You opened your French company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, received the Kbis extract that proves your company legally exists, hired your first employee in France, and everything felt like progress. Then the relationship breaks down: the performance never arrives, the trust evaporates, or the business simply cannot carry the cost. A founder used to employment at will writes a short termination email and moves on, and that single email can cost the French company tens of thousands of euros. France does not know employment at will. Every exit from a permanent French employment contract, called a CDI (contrat à durée indéterminée, the open-ended contract that is the default form of hiring in France), follows a mandatory choreography of delays, letters and payments, and the labour court, called the conseil de prud’hommes, enforces that choreography strictly against foreign employers who plead ignorance of the rules. This guide explains, in plain English, the two doors through which a foreign founder can lawfully end a first French hire: inside the trial period, where the exit is fast and cheap when handled correctly, and after the trial period, where a dismissal for personal reasons requires a summons, a meeting, a reasoned letter, severance pay, a notice period and a clean set of closing documents. Every acronym is explained, every decisive rule is quoted from the exact statute or court decision with an official link, and every step includes the practical move that works when you live abroad. If you are still planning the hire itself, read first our guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, then use this article when the separation becomes unavoidable.

I. Can you fire your first French employee during the trial period, and what does it really cost

A. How long is the trial period for your first hire and how do you end it without severance

The trial period, called période d’essai, is the cheapest exit door in French employment law, but it only exists if you wrote it into the contract. An oral understanding, a promise letter that says nothing about a trial, or a standard foreign template without a trial clause means there is no trial period at all, and every separation then follows the full dismissal procedure described in Part II. For a founder hiring from abroad, the first check is therefore a paperwork check: open the signed CDI, find the clause that states the trial duration in plain figures, and confirm that the employee signed it. A company-level or branch-level collective agreement, called convention collective, can also cap the duration below the statutory ceiling, so ask your payroll provider which agreement applies to your activity code before you assume the maximum is available. When the clause exists and the ceiling is respected, the trial gives both sides a testing window whose legal purpose is narrow and documented: La période d’essai permet à l’employeur d’évaluer les compétences du salarié dans son travail, notamment au regard de son expérience, et au salarié d’apprécier si les fonctions occupées lui conviennent. That sentence matters because a court that suspects you used the trial for another purpose, for example as cheap cover for a temporary surge in orders, will treat the breakup as abusive, as Section B explains.

The statutory ceilings depend on the employee’s category, and they are short: Le contrat de travail à durée indéterminée peut comporter une période d’essai dont la durée maximale est : 1° Pour les ouvriers et les employés, de deux mois ; 2° Pour les agents de maîtrise et les techniciens, de trois mois ; 3° Pour les cadres, de quatre mois. In plain terms, a junior hire gives you about two months of testing, a supervisor or technician three months, and an executive, called a cadre, four months. Most first hires of a foreign-owned subsidiary, an office manager, a sales developer, a junior engineer, fall into the first two categories, which means the cheap exit door closes fast. Renewal is possible only once and only if an extended branch agreement expressly allows it, within hard overall caps: La durée de la période d’essai, renouvellement compris, ne peut pas dépasser : 1° Quatre mois pour les ouvriers et employés ; 2° Six mois pour les agents de maîtrise et techniciens ; 3° Huit mois pour les cadres. A renewal clause signed only by the employer, or a second renewal stacked after the first, is void, and the employee is then deemed to have passed the trial on the original expiry date.

