You run your French company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore. The Kbis, the official identity certificate of your company issued by the greffe, the registry office of the French commercial court, is in hand. The company is entered in the RCS, the Registre du commerce et des sociétés, the French Trade and Companies Register. Revenue starts to flow, and one hire becomes unavoidable: a salesperson in Paris, an engineer in Lyon, an office manager who opens the mail your registered office receives. From abroad, hiring looks like signing a contract and paying a salary. In France, it is a sequence of dated formalities, and the order matters. The DPAE, the déclaration préalable à l’embauche, the pre-hire declaration to the social security bodies, must be filed before the employee starts. The employment contract must be put in writing with the right clauses. The trial period, the période d’essai, obeys strict maximum durations and renewal rules that courts enforce without mercy. Miss one step and the bill arrives from two directions at once: URSSAF, the Union de recouvrement des cotisations de sécurité sociale et d’allocations familiales, the French social security collection agency, on the contributions side, and the conseil de prud’hommes, the French labour court, on the employment side. This article walks a foreign founder through the first hire in France, from the declarations that must precede day one to the contract and trial period that decide what happens if the hire does not work out. It continues our general guide for foreign founders on setting up a company in France, from bank account and Kbis to VAT and first hire, and it explains why the shortcut of engaging a contractor instead of an employee usually backfires, as shown in our analysis of contractors reclassified as employees after an URSSAF audit.

I. Before day one: the declarations France requires for every first hire

A. Why does the DPAE condition everything about your first hire

The DPAE is the single most important formality of your first recruitment. French law makes hiring conditional on a prior nominative declaration to the social protection bodies, and the declaration must be completed before the employee takes up the post. The article L. 1221-10 of the Code du travail, the French Labour Code, states: “L’embauche d’un salarié ne peut intervenir qu’après déclaration nominative accomplie par l’employeur auprès des organismes de protection sociale désignés à cet effet.” In plain English, no hiring without a prior nominative declaration to the designated social protection bodies. The official hiring procedure page on service-public.fr confirms the scope: before hiring an employee, regardless of the nature and duration of the contract, the employer must complete these formalities, starting with the DPAE, and the declaration cannot be filed earlier than eight days before the start date, which gives you a precise filing window in the week before day one. The URSSAF portal hosts the declaration itself, and the acknowledgement of receipt it returns is the document you keep, because you must hand a copy of the DPAE or its acknowledgement to the employee. Practical guidance is available on the official service-public.fr hiring formalities page and the URSSAF DPAE page, and a founder running the company from abroad should read both before promising any start date.

The declaration is not a one-line email. The article R. 1221-1 of the Code du travail provides: “La déclaration préalable à l’embauche comporte les mentions suivantes”, followed by the list of mandatory details: your company identity, APE activity code, address, SIRET enterprise directory number and occupational health service, plus the employee’s surname, first names, sex, date and place of birth, social security number if already registered, and the date and hour of hiring with the nature and duration of the contract. Two consequences follow for a foreign founder. First, you cannot file a DPAE without a SIRET number, so the company must be fully registered before the hire, and the first employee cannot start on the same day the Kbis arrives unless the filing is done in time. Second, the DPAE does far more than notify URSSAF of one arrival. The article R. 1221-2 of the Code du travail provides: “Au moyen de la déclaration préalable à l’embauche, l’employeur accomplit les déclarations et demandes suivantes”, which include registering the employer with the general social security scheme and registering the employee with the CPAM, the Caisse primaire d’assurance maladie, the local health insurance fund. One form therefore opens your employer’s social security account and affiliates your employee to health insurance at the same time, which is why payroll providers treat the DPAE acknowledgement as the green light for everything else.

