Your only employee in France has been off sick for months, and a letter from the occupational health service has just landed on the desk of your Paris registered office while you are in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore. The letter says the employee is unfit to return to the previous job. Your first reflex, shaped by your home jurisdiction, is to treat the employment as over and stop paying. In France that reflex is one of the fastest routes to a judgment before the labour court, called the conseil de prud’hommes. A finding of unfitness, called inaptitude, does not terminate anything by itself. It opens a strictly supervised sequence in which you must look for another post for the employee, observe a one-month clock at the end of which the full salary resumes by operation of law, and, if no solution exists, dismiss through a formal procedure with specific severance. Every step of that sequence can be organised from abroad, but none of them can be skipped on the ground that you live abroad.
This guide covers exactly one situation: the employee of your French company, usually hired on a CDI (contrat à durée indéterminée, the open-ended contract that is the default form of hiring in France), is declared unfit by the occupational doctor, called the médecin du travail, and you manage the company from outside France. It explains who is entitled to declare unfitness and how to challenge the opinion, what the duty to find another post concretely requires of a company with one employee and no other department, when the dismissal becomes possible and what it costs, and what the tribunal awards when the search for another post was superficial. It does not cover disciplinary dismissals, economic dismissals or trial-period exits: the negotiated exit called rupture conventionnelle and the end of a first hire are addressed in our companion guide to ending a first hire, and the hiring sequence itself, from the DPAE (déclaration préalable à l’embauche, the pre-hiring declaration) to the first payslip, is covered in our hiring guide for foreign companies. The general roadmap for setting up and running the company, from the bank account to the Kbis (the official company identity certificate issued by the greffe, the commercial court registry) is set out in our pillar guide for foreign founders.
I. Your Employee Is Declared Unfit: What Does Inaptitude Mean and What Must You Do First?
A. How is unfitness declared, and can you challenge the occupational doctor’s opinion from abroad?
Only one person can declare your employee unfit with legal effect: the occupational doctor. Neither your own assessment, nor a certificate from the employee’s treating physician, nor a report from a foreign doctor produces inaptitude. The occupational doctor belongs to the occupational health service, called service de prévention et de santé au travail, to which every French employer must affiliate and pay contributions, and the doctor’s opinion is delivered, in most cases, at the return-to-work medical examination, called visite de reprise, which must be organised after a long absence. Article L4624-4 of the Labour Code describes the examination that precedes the opinion in these terms: “Après avoir procédé ou fait procéder par un membre de l’équipe pluridisciplinaire à une étude de poste et après avoir échangé avec le salarié et l’employeur, le médecin du travail qui constate qu’aucune mesure d’aménagement, d’adaptation ou de transformation du poste de travail occupé n’est possible et que l’état de santé du travailleur justifie un changement de poste déclare le travailleur inapte à son poste de travail.” Three elements in that sentence matter for a foreign employer. First, the doctor must have studied the actual post and spoken with both sides, which means your local manager or your counsel should attend or at least contribute to that exchange rather than leaving the employee alone with the doctor. Second, the adaptation of the current post must have been considered and discarded before unfitness is declared, so any adjustment you could realistically offer, such as reduced hours, remote work or lightened duties, should be documented and communicated to the doctor in writing before the examination. Third, the opinion must be supported by written conclusions with guidance on reassignment, because those conclusions will frame your entire subsequent search: “L’avis d’inaptitude rendu par le médecin du travail est éclairé par des conclusions écrites, assorties d’indications relatives au reclassement du travailleur.”
Sick leave itself, called arrêt maladie, never equals unfitness. During sick leave the contract is suspended, the employee receives daily allowances from the social security system, called IJSS (indemnités journalières de sécurité sociale), possibly topped up by the employer under the law or the applicable collective agreement, called convention collective, and you cannot dismiss on the ground of the illness alone. Unfitness is a separate medical and legal act that arrives later, usually at the return visit. This distinction protects you as much as the employee: as long as no opinion of unfitness has been issued, you owe no reassignment search and you must simply wait, while keeping the post or organising a temporary replacement. Conversely, once the opinion is issued, passivity becomes expensive, because the one-month clock described below starts running from the date of that examination whether you have read the letter or not. Mail addressed to the company’s siège social (registered office) is deemed received there, so a founder who visits Paris twice a year must organise a reliable forwarding chain for occupational health correspondence, ideally through counsel or a domiciliation provider that scans and transmits the same day.
