cassation quashed that reasoning with a sentence every foreign employer should memorise: “en l’absence de vice du consentement, l’existence de faits de harcèlement moral n’affecte pas en elle-même la validité de la convention de rupture intervenue en application de l’article L. 1237-11 du code du travail” In plain terms, a difficult atmosphere alone does not void the agreement, but any fraud, violence or defect that corrupted the employee’s consent does. From abroad, the practical consequences are concrete. Never present the rupture conventionnelle as the only alternative to a dismissal letter already drafted. Hold genuine meetings, leave the employee time to think and to seek advice, document that the initiative was shared, and pay at least the legal floor, ideally a little more so the file shows fairness. Be particularly careful if the employee is pregnant, on sick leave for a work-related accident, a protected staff representative, or has just complained of harassment or discrimination: in those situations the DREETS scrutinises consent closely, some categories require a different procedure entirely, and a quick call to counsel before proposing anything is cheaper than defending a cancellation claim. If you hired without creating a French subsidiary and the worker is employed directly by the foreign company, the same TéléRC approval route applies, because the contract is governed by French law and the competent DREETS is the one of the place of work; our companion guide on hiring in France without a subsidiary, from URSSAF registration to payslip explains that framework in detail.

II. What the separation will really cost and how the labour court reviews it from Paris to the provinces

Whether the exit takes the form of a dismissal or a negotiated agreement, the last payslip moment always arrives, and foreign employers systematically underestimate it. French law stacks several payments that each obey their own rule, and forgetting one of them hands the employee an easy claim with payslips as proof. Understanding the arithmetic before signing anything is what separates a controlled exit costing two months of salary from a court-ordered bill of eight.

A. How to calculate the severance, the notice and the final documents to the euro

The first payment is the statutory severance, called indemnité légale de licenciement. Article L1234-9 of the Labour Code grants it to any employee on an open-ended contract dismissed with at least “8 mois d’ancienneté ininterrompus au service du même employeur”, except in cases of serious or gross misconduct, faute grave ou lourde. Below eight months of service, no statutory severance is owed for a dismissal, though the applicable collective agreement, convention collective, very often grants more, and the rupture conventionnelle always requires at least this floor. The amount is set by Article R1234-2 of the Labour Code: “Un quart de mois de salaire par année d’ancienneté pour les années jusqu’à dix ans” plus “Un tiers de mois de salaire par année d’ancienneté pour les années à partir de dix ans.” The reference salary is the most favourable to the employee of the average of the last twelve months or the last three months, including bonuses pro rata. Take a concrete example a foreign founder will recognise: a first hire paid 3,000 euros gross per month, dismissed after eighteen months. The severance equals one quarter of a month per year, so 3,000 divided by 4 times 1.5 years, which is 1,125 euros. After three full years, the same salary gives 2,250 euros. These sums look modest, and that is exactly why founders relax, but they are only the first layer, and collective agreements in sectors like advertising, consulting or retail regularly double them, so the applicable convention collective must be read before any promise is made. Many founders also forget that the severance is exempt from social charges and income tax within limits, which makes a slightly higher negotiated payment cheaper for the company than it looks and more attractive to the employee than a salary increase of the same net amount. Payroll must handle the declaration correctly to URSSAF, because a wrongly charged exemption triggers a reassessment later, a point developed in our guide to URSSAF audits of foreign-owned French companies and how to challenge them from abroad.

The second payment is the notice period, called préavis or délai-congé, or the compensation that replaces it. Unless the dismissal is for serious misconduct, the employee is entitled to a notice whose length depends on seniority and the collective agreement, typically one month under two years of service and two months above, longer for managers, cadres. The employer may ask the employee to work the notice or release him from it, but the money is owed in both cases. Article L1234-5 of the Labour Code provides: “Lorsque le salarié n’exécute pas le préavis, il a droit, sauf s’il a commis une faute grave, à une indemnité compensatrice.” The compensation equals the salary the employee would have received, including paid leave accrual on the notice itself, and it “se cumule avec l’indemnité de licenciement”, meaning the two stack. A founder who tells the employee on Monday not to come back and pays only the severance therefore owes the full notice on top, and the employee’s lawyer will claim it as a matter of arithmetic. The third layer is accrued paid leave, congés payés: France grants two and a half working days of leave per month worked, and every day unused on the last day must be paid as indemnité compensatrice de congés payés, calculated under the most favourable of the tenth-of-salary or salary-maintenance methods. The fourth layer is administrative and non-negotiable: on the last day the employer must hand over the work certificate, certificat de travail, the final settlement receipt, reçu pour solde de tout compte, and the France Travail certificate, attestation France Travail, which allows the employee to claim unemployment benefits. Late or missing documents cause separate daily penalties and immediate interim claims, and a foreign employer with no one on site should mandate payroll or counsel to issue them on time. Two practical warnings close this section. First, salary and final payments must be made by traceable transfer to the declared bank account; cash or foreign-account arrangements create proof and URSSAF problems. Second, never deduct alleged debts, missing equipment or training costs from the last payslip by compensation without a written agreement or court order, because unlawful deductions are reimbursed with interest and cast a shadow over the whole file before the judge.