The sanction for skipping the DPAE is not an administrative reminder. Deliberately avoiding the pre-hire declaration is characterised as concealed work, travail dissimulé, by concealment of salaried employment. The article L. 8221-5 of the Code du travail provides: “Est réputé travail dissimulé par dissimulation d’emploi salarié le fait pour tout employeur : 1° Soit de se soustraire intentionnellement à l’accomplissement de la formalité prévue à l’article L. 1221-10”. The key word is intentionally: a late DPAE combined with genuine payslips and contributions looks like an oversight to be regularised, while an undeclared employee discovered during an inspection points to deliberate concealment. The criminal exposure is severe. The article L. 8224-1 of the Code du travail provides: “Le fait de méconnaître les interdictions définies à l’article L. 8221-1 est puni d’un emprisonnement de trois ans et d’une amende de 45 000 euros.” Three years of imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine is the headline penalty, before confiscations and management bans that criminal courts regularly add for company directors. On the civil side, the employee gets a powerful weapon at the end of the relationship. The article L. 8223-1 of the Code du travail provides: “En cas de rupture de la relation de travail, le salarié auquel un employeur a eu recours dans les conditions de l’article L. 8221-3 ou en commettant les faits prévus à l’article L. 8221-5 a droit à une indemnité forfaitaire égale à six mois de salaire.” Six months of salary as a flat-rate indemnity, on top of all other severance and damages, turns every departure of an undeclared worker into a heavy dispute. URSSAF recovers unpaid contributions with increases through its own route of mise en demeure, the formal demand, then contrainte, the enforceable collection order, a mechanism we describe in our guide to contesting an URSSAF mise en demeure and contrainte from abroad. Foreign owners sometimes assume that a social security body cannot join a criminal case over undeclared work. The Cour de cassation drew the boundaries precisely in a concealed-work case, holding: “Il résulte de ce texte que l’action civile n’appartient qu’à ceux qui ont personnellement souffert du dommage directement causé par l’infraction.” That sentence comes from the Criminal Division of the Cour de cassation, 2 March 2021, appeal no. 19-80.991, and it limits which bodies can claim civil damages in the criminal trial, without reducing URSSAF’s own power to reassess and collect contributions through its administrative route. The DPAE costs nothing and takes minutes online, while its absence can cost six months of salary per employee, a criminal record and a full URSSAF reassessment. No founder should promise a start date before the DPAE is filed.

B. What else must be ready before the employee starts

The DPAE opens the door, but three further formalities must be in place around day one, and founders abroad usually discover them late. First, the registre unique du personnel, the single personnel register. The article L. 1221-13 of the Code du travail provides: “Un registre unique du personnel est tenu dans tout établissement où sont employés des salariés.” Every establishment employing staff must keep one, with surnames and first names entered in hiring order, indelibly, at the moment of hiring. The register must be shown to labour inspectors on request, and a missing or post-dated register is the detail that turns a routine inspection into a suspicion of concealed work. Your payroll provider keeps it, but confirm it exists for your establishment, including when the establishment is a small Paris office combined with remote work. Second, occupational health coverage. Every worker benefits from individual health monitoring, and the article L. 4624-1 of the Code du travail provides: “Ce suivi comprend une visite d’information et de prévention effectuée après l’embauche par l’un des professionnels de santé mentionnés au premier alinéa du présent article.” The implementing rule sets the deadline: the article R. 4624-10 of the Code du travail provides: “Tout travailleur bénéficie d’une visite d’information et de prévention, réalisée par l’un des professionnels de santé mentionnés au premier alinéa de l’article L. 4624-1 dans un délai qui n’excède pas trois mois à compter de la prise effective du poste de travail.” Join a SPST, a service de prévention et de santé au travail, the accredited occupational health service, before or immediately after the hire, declare the employee, and schedule the visit within three months of the actual start. Third, the applicable collective agreement. France has hundreds of conventions collectives, branch-level collective agreements, and your company’s agreement follows its main activity, not your choice. It sets minimum pay scales, trial-period rules that can restrict the statutory scheme, notice periods and severance floors. Identify it from day one with your accountant, because the contract must name it, and the wrong agreement is a classic source of back-pay claims. Add two operational points that cost little and prevent much: monthly pay slips with the mandatory mentions, declared through the DSN, the déclaration sociale nominative, the monthly digital payroll return, and the mandatory complementary health cover, the mutuelle d’entreprise, with its minimum employer funding. Together, DPAE, register, health service, agreement, payslips and DSN form the day-one pack of the first hire.

