You hired your first employee in France from abroad, the weeks pass, and the fit is clearly not there: missed instructions, tensions with clients, unexplained absences. French employment law then offers one narrow window that foreign founders often misunderstand, the trial period, known in French as the période d’essai. During that window you can walk away without the full dismissal procedure, yet every shortcut is policed: a missing written clause, a late notice, a renewed period nobody validly agreed to, or a reason linked to health can turn a clean break into a case before the labour court, the conseil de prud’hommes. This guide explains, for a founder who lives outside France, how to check whether the trial period is still open, how to terminate it from another country with proof that holds up, and what you owe when something has already gone wrong. It assumes a permanent contract, a contrat à durée indéterminée (CDI, open-ended contract), with notes on fixed-term contracts, contrats à durée déterminée (CDD), where the rules differ. For the wider setup sequence, from the corporate bank account to the Kbis (the official company identity extract issued by the greffe, the registry of the commercial court) and VAT, see our step-by-step guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder.

I. Can you still end the trial period, and how much time do you really have?

A. Is your trial period valid, and when does it expire?

The trial period exists so that, in the words of the statute, Article L1221-20 of the Labour Code, “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.” In plain English: the employer tests the employee’s skills, and the employee tests whether the job suits them. A termination during this period does not need a dismissal ground, but it must still relate to the person’s professional suitability, not to an unrelated motive, and it must fall inside a valid period. Three checks decide everything, and each of them traps foreign employers who signed a quick English-language offer letter.

First, the period must be written down. Article L1221-23 of the Labour Code states: “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. A verbal promise, a mention only in the company handbook, or a clause added after the employee started work does not create one. From abroad, founders often send an offer by email and formalise the contract weeks later; if the signed contract dated after the start date is the first document mentioning the trial period, the employee can argue there was never one. The practical fix is simple: the signed letter of engagement or employment contract, dated no later than the first day of work, must state the duration and the possibility of renewal. Keep the signed PDF, the email thread showing when it was sent and returned, and proof of signature date. If you use electronic signature, keep the audit trail.

Second, the duration must fit the legal ceilings. Article L1221-19 of the Labour Code 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.” These ceilings are mandatory. Article L1221-22 of the Labour Code confirms that only shorter durations can be set by later collective agreements, by the letter of engagement or by the contract. A longer contractual period is cut back to the legal maximum, and time worked beyond the maximum counts as ordinary employment, where ending the relationship requires a dismissal. Two refinements matter for foreign founders. Many sector-level collective agreements, the conventions collectives, impose shorter periods than the statute, for example for non-managerial staff, and some company-level usages shorten them further; always read the applicable agreement before counting. For fixed-term contracts the scale is different: Article L1242-10 of the Labour Code states: “Le contrat de travail à durée déterminée peut comporter une période d’essai. Sauf si des usages ou des stipulations conventionnelles prévoient des durées moindres, cette période d’essai ne peut excéder une durée calculée à raison d’un jour par semaine, dans la limite de deux semaines lorsque la durée initialement prévue au contrat est au plus égale à six mois et d’un mois dans les autres cas.” A six-month CDD therefore carries at most two weeks of trial, and a twelve-month CDD at most one month. Founders who hire a first employee on a short CDD “to test them” often discover the trial window is far shorter than for a CDI.

Third, the clock does not always run the way the calendar suggests. Renewal is the classic trap. Article L1221-21 of the Labour Code states: “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 continues: “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.” Three cumulative conditions follow: an extended sector agreement must authorise renewal, the contract must expressly provide for it, and the employee must give clear written agreement before the initial period ends. A signature that merely acknowledges receipt of a letter is not enough, as the Court of Cassation confirmed in 2025 (see II.B below). Suspension is the second timing trap. Illness, and in particular sick leave, suspends the trial period: the days of absence do not count, and the period is extended by the same length. The official service-public guidance confirms that the trial period is extended by the duration of the sick leave and that termination remains possible under the usual conditions once the employee returns. Practically, if your first hire spent three weeks on sick leave during a two-month trial, your deadline moves by three weeks, but you must be able to prove the dates with the medical certificates and the payroll records. The same logic applies to other suspensions such as maternity leave or work accidents declared to the health insurance fund, the caisse primaire d’assurance maladie. Never count the trial period from the promise date: it runs from the actual first day of work, and the mandatory hiring declaration, the déclaration préalable à l’embauche (DPAE, the pre-hiring declaration filed with URSSAF, the social contributions collection agency), must have been filed before that day. Missing the DPAE is punished on its own: Article L1221-11 of the Labour Code punishes any failure: “Le non-respect de l’obligation de déclaration préalable à l’embauche” triggers, in the words of the statute, “entraîne une pénalité dont le montant est égal à trois cents fois le taux horaire du minimum garanti” Founders who onboard remotely and “sort out the paperwork later” therefore face a penalty even before the trial-period question arises.