Ending the trial is deliberately simple: no summons to a preliminary meeting, no reasoned dismissal letter, no severance pay. The employer notifies the employee that the trial is ended, preferably in writing with proof of delivery, and the contract stops. Simplicity is not the absence of rules, however, because the statute imposes a warning period, called délai de prévenance, that grows with the time already spent in the company: Lorsqu’il est mis fin, par l’employeur, au contrat en cours ou au terme de la période d’essai définie aux articles L. 1221-19 à L. 1221-24 ou à l’article L. 1242-10 pour les contrats stipulant une période d’essai d’au moins une semaine, le salarié est prévenu dans un délai qui ne peut être inférieur à : 1° Vingt-quatre heures en deçà de huit jours de présence ; 2° Quarante-huit heures entre huit jours et un mois de présence ; 3° Deux semaines après un mois de présence ; 4° Un mois après trois mois de présence. A founder who ends the trial of a three-month employee must therefore warn that employee one full month in advance, which in practice means deciding at the end of month two. Two traps catch foreign employers here. First, serving the warning late does not extend the trial: La période d’essai, renouvellement inclus, ne peut être prolongée du fait de la durée du délai de prévenance. If the trial expires while the warning is still running, the employee becomes permanent and only a full dismissal can end the contract. Second, skipping the warning is not free: the same article provides that Lorsque le délai de prévenance n’a pas été respecté, son inexécution ouvre droit pour le salarié, sauf s’il a commis une faute grave, à une indemnité compensatrice. That compensation equals the wages and benefits, including paid-leave compensation, the employee would have received by working through the warning period. It is not severance and not damages, but it is payable on top of the salary owed and the compensation for accrued paid leave, and the final payslip, the work certificate and the unemployment attestation for France Travail (the public body that pays unemployment benefits and was formerly called Pôle emploi) must still be delivered and declared through the DSN (déclaration sociale nominative, the monthly online payroll return through which all French payroll and social data is filed, feeding URSSAF, the social contributions collector, and the pension bodies).

B. Why an abusive trial breakup still costs damages even when severance is zero

The employer’s freedom inside the trial period is wide but not absolute, and the Cour de cassation, the supreme court for labour disputes sitting in Paris, drew the line in terms every foreign founder should memorize: Il résulte de ce texte que l’employeur peut discrétionnairement mettre fin aux relations contractuelles avant l’expiration de la période d’essai, sous la réserve de ne pas faire dégénérer ce droit en abus. That sentence comes from a Social Chamber ruling of 12 February 2025, appeal No. 23-21.165, and it governs every trial breakup in France. Discretionary means you do not have to prove poor performance the way a dismissal letter must; abuse means the judge will still punish a breakup driven by motives foreign to the trial’s purpose, such as discrimination, retaliation for exercising a right, or using the trial as a disposable short-term contract to absorb a temporary peak in business. The distinction is fact-heavy, which is exactly why a founder operating from abroad must build the paper trail early instead of reconstructing it after the claim arrives.

The 12 February 2025 case is worth reading closely because its facts resemble the mistakes foreign-owned companies make. An employee living in Switzerland was promised a finance manager post, organized an international move, and received 90,000 euros from the manager to help buy an apartment, all on the basis of a hiring promise dated 20 November 2018 that mentioned no trial period; she then had no practical choice but to sign a contract that did contain one, and the employer ended the trial on 27 November 2019. The appeal court called the breakup abusive and awarded damages, but the Cour de cassation quashed that part of the ruling, holding that circumstances predating the signature of the contract, however harsh, cannot alone characterize an abusive breakup of the trial itself. The lesson cuts both ways for a foreign employer. On one side, the ruling confirms that ending a trial is a discretionary right and that courts may not invent abuse from the hiring context alone. On the other side, it confirms that abuse is judged on the breakup decision itself: contemporaneous proof that the employee’s professional conduct justified the exit defeats the claim, while silence in the file invites the judge to infer an illicit motive. Concretely, from the first week of the trial, keep dated performance notes, written objectives, meeting summaries sent by email, and any warnings about missed targets, all consistent with the statutory purpose of letting the employer assess skills. If the trial covers a sales role, keep the pipeline reports; if it covers an administrative role, keep the error logs and correction requests. A founder in another time zone should insist that the local manager sends a short monthly written assessment, because the absence of any documented professional reason at the moment of the breakup is the single strongest argument an employee’s lawyer will use before the prud’hommes.