An opinion you consider wrong or incomplete can be challenged, and distance is no obstacle to the challenge. Article L4624-7 of the Labour Code provides that either side may bring the dispute before the labour court under an accelerated procedure on the merits, and that the occupational doctor, informed of the challenge, is not a party to the case. In practice, counsel files the challenge, the court may order an independent medical assessment, called mesure d’instruction, entrusted to another occupational doctor, and the judge rules on the medical elements while the employment relationship continues under the protective regime. Challenge the opinion promptly when it contains a factual error about the posts available, when the job study never took place, or when the conclusions contradict the capacities they describe. Do not challenge routinely in the hope of gaining time: an unfounded challenge irritates the tribunal that will later judge the dismissal, and the reassignment clock keeps running during the dispute. The telephone line of the Paris office, +33 6 46 60 58 22, receives the occupational health correspondence of several foreign-run companies precisely so that these short deadlines are never missed while the founder is travelling.
One preliminary check conditions everything that follows: determine whether the unfitness has an occupational origin. If the illness or injury comes from a work accident, called accident du travail, or an occupational disease, called maladie professionnelle, a reinforced regime applies with doubled severance and a stricter protective framework, while ordinary illness or a non-work accident follows the standard regime. Ask the occupational doctor and the health insurance fund, called CPAM (caisse primaire d’assurance maladie), for the classification in writing, check whether a work accident declaration, called déclaration d’accident du travail, was filed within forty-eight hours of learning of the accident, and never assume the origin is ordinary merely because the employee never complained at the time. The rest of this guide presents the ordinary regime first and flags the occupational differences at each stage, because confusing the two is the most common and the most expensive error foreign employers make in these files.
B. What does the duty to find another post require from a company with one employee and no other department?
Once unfitness is declared, the employer must look for another job for the employee. Article L1226-2 of the Labour Code states the obligation directly: “l’employeur lui propose un autre emploi approprié à ses capacités, au sein de l’entreprise ou des entreprises du groupe auquel elle appartient le cas échéant, situées sur le territoire national et dont l’organisation, les activités ou le lieu d’exploitation assurent la permutation de tout ou partie du personnel.” Every phrase of that provision has a concrete consequence for a foreign-owned company. The proposed post must be suited to the employee’s remaining capacities as described in the doctor’s written conclusions, not a copy of the old job and not a humiliating downgrade designed to provoke a refusal. The search perimeter covers the French company and, where applicable, the group companies located on French territory whose organisation allows staff transfers between them. Entities abroad do not count: your London, Delaware or Dubai companies cannot be used to argue that a post exists elsewhere, and symmetrically the employee cannot demand a transfer to them. For a single French subsidiary with one employee and no sister companies in France, the perimeter is the subsidiary itself, but the search must still be genuine and documented rather than asserted in one sentence.
The proposal must also take account, under Article L1226-2 of the Labour Code, after the opinion of the staff committee where one exists, of the doctor’s conclusions: “Cette proposition prend en compte, après avis du comité social et économique lorsqu’il existe, les conclusions écrites du médecin du travail et les indications qu’il formule sur les capacités du salarié à exercer l’une des tâches existantes dans l’entreprise.” In a company with fewer than eleven employees there is generally no elected staff representation, called CSE (comité social et économique), so this step is usually inapplicable to the foreign founder’s first hire, but verify the headcount and any applicable collective agreement before concluding so. The doctor also gives guidance on training that could prepare the employee for an adapted post, and the proposed job must be as comparable as possible to the previous one, if necessary through transfers, adjustments or working-time arrangements: “L’emploi proposé est aussi comparable que possible à l’emploi précédemment occupé, au besoin par la mise en oeuvre de mesures telles que mutations, aménagements, adaptations ou transformations de postes existants ou aménagement du temps de travail.” Concretely, list every task the company performs, measure each against the medical restrictions, put each genuine possibility to the employee in writing with the pay, hours and location stated, and record each refusal with its reasons. Where the applicable collective agreement contains specific reassignment rules, apply them on top of the statute, because the tribunal will read both.