Put these checks in order before you act: pull the signed contract and its date, identify the employee’s category (employee, supervisor/technician, or cadre, meaning executive or managerial staff) and the applicable collective agreement, compute the maximum including any valid renewal, add suspensions, and only then set the termination date. If the period has already expired by even one day, the termination is analysed as a dismissal without cause, with far heavier consequences. When the calendar is tight, move fast but in writing, as the next section explains.

B. How do you terminate from abroad without extending the trial period or losing the proof?

Ending a trial period is form-free in theory but proof-heavy in practice, and distance makes proof harder. The statute imposes a notice, called the délai de prévenance, whenever the employer ends the trial, including at its end. Article L1221-25 of the Labour Code sets the scale: “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.” Presence means actual time in the company, so the one-month notice only applies once the employee has three months of presence. The same article adds two sentences that decide many disputes: “La période d’essai, renouvellement inclus, ne peut être prolongée du fait de la durée du délai de prévenance.” and “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. Cette indemnité est égale au montant des salaires et avantages que le salarié aurait perçus s’il avait accompli son travail jusqu’à l’expiration du délai de prévenance, indemnité compensatrice de congés payés comprise.” In other words, the notice does not stretch the trial period, and skipping it costs exactly the wages and benefits, including paid-leave compensation, for the missing days. For symmetry, when the employee leaves during the trial, Article L1221-26 of the Labour Code states: “Lorsqu’il est mis fin à la période d’essai par le salarié, celui-ci respecte un délai de prévenance de quarante-huit heures. Ce délai est ramené à vingt-quatre heures si la durée de présence du salarié dans l’entreprise est inférieure à huit jours.” Knowing this helps you read resignations correctly: a first hire who walks out with a text message may owe you short notice, but chasing it from abroad is rarely worth a dispute.

The decisive practical point is that the employer’s decision must be notified before the trial period expires, even if the notice itself runs past the end date. Notify on the last day and the termination is timely; the contract then ends when the notice expires, with the days after expiry paid as notice, not as trial. Notify one day late and the termination is late, hence reclassified. From abroad, organise notification as if you will have to prove the exact hour. A registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt, a lettre recommandée avec accusé de réception, posted from France through your accountant or counsel, remains the reference. If you notify from abroad by email, send it with a timestamped method, request an explicit acknowledgement, and double it with a registered letter the same day. State the date of notification, the employee’s presence length used to compute the notice, the last working day, and the sentence that the decision is taken at the end of the trial period on professional grounds without disciplinary characterisation. Keep the employee’s work during the notice in the payroll: the monthly payslip, the bulletin de paie, and the monthly social declaration, the déclaration sociale nominative (DSN, the single monthly payroll return sent to URSSAF and the tax administration), must show the notice days and the compensatory allowance if notice was cut short. Our companion piece on overtime, time records and proof for a first hire explains why contemporaneous records decide French working-time cases; the same discipline applies here.

Do not state a dismissal ground and do not run a disciplinary procedure: the trial-period termination is not a dismissal, and dressing it as one creates confusion about which regime applies. But do keep the file professional: onboarding notes, task assignments, warnings about quality framed as coaching, client feedback, and the manager’s assessment. If the employee later alleges discrimination, that file is your evidence that the decision rested on observed work. Deliver the end-of-contract documents on the last day: the final payslip with the solde de tout compte (the final balance receipt listing all sums paid), the certificat de travail (the employment certificate stating start and end dates and positions), and the attestation France Travail (the certificate for the public employment service, formerly Pôle emploi, allowing benefit claims). A Paris or Ile-de-France founder should also note the local plumbing: the hiring company must be identifiable on the payslip with its SIRET number (the establishment identifier issued alongside registration, visible on the Kbis), contributions must flow to the URSSAF Ile-de-France collection account, and any later dispute goes to the conseil de prud’hommes of the place of work, in Paris the Paris labour court, where conciliation is attempted first and delays run in months, not weeks. Getting the paperwork right at the exit costs little; rebuilding it after a claim costs a great deal, as Part II shows.

