You hired your first employee in France, you run the company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, and the timesheets coming back from Paris show 39, 42, sometimes 45 hours in a week. Your employee smiles and says the extra hours were necessary to finish the work. Three months later, the payslips still show 35 hours, no overtime premium has been paid, and no one has signed anything. This is exactly how a small back-pay claim turns into a labour court case that costs a foreign-owned company tens of thousands of euros. French law does not treat overtime as a favour the employer may or may not reward. Every hour beyond the 35-hour legal working week is an overtime hour that must be paid at a premium rate or compensated with equivalent rest, counted week by week, within a 220-hour annual ceiling, and proved with documents the employer itself must keep. A 2026 decision of the Cour de cassation, handed down on 2 September 2026, has just reminded employers that a simple half-day table with start and end times drawn up by the employee is enough to force the employer to produce its own records. This guide explains, for a foreign founder or parent company managing from abroad, what each overtime hour really costs, which records protect you, and how to settle a dispute before the conseil de prud’hommes, the French labour court, gets involved.
I. What French law imposes on every hour worked beyond 35 hours
A. The 35-hour week, overtime pay rates and the 220-hour annual ceiling
The starting point is simple and it surprises many foreign employers: the legal working time for a full-time employee is 35 hours per week. Article L3121-27 of the French Labour Code states: “La durée légale de travail effectif des salariés à temps complet est fixée à trente-cinq heures par semaine.” The 35 hours are not a target and not a maximum; they are the threshold above which every additional hour changes legal nature and price. Article L3121-28 of the same Code provides: “Toute heure accomplie au delà de la durée légale hebdomadaire ou de la durée considérée comme équivalente est une heure supplémentaire qui ouvre droit à une majoration salariale ou, le cas échéant, à un repos compensateur équivalent.” In plain terms, each hour beyond 35 opens either a pay premium or an equivalent compensatory rest. The official service-public.fr guidance for private-sector employees, verified on 8 June 2026, confirms the same mechanism and adds the annual reference of 1,607 hours used for annualised schedules (see service-public.fr, Heures supplémentaires d’un salarié du secteur privé).
Two counting rules then decide the bill. First, overtime is counted strictly week by week: Article L3121-29 says “Les heures supplémentaires se décomptent par semaine.” A quiet 30-hour week never cancels out a 40-hour week; the five extra hours of the busy week remain overtime even if the monthly average stays at 35. For a foreign manager reading monthly reports, this is the first trap: monthly smoothing is legally meaningless. Second, the premium rate depends on whether a collective agreement applies. A company-level or industry-wide agreement may set the overtime premium, but never below 10 percent: Article L3121-33 provides that the agreement “Prévoit le ou les taux de majoration des heures supplémentaires accomplies au-delà de la durée légale ou de la durée considérée comme équivalente. Ce taux ne peut être inférieur à 10 %”. Where no agreement applies, which is the situation of most newly created foreign-owned companies with a single employee, the default statutory rates apply in full: Article L3121-36 states: “A défaut d’accord, les heures supplémentaires accomplies au-delà de la durée légale hebdomadaire fixée à l’article L. 3121-27 ou de la durée considérée comme équivalente donnent lieu à une majoration de salaire de 25 % pour chacune des huit premières heures supplémentaires. Les heures suivantes donnent lieu à une majoration de 50 %.” The calculation is therefore mechanical. Take an employee paid 2,800 euros gross per month for 35 hours: the hourly rate is about 18.46 euros (2,800 x 12 / (35 x 52)), each of the first eight weekly overtime hours costs about 23.08 euros, and every hour from the ninth onward costs about 27.69 euros. Five overtime hours in a week cost roughly 115 euros extra; repeated over a year, that is nearly 6,000 euros of wage cost before employer social contributions, which add roughly 42 to 45 percent on top. The Bercy guide for businesses summarises these rates and the available compensations (see economie.gouv.fr, Heures supplémentaires pour les salariés du privé).