II. The contract you hand over: permanent or fixed-term, and the trial-period trap

A. Should you offer a CDI or a CDD when hiring from abroad

The CDI, the contrat à durée indéterminée, the open-ended contract, is the normal and default form of employment in France, and for a first hire it is usually the right one. A full-time CDI does not legally require a written document to exist, but hiring without a written contract from abroad is a serious mistake: without writing, you cannot prove the trial period, the remuneration structure, the duties, the non-compete clause or the applicable agreement, and every ambiguity will later be construed against the employer. Put the CDI in writing, in French, with the job title, duties, workplace, working time, gross salary, collective agreement, trial period and notice terms. The CDD, the contrat à durée déterminée, the fixed-term contract, is the exception, and it is fenced in. It is available only in exhaustively listed cases such as replacing an absent employee or facing a temporary increase in activity, and above all it must be written with precision. The article L. 1242-12 of the Code du travail provides: “Le contrat de travail à durée déterminée est établi par écrit et comporte la définition précise de son motif. A défaut, il est réputé conclu pour une durée indéterminée.” No written document, or no precise statement of the legal reason, and the fixed-term contract is deemed open-ended. Courts apply this sentence mechanically: a foreign founder who emails a six-month offer abroad, lets the person start in Paris, and sends the paperwork weeks later may discover that the late or vague document created a permanent employee. The price of a CDD does not end there. The article L. 1243-8 of the Code du travail provides: “Lorsque, à l’issue d’un contrat de travail à durée déterminée, les relations contractuelles de travail ne se poursuivent pas par un contrat à durée indéterminée, le salarié a droit, à titre de complément de salaire, à une indemnité de fin de contrat destinée à compenser la précarité de sa situation. Cette indemnité est égale à 10 % de la rémunération totale brute versée au salarié.” Ten percent of total gross pay as an end-of-contract indemnity is the default cost of fixed-term hiring, unless a branch agreement sets a lower rate with counterpart guarantees. Add that a CDD cannot durably fill a permanent job linked to the normal activity of the company, and the picture is complete: use a CDD for genuinely temporary needs with a written, precisely motivated contract transmitted on time, and use a written CDI for your first structural hire. One related trap deserves a warning because it tempts every foreign founder: hiring the person as a freelance contractor to avoid all of this. If the worker performs under your authority, on your premises or with your tools, on fixed hours, for one client, French courts and URSSAF reclassify the relationship as employment with back contributions, back pay and penalties, exactly the scenario our contractor reclassification guide documents. A proper employment contract from day one is cheaper than a reclassification two years later.

B. How long can you test your first hire, and how do you end the trial lawfully

The trial period is the most litigated clause of the first hire, because founders treat it as an American-style at-will window while French law treats it as a short, capped, written evaluation mechanism. Its purpose is defined by statute. The article L. 1221-20 of the Code du travail provides: “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.” Evaluation of skills on one side, assessment of the role on the other: a trial period used for other purposes, such as testing the order book or waiting for a client contract, can be challenged as a misuse. The maximum initial durations are fixed by employee category. The article L. 1221-19 of the Code du travail provides: “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.” Two months for workers and employees, three for supervisors and technicians, four for executives, and your applicable collective agreement may shorten these ceilings, never lengthen them beyond the statutory renewal caps. Renewal is where foreign founders lose most cases. The article L. 1221-21 of the Code du travail provides: “La période d’essai peut être renouvelée une fois si un accord de branche étendu le prévoit. Cet accord fixe les conditions et les durées de renouvellement.” One renewal only, and only if an extended branch agreement allows it, with total durations capped at four, six and eight months respectively by category. And nothing is implied. The article L. 1221-23 of the Code du travail provides: “La période d’essai et la possibilité de la renouveler ne se présument pas. Elles sont expressément stipulées dans la lettre d’engagement ou le contrat de travail.” No clause, no trial period; no renewal clause, no renewal. The Cour de cassation enforces these conditions cumulatively. In a 2025 case about a renewed trial period, the Social Division recalled the double lock, holding: “Selon le premier de ces textes, la période d’essai peut être renouvelée une fois si un accord de branche étendu le prévoit. Cet accord fixe les conditions et les durées de renouvellement.” It then quashed the appeal ruling because the renewal failed the second lock, holding: “Ce renouvellement fait l’objet d’un accord écrit entre le salarié et l’employeur ou son représentant, avant le terme de la période d’essai initiale.” Those two sentences come from the Social Division of the Cour de cassation, 11 June 2025, appeal no. 23-21.128, and they give founders the checklist: an extended branch agreement authorising renewal, plus a written agreement with the employee signed before the initial period expires. An email from the employer announcing the renewal, signed or countersigned late, does not satisfy the test.