Two neighbouring risks deserve a paragraph because they routinely ambush foreign founders at this stage. First, discrimination: ending a trial after learning of a pregnancy, a disability, a union mandate or the employee’s foreign-sounding request to take legally owed leave converts a cheap exit into a void or damages-bearing breakup with far heavier consequences than an ordinary unfair dismissal. Second, the false-freelancer trap: if your first hire was labelled a contractor but worked like an employee, ending the relationship does not end the risk, since reclassification brings back-pay for contributions and dismissal protection with it. Our guide on freelancers reclassified as employees explains how URSSAF pursues those files and how a foreign company answers. The discipline is the same in all three situations: decide early, document professional reasons in real time, notify the breakup in writing before the ceiling expires, serve the full warning period, pay the warning compensation and accrued leave when the warning was short, and deliver the closing documents. A trial breakup handled that way typically costs a few weeks of wages; a trial breakup handled by email from abroad with no file behind it becomes a prud’hommes case about abuse, discrimination or concealed employment, and the price jumps from hundreds to tens of thousands of euros.

II. How do you dismiss a French employee after the trial period without losing before the prud’hommes

A. What summons, meeting and reasoned letter keep a dismissal lawful when you live abroad

Once the trial ceiling has passed, the employee holds a CDI and can only be dismissed for a real and serious cause through a strict three-step procedure that applies to every employer in France, including a company whose owner never sets foot in the country. The cause may be personal, meaning linked to the employee such as persistent underperformance, misconduct or repeated absence, or economic, meaning linked to the company such as a lasting loss of orders or a reorganization; this guide covers the personal dismissal, which is the situation most foreign founders face with a first hire, while collective economic dismissals trigger additional consultation and notification duties that always require local counsel. The procedure starts with a summons to a preliminary meeting, and the statute commands each detail: L’employeur qui envisage de licencier un salarié le convoque, avant toute décision, à un entretien préalable. The summons must travel by registered letter or by hand delivery against a signed receipt: La convocation est effectuée par lettre recommandée ou par lettre remise en main propre contre décharge. It must state its purpose: Cette lettre indique l’objet de la convocation. And it imposes a waiting period that cannot be shortened: 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 means five days excluding Sundays and public holidays, counted from the day after presentation of the registered letter, and a meeting held on day four voids the rest of the procedure even if the underlying performance complaints were genuine. The government’s own procedure page for dismissal on personal grounds, published by the Ministry of Labour, walks through the same sequence and is a useful cross-check alongside the statute: La procédure en cas de licenciement pour motif personnel.

The meeting itself is the employee’s defence stage, not a formality. The employee may come alone or accompanied by a staff member of the company, or, where no staff representatives exist, by an outside adviser chosen from an official departmental list; the employer states the reasons envisaged and listens to the explanations given. A foreign founder does not have to fly to Paris for this meeting: a written mandate can empower a local manager, the company lawyer or another representative to conduct it, but the mandate should be explicit, dated and kept with the file, because an employee who claims to have faced a person with no authority to hear the defence will raise that point before the prud’hommes. After the meeting, a second waiting period applies before the decision can be sent: Lorsque l’employeur décide de licencier un salarié, il lui notifie sa décision par lettre recommandée avec avis de réception. That letter must state the reasons: Cette lettre comporte l’énoncé du ou des motifs invoqués par l’employeur. And it cannot leave early: 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. The labour ministry publishes model letters by decree that foreign employers should use as a skeleton, since the models force the drafter to state precise, dated, verifiable facts instead of general dissatisfaction. Precision is decisive because the letter fixes the boundaries of the dispute: the judge examines only the motives stated in the letter, and a vague letter about an attitude problem, without dates, examples or prior warnings, is routinely held to lack a real and serious cause. The practical method that survives judicial review is a short factual narrative per grievance, each with dates, each supported by a document already shown or at least known during the employment, and each connected to the employee’s duties. Service-public, the official portal of the French administration, summarizes the remedies when the dismissal is held to have no real and serious cause, a void motive or a procedural defect: Licenciement pour motif personnel nul, sans cause réelle et sérieuse ou irrégulier.