The third rule is the annual ceiling. Overtime can be worked only within an annual quota known as the contingent annuel, and hours beyond that quota trigger a mandatory rest entitlement on top of the pay premium. Article L3121-30 states: “Des heures supplémentaires peuvent être accomplies dans la limite d’un contingent annuel.” It continues: “Les heures effectuées au delà de ce contingent annuel ouvrent droit à une contrepartie obligatoire sous forme de repos.” Where no collective agreement sets a different quota, the default ceiling is 220 hours per employee per year: Article D3121-24 provides: “A défaut d’accord prévu au I de l’article L. 3121-33 , le contingent annuel d’heures supplémentaires est fixé à deux cent vingt heures par salarié.” Beyond 220 hours, the employer owes both the premium and a mandatory rest equal to 50 percent of the extra hours in companies with twenty or fewer employees, and 100 percent above that headcount: Article L3121-38 states: “A défaut d’accord, la contrepartie obligatoire sous forme de repos mentionnée à l’article L. 3121-30 est fixée à 50 % des heures supplémentaires accomplies au-delà du contingent annuel mentionné au même article L. 3121-30 pour les entreprises de vingt salariés au plus, et à 100 % de ces mêmes heures pour les entreprises de plus de vingt salariés.” A foreign founder should read this as a hard budget line: 220 hours at, say, 23 euros average premium means roughly 5,000 euros of manageable annual flexibility per employee, but every hour beyond that buys absence as well as pay. Two categories of staff sit outside this system and deserve a one-line check with counsel: the cadre dirigeant, the senior executive who genuinely participates in management with wide autonomy, and employees on an annual days-based package, the forfait annuel en jours, are not subject to overtime at all.
B. Time records, payslips and who proves what before the labour court
French overtime litigation is won or lost on documents, and the documents are the employer’s job. When employees do not all work the same collective schedule, which is always the case when a company has a single employee working variable hours, the employer must draw up the records needed to count working time. Article L3171-2 of the Labour Code provides: “Lorsque tous les salariés occupés dans un service ou un atelier ne travaillent pas selon le même horaire collectif, l’employeur établit les documents nécessaires au décompte de la durée de travail, des repos compensateurs acquis et de leur prise effective, pour chacun des salariés concernés. Le comité social et économique peut consulter ces documents.” The comité social et économique mentioned at the end is the employee representative body that only exists in companies with at least eleven employees, so a foreign founder with one hire will never see it; the useful part of the text is the first sentence, which covers your situation exactly. In parallel, Article L3171-3 requires the employer to keep available for the labour inspectorate the documents that allow working time to be counted for each employee: “L’employeur tient à la disposition de l’agent de contrôle de l’inspection du travail mentionné à l’article L. 8112-1 les documents permettant de comptabiliser le temps de travail accompli par chaque salarié. La nature des documents et la durée pendant laquelle ils sont tenus à disposition sont déterminées par voie réglementaire.” The inspection du travail is the French labour inspectorate, a public body whose officers can visit premises, demand records and draw up official reports. These two texts mean one concrete thing for a company run from abroad: a shared spreadsheet updated when someone remembers, a badge reader nobody checks, or monthly payslips silently showing 151.67 hours, the mathematical equivalent of 35 hours per week, do not satisfy the employer’s record-keeping duty.
The reason this duty matters so much is the burden of proof. In an overtime dispute, the employee does not have to prove the hours with certainty; presenting reasonably precise material is enough, and then the employer must answer with its own records. Article L3171-4 states: “En cas de litige relatif à l’existence ou au nombre d’heures de travail accomplies, l’employeur fournit au juge les éléments de nature à justifier les horaires effectivement réalisés par le salarié. Au vu de ces éléments et de ceux fournis par le salarié à l’appui de sa demande, le juge forme sa conviction après avoir ordonné, en cas de besoin, toutes les mesures d’instruction qu’il estime utiles.” The Cour de cassation, France’s supreme court for civil, commercial and employment matters, has just tightened this mechanism against employers. On 2 September 2026, in a decision published in its official Bulletin (Cass. soc., 2 September 2026, appeal no. 25-16.106, read the decision on courdecassation.fr), the court quashed a court of appeal judgment that had thrown out an overtime claim because the employee’s table, drawn up for each half-day with start and end times, allegedly counted travelling time as working time without distinguishing it. The court recorded that the employee produced “un tableau comportant, pour chaque demi-journée, les heures de début et de fin du travail”, a table showing start and end times for each half-day, and then quashed the appeal judgment: “En statuant ainsi, alors qu’il résultait de ses constatations que le salarié présentait des éléments suffisamment précis pour permettre à l’employeur de répondre, la cour d’appel, qui a fait peser la charge de la preuve sur le seul salarié, a violé le texte susvisé.” In other words, the half-day table was precise enough to oblige the employer to answer with its own records, and rejecting the claim for lack of precision placed the whole burden of proof on the employee alone, in breach of Article L3171-4. For a foreign employer, the lesson is direct: if your only defence is to attack the precision of the employee’s personal notes while producing no time records of your own, you will lose. The judges of the conseil de prud’hommes, the specialised labour court that hears individual employment disputes, apply this shared-burden rule every day.