A second decision sharpens the point for founders who mistake silence for consent. The Social Division held: “Il résulte de ces textes que le renouvellement de la période d’essai doit résulter d’un accord exprès des parties et exige une manifestation de volonté claire et non équivoque du salarié.” That sentence comes from the Social Division of the Cour de cassation, 22 October 2025, appeal no. 24-15.053, and the Court quashed the appeal ruling precisely because the lower court had inferred acceptance from the employee’s failure to object expressly. For a founder, the lesson is operational: circulate the renewal amendment before the expiry date, obtain a dated signature showing clear and unequivocal agreement, and keep proof of that date. Conversely, when the employer does everything correctly, courts uphold the renewal. In an earlier dispute, the Court noted that “par lettre du 5 février 2012, l’employeur a renouvelé la période d’essai, après accord express du salarié, pour une nouvelle période de 3 mois”, and it rejected the employee’s challenge to the renewed trial period. That finding comes from the Social Division of the Cour de cassation, 27 June 2018, appeal no. 16-25.756. Express agreement before expiry: valid. Silence treated as agreement: invalid. The contrast between the two rulings is the whole law of renewal in one line.

Ending the trial period has its own traps, starting with the notice you must give. The article L. 1221-25 of the Code du travail provides: “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.” Twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours, two weeks, then one month depending on length of service, and the same article adds that the trial period cannot be extended by the notice period. Missing the notice does not automatically convert the termination into a dismissal, but ending the trial after its expiry date does. In a 2026 ruling, the Social Division approved an appeal court that had found the trial period had ended on 13 February 2020 without valid renewal, and it confirmed that “la rupture, notifiée le 14 août 2020 avec effet au 13 septembre 2020, s’analysait en un licenciement verbal nécessairement dépourvu de cause réelle et sérieuse”. That sentence comes from the Social Division of the Cour de cassation, 9 April 2026, appeal no. 24-19.688. A late termination of the trial period is therefore reclassified as a verbal dismissal without real and serious cause, opening the full dismissal litigation: notice indemnity, severance, and damages under the Macron scale. Founders should diary two dates for every hire: the last day of the initial trial period, and the last day on which notice of termination can still be served inside the period. Absences for sick leave or holidays suspend and extend the trial period day for day, so keep a calendar that accounts for suspensions, and when in doubt, terminate early inside the period with the proper notice rather than gambling on the last day from another continent.

A final word on cost, because the first hire abroad fails on budget more often than on law. French employer social charges add a substantial layer on top of gross salary, covering health, family, retirement, unemployment, occupational accidents and the complementary AGIRC-ARRCO pension scheme, plus the employer’s share of the mutuelle and the transport contribution in Paris and Île-de-France. As a planning rule of thumb, many founders budget roughly forty to forty-five percent above gross salary for the employer’s share, then confirm the exact figure with their payroll provider or the URSSAF simulator for their pay level and collective agreement, because rates vary with salary bands, headcount thresholds and exemptions for a first hire. Add the monthly DSN return, the annual social data declaration, and the professional training contribution, and the true monthly cost of a first employee becomes visible. None of this is a reason not to hire. It is a reason to price the hire before signing, to choose the right contract from day one, and to keep the trial period machinery exact, so that a hiring mistake costs weeks of salary instead of years of litigation.

Conclusion

Hiring a first employee in France from abroad succeeds when the sequence is respected. File the DPAE in the eight days before the start date and hand the acknowledgement to the employee, because article L. 1221-10 makes the declaration a precondition of hiring and article L. 8221-5 turns its deliberate omission into concealed work punishable by three years of imprisonment, a 45,000 euro fine and a six-month flat-rate indemnity at termination. Open the single personnel register at the moment of hiring, join an occupational health service and schedule the information and prevention visit within three months, identify the applicable collective agreement before drafting anything, and run monthly payroll through the DSN with proper pay slips. Put the contract in writing in French: a CDI for structural needs with duties, pay, agreement and trial clause spelled out, or a CDD only for genuinely temporary cases with a written, precisely motivated document, knowing that a missing or vague CDD is deemed open-ended and that fixed-term work carries a default ten percent end-of-contract indemnity. Draft the trial period with the statutory ceilings of two, three and four months, renew once only under an extended branch agreement with the employee’s express written agreement before expiry, respect the twenty-four-hour to one-month notice scale, and never terminate after the expiry date, because courts reclassify late termination as a verbal dismissal without real and serious cause. The founders who get this right share one habit: nothing is promised orally from abroad, everything is filed, signed and diaried in France before the employee walks in. Do the same, and your first hire becomes what it should be, the start of a team rather than the start of a file at the prud’hommes.

Need a quick opinion on your case

About to hire your first employee in France, or facing a DPAE problem, a disputed trial period or an URSSAF claim on your payroll while running the company from abroad? Our firm offers a phone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to review your hiring file, your deadlines and your risks. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write through our contact page. Our office in Paris advises foreign founders and groups across Paris and Île-de-France and from abroad in English.