Where no adapted post genuinely exists, the law does not ask you to invent one. Article L1226-2-1 of the Labour Code provides: “Lorsqu’il est impossible à l’employeur de proposer un autre emploi au salarié, il lui fait connaître par écrit les motifs qui s’opposent à son reclassement.” That written statement of impossibility is a mandatory document, not an optional courtesy. It must explain precisely why each conceivable solution fails: the company has a single post whose essential duties the doctor has ruled out, no other establishment in France, no group entity on French territory permitting transfers, and no adjustment capable of reconciling the medical restrictions with the work. Vague formulas such as a small structure or no available post, without analysis of the doctor’s conclusions, are regularly treated by judges as evidence that no real search took place. Send the statement by a traceable means, keep proof of dispatch and receipt, and keep the underlying evidence, meaning the organisation chart, the job descriptions, the medical conclusions and the correspondence with the doctor, because the tribunal will examine the file, not your intentions.
Two court rulings illustrate how strictly judges read these documents, and both should be studied before writing a single letter. In a judgment of 12 February 2025, appeal number 23-22.612, the social chamber of the Cour de cassation recalled that “l’employeur ne peut rompre le contrat de travail que s’il justifie soit de son impossibilité de proposer un emploi dans les conditions prévues à l’article L. 1226-2, soit du refus par le salarié de l’emploi proposé dans ces conditions, soit de la mention expresse dans l’avis du médecin du travail que tout maintien du salarié dans un emploi serait gravement préjudiciable à sa santé ou que l’état de santé du salarié fait obstacle à tout reclassement dans un emploi”, and approved the appeal court for holding that the doctor’s formula, stating that the employee’s state of health allowed no reassignment proposal within the company, subsidiaries and holding included, and made the employee unfit for any post, was equivalent to the statutory wording, so that “la formule utilisée par le médecin du travail étant équivalente à la mention de l’article L. 1226-2-1 du code du travail”, the employer was dispensed from the search (Cass. soc., 12 February 2025, no. 23-22.612). The lesson is symmetrical: where the doctor writes an express exemption formula, you may rely on it, but the formula must genuinely cover every post, and paraphrases that fall short do not exempt you. In the mirror ruling of 13 December 2023, appeal number 22-19.603, the same chamber held that an opinion whose exemption covered only one site did not dispense the employer from searching beyond the employee’s establishment where other establishments existed, since “l’employeur n’était pas dispensé, par un avis d’inaptitude du médecin du travail limité à un seul site, de rechercher un reclassement hors de l’établissement auquel le salarié était affecté et avait ainsi manqué à son obligation de reclassement” (Cass. soc., 13 December 2023, no. 22-19.603). Read the doctor’s notice word by word, check its geographic scope against your actual French footprint, and ask the doctor in writing for clarification of any ambiguity before relying on an exemption.
II. How Do You End the Contract or Keep It Alive After a Finding of Unfitness?
A. When can you dismiss, with which procedure, and which severance must you pay?
The dismissal for unfitness becomes possible in exactly three situations, and only in those three: you have demonstrated that no reassignment is possible and notified the written reasons, the employee has refused a suitable post offered in compliance with the statute, or the doctor’s notice expressly exempts you from the search in the terms the courts accept. Act before one of these conditions is met, and the dismissal lacks a real and serious cause by construction. A dismissal pronounced while the search is still open, or on the sole ground that the employee is often absent for health reasons without a finding of unfitness, exposes the company to the full sanctions described in the next section. The calendar therefore has three dated milestones: the examination date that starts the one-month period, the written impossibility notice or the documented refusal, and the dismissal itself. Manage the file from abroad with these three dates on a single page, because every subsequent dispute will be argued date by date.