B. How the Macron scale caps damages and why the twelve-month deadline changes everything

If the employee challenges the dismissal, the case goes to the conseil de prud’hommes, the specialised labour court composed of employer and employee judges, with a conciliation hearing first and a judgment usually within twelve to eighteen months in Paris and the Île-de-France region. The employee asks the court to declare the dismissal without real and serious cause and to award damages, and since September 2017 those damages are framed by the mandatory scale known as the barème Macron. Article L1235-3 of the Labour Code 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.” Reinstatement is almost always refused by one side, and then “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.” The table that follows is the heart of the employer’s risk calculation. With less than one year of service, the maximum is one month of salary in larger companies, two months at two years, three and a half months at three years, climbing to twenty months at thirty years, with a minimum of three months once two years of service are reached. In companies that habitually employ fewer than eleven employees, the minimums are lowered, for example half a month at one year instead of one, which directly benefits the foreign founder whose French subsidiary has one to three staff. Two features of the scale matter for strategy. First, the judge may take account of severance already paid, except the statutory severance itself, when setting the award within the scale. Second, the scale is both a floor and a ceiling for unfair dismissal damages: the employee cannot obtain less than the minimum or more than the maximum on that head of claim, though separate heads such as procedural irregularity, missing documents or harassment can add up within their own caps. A first hire dismissed after one year on 3,000 euros therefore risks at most 3,000 euros in unfair-dismissal damages in a small company, plus the procedural penalties described earlier, which transforms an emotional dispute into a calculable business decision.

For years employees argued that the scale should be set aside in their individual case to obtain higher compensation, invoking the right to adequate compensation under international law. The Cour de cassation has now closed that debate in terms a foreign employer can rely on. In a full-text verified ruling of 4 June 2025, appeal number G 24-15.145, published on the official court website at Cour de cassation, chambre sociale, 4 June 2025, no. 24-15.145, an employer challenged a court of appeal that had awarded triple the statutory maximum after an individual proportionality review. The Cour de cassation recalled that the scale and its accompanying provisions “permettent raisonnablement l’indemnisation de la perte injustifiée de l’emploi et assurent le caractère dissuasif des sommes mises à la charge de l’employeur”, that they are “de nature à permettre le versement d’une indemnité adéquate ou une réparation considérée comme appropriée au sens de l’article 10 de la Convention n° 158 de l’Organisation internationale du travail (OIT)”, and concluded: “Il en résulte que les dispositions de l’article L. 1235-3 du code du travail sont compatibles avec les stipulations de l’article 10 de la Convention précitée.” Judges must therefore set compensation inside the scale and may not disregard it because of the employee’s personal circumstances. The ruling does not make dismissal free: minimums remain mandatory, and null dismissals, for example for discrimination or violation of a protected status, fall outside the scale with a minimum of six months. But for an ordinary failed first hire, the exposure is now readable in advance, which is precisely why settling at conciliation for an amount inside the scale often serves both sides better than two years of proceedings.

The final strategic point is time, and here the clock favours the organised employer. Article L1471-1 of the Labour Code states: “Toute action portant sur la rupture du contrat de travail se prescrit par douze mois à compter de la notification de la rupture.” Twelve months from notification of the termination, not from the last payslip or from the discovery of a grievance. An employee who waits thirteen months to challenge the dismissal loses, and the rupture conventionnelle has its own identical twelve-month limit running from approval. From abroad, this means two reflexes. First, keep the complete proof file for at least two years: signed invitation letters with postal receipts, meeting notes, the mandate of your representative, the dismissal letter with its acknowledgment, payroll records, warnings and appraisals. Second, if you receive a writ, check the date immediately, because a time-barred claim can be defeated at the start, while a timely claim must be answered with settlement authority calibrated on the scale before legal costs accumulate. Foreign founders based in Paris and the Île-de-France region should note that the Paris prud’hommes dockets move faster than the national average and that conciliation sessions genuinely settle a large share of short-seniority cases, so preparing a settlement range before the first hearing, rather than after losing, is the economically rational move.

Conclusion

Dismissing a first French employee from abroad is neither impossible nor lawless: it is a written procedure with fixed time limits, a severance formula that can be computed to the euro, a negotiated alternative with official approval, and a damages scale that makes the court risk predictable. The employers who lose are almost never those with the weakest substantive reason; they are those who notified by email, skipped the five-day wait, wrote a two-line dismissal letter, forgot the notice and the France Travail certificate, or imposed a rupture conventionnelle under pressure. Reverse each of those mistakes and the file becomes defensible: registered letters counted in working days, a mandated representative at the meeting, a dismissal letter with dated facts, severance under Articles L1234-9 and R1234-2 checked against the collective agreement, notice and leave paid, final documents delivered on time, and, where consent is genuine, a rupture conventionnelle approved by the DREETS. With the Cour de cassation confirming the Macron scale and the twelve-month deadline closing old files, a short-seniority separation can be budgeted and closed within months rather than litigated for years. Act early, document everything, and take advice before posting the letter rather than after receiving the writ.

Need a quick opinion on your case

If you are about to dismiss your first employee in France, or if a writ from the prud’hommes has just arrived at your French address while you live abroad, get a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page. We review dismissal letters, compute severance and notice, draft rupture conventionnelle agreements and defend foreign employers before the labour courts of Paris and the Île-de-France region.