The payslip and the monthly social declaration close the loop. Each payslip, the bulletin de paie, must reflect the hours actually worked, and the data flows each month into the DSN, the déclaration sociale nominative, the single electronic return through which the employer declares wages and calculates social contributions to URSSAF, the body that collects employer and employee social charges. URSSAF runs its own audits of foreign-owned companies, a process described in our guide to URSSAF audits of companies run from abroad. Underpaying overtime therefore creates three parallel exposures at once: back pay before the labour court, reassessment of social contributions with late penalties by URSSAF, and, where payslips knowingly understate hours, the criminal-law territory of concealed work examined in Part II. A time-tracking tool accessible online, a weekly validation email from the manager, and payslips that show the overtime lines explicitly are not administrative luxuries; they are the three documents that decide whether an overtime disagreement stays a 2,000-euro adjustment or becomes a 30,000-euro case.
II. Running overtime safely while managing from another country
A. Set the rules before the hours happen: written agreement, workload and cost cap
The most expensive sentence a foreign founder can write is a clause requiring the employee to obtain written permission before any overtime, and then believing the clause settles the matter. It does not. The Cour de cassation held in a published decision that an employee can obtain payment for overtime performed either with the employer’s agreement or where the extra hours were made necessary by the tasks entrusted to the employee. In Cass. soc., 14 November 2018, appeal no. 17-16.959, published in the Bulletin (read the decision on courdecassation.fr), the court approved a court of appeal that had ordered back pay even though the contract required prior authorisation, stating: “le salarié peut prétendre au paiement des heures supplémentaires accomplies, soit avec l’accord au moins implicite de l’employeur, soit s’il est établi que la réalisation de telles heures a été rendue nécessaire par les tâches qui lui ont été confiées” The judges had noted that the workload which had already justified paid overtime for months had been maintained and then increased, so the new overtime was necessary regardless of the missing prior permission. Translated into management practice, this means the clause is useful only if the workload makes it credible: assigning one person the work of two while pointing at the permission clause is exactly the fact pattern the courts sanction.
A system that works from another country has four layers. First, put the overtime rule in the employment contract or in a written policy the employee signs: overtime only at the manager’s written request, except genuine emergencies, with hours reported each Friday by email and validated or corrected by the manager the following Monday. The written request protects the employer; the weekly validation protects the employee from the accusation of working in secret, and it gives the employer a contemporaneous record that judges trust. Second, calibrate the workload honestly. If the Friday reports show overtime every single week for two months, the legal reading is not that the employee disobeys but that the position is understaffed, and a judge will draw the same conclusion by comparing the task list with the hours. Hiring a second pair of hands, reorganising tasks or expressly authorising and paying the overtime are the only consistent answers; our step-by-step guide to setting up the company, the bank account, the Kbis registration and the first hire explains the hiring formalities, from the DPAE prior hiring declaration to the employment contract, that frame this decision. Third, choose the compensation channel deliberately. Paying the 25 and 50 percent premiums is the default; replacing the premium with equivalent compensatory rest, the repos compensateur de remplacement, is possible where an agreement allows it and gives the employer time instead of cash; letting hours pile up beyond the 220-hour ceiling without granting the mandatory rest is the one option that is never available. Fourth, track the ceiling per employee in real time. A simple running table, week number, overtime hours, cumulative total against 220, shared with the employee each month, costs nothing and proves in court that the employer monitored working time as the Labour Code requires. None of this demands a presence in Paris: e-signature, shared drives and a weekly video check-in are enough, provided the documents exist and match the payslips.