Three timing points complete the procedural picture for a founder managing the file from another country. First, send every letter by registered mail with acknowledgment of receipt, called LRAR (lettre recommandée avec accusé de réception), and keep the postal receipts, because proof of the five-day and two-day clocks is the employer’s burden and foreign postmarks invite challenges. Second, calendar the employee’s claim deadline: 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, not from the last day worked, which means a clean file with dated receipts lets the company know exactly when the risk expires. Third, never present the dismissal as already decided in the summons or during the meeting, never dismiss by text message or email alone, and never ask the employee to sign a resignation on the spot to avoid the procedure: a forced or prematurely announced decision converts a defensible file into an unfair dismissal with procedural compensation on top. Companies with fewer than eleven employees have no elected staff committee to consult, which simplifies the file, but the summons, the two waiting periods and the reasoned registered letter remain fully mandatory regardless of headcount.

B. How much severance, notice and Macron-scale damages a foreign employer really pays

A lawful dismissal after the trial period always costs three layers, and a lost case adds a fourth. The first layer is statutory severance, called indemnité de licenciement, which is owed as soon as the employee has eight months of unbroken service with the same employer: 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. Serious misconduct, called faute grave, removes the severance right, but ordinary underperformance or a failed working relationship never qualifies, so a foreign founder dismissing a first hire for poor results after one year should budget severance as a certainty, not a risk. The regulatory floor is computed per year of service with credit for extra months: L’indemnité de licenciement prévue à l’article L. 1234-9 ne peut être inférieure à une somme calculée par année de service dans l’entreprise et tenant compte des mois de service accomplis au-delà des années pleines. En cas d’année incomplète, l’indemnité est calculée proportionnellement au nombre de mois complets. And the rates are fixed: L’indemnité de licenciement ne peut être inférieure aux montants suivants : 1° Un quart de mois de salaire par année d’ancienneté pour les années jusqu’à dix ans ; 2° Un tiers de mois de salaire par année d’ancienneté pour les années à partir de dix ans. For a first hire dismissed after one full year on a gross monthly salary of 3,000 euros, the statutory floor is therefore one quarter of a month, about 750 euros, plus a proportional fraction for any extra complete months, calculated on the reference salary defined by regulation. Collective agreements frequently set higher rates, so the payroll provider must confirm whether your convention collective improves the floor before any figure is announced to the employee.

The second layer is the notice period, called préavis, during which the contract continues and salary keeps running. Its length comes from the employment contract, the applicable collective agreement or established practice, typically one to three months for a first hire depending on category and seniority. When the employer releases the employee from working the notice, the salary for the unworked notice remains due as compensation in lieu, alongside compensation for accrued paid leave. Missed notice mechanics are a classic source of small but certain losses: founders who stop paying on the day the letter is received, believing the contract ended with the decision, owe the full notice balance plus leave compensation, and the DSN declarations must reflect the extended paid period so that URSSAF contribution records and France Travail rights align. The third layer is the closing paperwork delivered on the last day: the work certificate required by statute, A l’expiration du contrat de travail, l’employeur délivre au salarié un certificat dont le contenu est déterminé par voie réglementaire, together with the final payslip and the France Travail attestation that lets the former employee claim unemployment benefits, all declared through the DSN. Late or missing documents generate daily penalty claims and feed the employee’s damages case, so instruct the payroll provider to prepare them in parallel with the dismissal letter rather than after the departure.