II. What turns a simple termination into an expensive labour court case?

A. Why can ending a trial period still be declared void for discrimination?

The trial period gives freedom over timing, not over motive. French law bans any termination driven by a prohibited ground, and that ban fully applies during the trial. Article L1132-1 of the Labour Code provides that “aucun salarié ne peut être sanctionné, licencié ou faire l’objet d’une mesure discriminatoire, directe ou indirecte”, on grounds including origin, sex, morals, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family situation, pregnancy, genetic characteristics, economic vulnerability, real or supposed ethnicity, nation or race, political opinions, union or mutualist activities, elective mandate, religious convictions, physical appearance, family name, place of residence or bank domiciliation, and, crucially for trial-period cases, state of health, loss of autonomy or disability. A termination announced days after the employee discloses a serious illness, a pregnancy, or a disability accommodation request therefore invites the court to look behind the timing. The employer’s distance can aggravate suspicion: a founder who never met the employee and ends the trial by a curt email the week the employee reports sick leave looks, on paper, like a decision based on the absence rather than on months of observed work.

The Court of Cassation drew the exact consequences in a 2025 ruling that every foreign employer should know. In Social Chamber, 25 June 2025, appeal No. 23-17.999, an employee hired as a claims manager was placed on sick leave from January to August 2014 and received notice ending her trial period in July 2014 with effect mid-August. The court of appeal found discrimination and awarded damages; the employer challenged the amount and the reasoning. The Social Chamber held, verbatim: “Selon les articles L. 1132-1 et L. 1132-4 du code du travail, toute rupture du contrat de travail prononcée à l’égard d’un salarié en raison de son état de santé est nulle.” Then, on the sanction, it added the sentence that corrects a widespread misunderstanding: “Il résulte de ces textes que le salarié dont la rupture de la période d’essai est nulle pour motif discriminatoire ne peut prétendre à l’indemnité prévue en cas de licenciement nul mais à la réparation du préjudice résultant de la nullité de cette rupture.” In English: a discriminatory trial-period termination is void, but the employee does not automatically receive the dismissal-nullity indemnity of at least six months’ wages; they receive damages compensating the harm from the void termination, assessed by the judges. In that case the appeal court had awarded 5,000 euros, and the Social Chamber approved the method while quashing on a separate procedural point about loss-of-chance reasoning. The lesson is double-edged. The amount may be lower than for a void dismissal, but the finding of discrimination itself is severe: it brands the company, opens the door to additional claims such as failure to declare the illness to the provident fund, the organisme de prévoyance (the supplementary insurer covering illness and disability top-ups), and destroys any settlement leverage.

Procedure amplifies the risk because the burden of proof is shared. The employee only needs to present facts suggesting discrimination, for instance the calendar coincidence between announcing an illness or pregnancy and receiving the termination, remarks in messages, or a sudden change of tone after a medical certificate. The employer must then show objective reasons unrelated to discrimination, meaning dated evidence of professional inadequacy. Founders living abroad should therefore build the file before notifying: weekly task lists with measurable outcomes, examples of errors with dates and corrections requested, attendance records, and the local manager’s written assessment. Avoid any written comment on health, pregnancy, age, origin, family situation, or private life, including well-meaning ones. Do not mention the sick leave as the reason, even indirectly by presenting repeated absences, caused by illness, as the motive for the decision, because absences caused by illness point straight to health. If performance genuinely collapsed only after a long absence, wait for the return, observe the work for a fair period, document it, and only then decide. Where the employee is pregnant, add extreme caution: parallel protections restrict dismissal and interact with the trial rules, so the file must be watertight and dated. Where a disability is disclosed, consider whether a simple adjustment, schedule, equipment, or task allocation, would have solved the issue; courts notice when none was tried. The principle is constant: during the trial you may judge the work, never the person.