B. When overtime turns into a dispute: back pay, concealed-work damages and settlement
When the employee’s lawyer writes, the claim almost always arrives as a package: back pay for the overtime premiums, paid leave accrued on those premiums, and a lump-sum indemnity for concealed work. The back-pay window is wide. Article L3245-1 of the Labour Code provides: “L’action en paiement ou en répétition du salaire se prescrit par trois ans à compter du jour où celui qui l’exerce a connu ou aurait dû connaître les faits lui permettant de l’exercer. La demande peut porter sur les sommes dues au titre des trois dernières années à compter de ce jour ou, lorsque le contrat de travail est rompu, sur les sommes dues au titre des trois années précédant la rupture du”, which means three full years of unpaid premiums can be claimed at once, a multiplier foreign employers consistently underestimate. On top of the wages, payslips that knowingly show fewer hours than actually worked cross the line into concealed employment. Article L8221-5 defines the offence: “Est réputé travail dissimulé par dissimulation d’emploi salarié le fait pour tout employeur”, followed by the cases including “Soit de se soustraire intentionnellement à l’accomplissement de la formalité prévue à l’article L. 1221-10 , relatif à la déclaration préalable à l’embauche”, the DPAE prior hiring declaration every employer files before the first day of work. The same article covers payslips that understate the hours genuinely performed and failures to declare wages and social contributions to the collection bodies, and each of these requires intent, which the courts infer from repeated, systematic understating rather than from a single error. Where the employment relationship ends, the sanction is automatic and heavy: Article L8223-1 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, added to three years of back pay, paid leave on top, and the URSSAF reassessment of contributions: this arithmetic is why an overtime file that starts at 5,000 euros of premiums can end above 40,000 euros once it reaches judgment. The 2018 decision cited above illustrates the point concretely, since the employer in that case was ordered to pay overtime back pay together with the concealed-work indemnity, and the Cour de cassation rejected its appeal.
Distance does not prevent settlement, and settlement is usually the rational outcome once the exposure is mapped. The practical sequence from abroad is: freeze the facts by reconstructing the real hours from emails, connection logs, delivery timestamps and the employee’s own table; have French counsel cost the three scenarios, amicable payment of the premiums, negotiated mutual separation where the relationship is broken, and full litigation with the six-month indemnity risk; then negotiate a written settlement that states the exact hours regularised, corrects the payslips and the DSN declarations, and closes the overtime period explicitly. Where the employment relationship itself must end, the exit route needs the same care as the pay issue: our guide to dismissing the first employee or negotiating a mutual separation from abroad details the dismissal steps, the negotiated exit costs and the labour court risks, and an overtime regularisation should be coordinated with that process rather than discovered during it. One final procedural warning: never answer a lawyer’s letter by denying everything in writing without checking the records first. A blanket denial contradicted a month later by your own emails destroys credibility before the labour court and makes the intent element of concealed work easier for the employee to argue. A short holding reply, records checked within two weeks, then a costed proposal: that is the tempo that keeps a foreign-run company credible.
Conclusion
Overtime in France is a priced, counted and documented mechanism, not a grey zone. Thirty-five hours set the threshold, weekly counting sets the method, 25 and 50 percent set the default price, 220 hours set the annual ceiling, and the employer’s own time records decide who wins the argument. The September 2026 decision of the Cour de cassation confirms that an employee’s simple start-and-end-time table is enough to shift the burden onto the employer, and the 2018 case law confirms that a prior-permission clause cannot defeat hours the workload made necessary. For a company run from abroad, the entire risk is managed with four habits: written weekly requests and validations, honest workload calibration, a live count against the 220-hour ceiling, and payslips that match reality. Put those in place and overtime becomes what it should be, a flexible and lawful management tool; ignore them and every extra hour worked in Paris becomes a liability signed in your absence.