The fourth layer, damages for a dismissal without a real and serious cause, is where foreign employers discover the Macron scale, called barème Macron, the bracket table that caps the judge’s award according to seniority. The statute opens with the employee’s right to return and then frames the money alternative: 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. Where either side refuses reinstatement, and refusal is the norm, 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 then sets the corridor every founder should know by heart: with no complete year of service the maximum is one month of gross salary; with one complete year the award falls between one and two months; the maximum climbs gradually with seniority toward twenty months for thirty years of service, while companies that habitually employ fewer than eleven staff benefit from lower minimum thresholds in the early years. For a first hire dismissed after a year on 3,000 euros gross, a lost case therefore adds roughly 3,000 to 6,000 euros of damages on top of severance, notice and leave, before procedural compensation and the employee’s legal costs. The Cour de cassation has locked this architecture twice in recent months against challenges based on European and international texts. On 9 April 2025, appeal No. 24-13.958, the Social Chamber restated that 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. On 21 May 2025, appeal No. 24-10.362, it confirmed the same holding word for word and added that the scale, combined with the other statutory remedies, reasonably compensates the unjustified loss of employment and keeps a deterrent effect on employers: 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. Founders should therefore stop hoping a court will break the ceiling to punish the company or, conversely, fearing unlimited exposure: the judge moves inside the bracket according to the employee’s age, salary, length of unemployment and concrete difficulty finding equivalent work, and the founder’s best lever on the amount is a serious, documented file that either wins on cause or keeps the award near the floor.

Where the separation is genuinely consensual rather than imposed, French law offers a negotiated exit, called rupture conventionnelle, that buys legal peace at a known price but follows its own approval ritual. The principle is freedom on both sides: L’employeur et le salarié peuvent convenir en commun des conditions de la rupture du contrat de travail qui les lie. La rupture conventionnelle, exclusive du licenciement ou de la démission, ne peut être imposée par l’une ou l’autre des parties. The signed agreement must grant severance at least equal to the statutory floor: La convention de rupture définit les conditions de celle-ci, notamment le montant de l’indemnité spécifique de rupture conventionnelle qui ne peut pas être inférieur à celui de l’indemnité prévue à l’article L. 1234-9, and each side then has fifteen calendar days to retract in writing. Approval by the administration is what makes the agreement valid: A l’issue du délai de rétractation, la partie la plus diligente adresse une demande d’homologation à l’autorité administrative, avec un exemplaire de la convention de rupture, the authority has fifteen working days to verify compliance and free consent, and La validité de la convention est subordonnée à son homologation. Any later challenge goes to the prud’hommes within twelve months of approval. For a Paris or Île-de-France company there is no separate local dismissal regime: the same statutes apply, the homologation request goes to the DREETS (direction régionale de l’économie, de l’emploi, du travail et des solidarités, the regional authority that approves negotiated terminations) of Île-de-France, and disputes go to the Paris labour court, the conseil de prud’hommes de Paris, whose docket is heavy and whose judges expect the same dated evaluations, postal receipts and reasoned letters described above. The practical difference is logistical: a file assembled in advance, with a named local contact holding a written mandate, moves through homologation and any hearing far faster than a file reconstructed from abroad after the claim arrives.

Conclusion

A foreign founder ends a first French employment contract through one of two doors, and the calendar decides which one is open. Inside the trial ceiling, with a written trial clause, the warning period served and the decision grounded in documented professional observations, the exit costs wages, paid leave, warning compensation when the warning was short, and the standard closing documents, with no severance and no dismissal procedure. Past the ceiling, the dismissal choreography becomes mandatory: a summons stating its purpose, five working days before the meeting, a reasoned registered letter at least two working days after, severance from eight months of service at one quarter month per year of seniority, notice worked or paid, and end-of-contract documents declared through the DSN. A letter without provable cause adds Macron-scale damages that two 2025 rulings of the Cour de cassation have locked inside their brackets, while a genuinely mutual separation can be secured through an approved rupture conventionnelle at a negotiated but floored price. Run the three-point check before every separation, keep every receipt, and the French subsidiary survives its first hiring mistake the way it should: as an administrative task with a budgeted cost, not as a lawsuit managed from another continent.