B. What do you owe when the notice is missed or the renewal was never valid?

Two mechanical errors produce most of the bills: cutting the notice short and relying on a renewal that was never agreed. The notice error is arithmetic. Take an employee with two months of presence: the employer owes two weeks’ notice. If the founder notifies on 10 March for a trial period ending 14 March and asks the employee not to come back, eleven days of notice are missing, and the payslip must show the compensatory allowance for those days plus paid-leave accrual. The payslip, the DSN, and the solde de tout compte must align; URSSAF and the labour court both read those three documents together, and a mismatch suggests concealment. Late notification is worse than short notice: if the trial period ended on 14 March and the letter is dated 15 March, the termination is outside the trial, and the court reclassifies it as a dismissal without cause, opening damages, reimbursement of unemployment benefits to France Travail within limits, and, for companies with at least eleven employees, the statutory dismissal scale. From abroad, the safeguard is a backward calendar: compute the expiry with suspensions, subtract the notice length to get the latest notification date, then notify several days earlier to absorb postal delays. Never let the notice push you past the expiry in your own mind; the statute is explicit that the notice does not extend the period, so notifying early is always safe and notifying late is never fixable.

The renewal error is subtler and was settled by the second 2025 decision to cite in full. In Social Chamber, 11 June 2025, appeal No. 23-21.128, a residential property director hired in September 2018 had a four-month trial, stated as renewable once up to seven months, governed by the property development sector agreement. In December 2018 the employer sent a renewal letter for three months; the employee returned it signed with the words “here is the renewal letter signed today.” The court of appeal treated that as clear agreement and upheld the later termination during the renewed period. The Court of Cassation quashed. It recalled, verbatim: “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 held: “En se déterminant ainsi, par des motifs qui ne suffisent pas à caractériser l’accord écrit non équivoque du salarié au renouvellement de la période d’essai, la cour d’appel a privé sa décision de base légale.” In English: the appeal judges’ reasons were not enough to establish the employee’s clear and unequivocal written agreement to renewal, so their decision lacked a legal basis. A signature acknowledging receipt, plus a polite covering email, is not consent. For a foreign founder this means the renewal must be a separate, explicit document, signed before the initial period ends, stating that the employee agrees to renew for a defined length under the cited sector agreement. Send it early enough that a delayed return still lands before expiry; if the signed agreement comes back one day late, there is no renewal, and any termination after the initial expiry is judged as a dismissal. Check also that the sector agreement actually authorises renewal and that the total stays within the eight/six/four-month caps quoted above. If in doubt, do not renew: a short, clean initial period is safer than a long, contestable one.

When either error has already happened, the response from abroad must be methodical. First, freeze the documents: the signed contract, the applicable collective agreement version at hiring date, the renewal letter and its return email with full headers, the notification letter with posting receipts, payslips, DSN returns, and the medical certificates if suspension is debated. Second, quantify: missing notice days at full salary and benefits including leave compensation; wages if the termination is reclassified as dismissal, with the statutory or judicial indemnities depending on seniority and headcount; and the administrative tail, corrected DSN, corrected attestation France Travail, and late-contribution interest to URSSAF. Third, choose the forum logic: if the employee files before the conseil de prud’hommes, conciliation comes first, and a file showing a dated professional assessment settles far better than a file showing a late letter and no evaluation. Employers in Paris face the Paris labour court, one of the busiest in France, where the conciliation hearing can arrive within weeks and the trial months later; an Ile-de-France company with a Paris workplace should calendar accordingly and mandate local counsel early rather than exchanging direct messages with the employee. If instead the dispute is an URSSAF audit of the exit paperwork, see our guide to URSSAF audits, assessments and challenges from abroad; and if the problem is no longer suitability but redundancy after the trial, the procedure changes entirely, as explained in our guide to economic dismissal and the CSP offer from abroad. The thread across all three is the same: French procedure rewards the employer who writes things down on time and punishes the one who reconstructs them afterwards.

Conclusion

Hiring a first employee in France from abroad concentrates every difficulty of distance into one short window: the trial period is brief, the notice is counted in days, and the proof must be contemporaneous. Check in order that the clause exists in a document signed before day one, that the duration fits the employee’s category and the collective agreement, that any renewal rests on an extended sector agreement and on a clear written agreement returned before expiry, and that suspensions for sick leave or similar events are added to the calendar. Notify before the period ends, respect the 24-hour, 48-hour, two-week or one-month notice, pay any shortfall as a compensatory allowance with leave, and deliver the solde de tout compte, the certificat de travail and the attestation France Travail. Never let the motive touch health, pregnancy, or any other prohibited ground, and keep a dated file of observed work that proves the decision was professional. Missed notice and void renewals do not just cost days of wages; they can reclassify the exit as a dismissal and, in discrimination cases, render it void with damages fixed by the court. Handled with this discipline, the trial period does what foreign founders need it to do: it lets a small French team correct a hiring mistake quickly, lawfully, and from anywhere in the world.