The one-month period is the mechanism foreign employers misunderstand most often. Article L1226-4 of the Labour Code provides: “Lorsque, à l’issue d’un délai d’un mois à compter de la date de l’examen médical de reprise du travail, le salarié déclaré inapte n’est pas reclassé dans l’entreprise ou s’il n’est pas licencié, l’employeur lui verse, dès l’expiration de ce délai, le salaire correspondant à l’emploi que celui-ci occupait avant la suspension de son contrat de travail.” In plain terms, thirty days after the examination, if the employee is neither reassigned nor dismissed, the salary restarts in full even though no work is performed, and it continues until one of the two outcomes occurs. The provision applies even where the doctor has found unfitness for every post in the company. Founders who discover the opinion two months late regularly owe back pay from the end of the first month, with payslips, called bulletins de paie, to be issued through the payroll system and social contributions, called cotisations sociales, declared to URSSAF (the social security collection agency) via the monthly nominative declaration, called DSN (déclaration sociale nominative). Your payroll provider can run zero-hour full-pay slips from abroad on instruction, but only if someone gives the instruction in time, which is another reason the forwarding chain for occupational health mail must be same-day rather than next-visit.
Where reassignment has failed or been refused, the dismissal itself follows the procedure for dismissal on personal grounds. The employer convenes the employee to a preliminary meeting, called entretien préalable, by registered letter or hand-delivered letter stating its purpose, with at least five working days between presentation of the letter and the meeting, as Article L1232-2 of the Labour Code requires: “L’employeur qui envisage de licencier un salarié le convoque, avant toute décision, à un entretien préalable.” At the meeting the employer states the contemplated decision and hears the employee’s explanations, a step that can be handled from abroad by a duly authorised representative holding a written delegation of authority, called délégation de pouvoirs, or by videoconference where the employee agrees, with a local manager physically present to keep the exchange genuine. The dismissal is then notified by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt, stating the grounds, and it cannot be dispatched less than two working days after the scheduled meeting date: “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” (Article L1232-6 of the Labour Code). The letter must set out the unfitness, the search conducted with its dates and offers, the impossibility reasons or the refusal, and, where applicable, the doctor’s exemption formula. Precision here is decisive, because the letter frames the entire future dispute and vague grounds cannot be repaired afterwards except through the narrow statutory clarification mechanism.
The exit payments differ from an ordinary dismissal in two respects that must be computed exactly. First, the notice period, called préavis, is not worked: “En cas de licenciement, le préavis n’est pas exécuté et le contrat de travail est rompu à la date de notification du licenciement”, although the notice is counted for the severance calculation, and, by exception to the ordinary rule, its non-performance gives rise to no compensatory payment (Article L1226-4 of the Labour Code). Second, the statutory severance, called indemnité légale de licenciement, is due as soon as the employee has eight months of continuous service: “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” (Article L1234-9 of the Labour Code), and it cannot be less than one quarter of a month’s pay per year of service for the first ten years and one third per year beyond, since “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” (Article R1234-2 of the Labour Code). Add the accrued paid leave, called congés payés, the pro-rata bonuses and any more favourable conventional severance, and deliver the three final documents on the last day: the work certificate, called certificat de travail, the final payslip with the balance of all accounts, called solde de tout compte, and the employment centre attestation, called attestation France Travail, for unemployment benefits. Errors in these documents generate their own damages, so have payroll and counsel cross-check them before dispatch.
Where the unfitness has an occupational origin, meaning a work accident or occupational disease, the price rises sharply and the procedure tightens further. The reassignment duty is stated in Article L1226-10 of the Labour Code on the same group-wide French-territory perimeter, the written impossibility notice is required by Article L1226-12 of the Labour Code, and the dismissal opens a right to a notice-equivalent payment plus a special severance equal to twice the statutory amount: “une indemnité spéciale de licenciement qui, sauf dispositions conventionnelles plus favorables, est égale au double de l’indemnité prévue par l’article L. 1234-9” (Article L1226-14 of the Labour Code). Dismissal during the suspension period is prohibited except for serious misconduct or impossibility of maintaining the contract for a reason unrelated to the accident or illness, and breach of that protection can lead to reinstatement orders. Foreign founders sometimes discover the occupational classification only at this stage, when the doubled severance comes as a shock. Classify early, as recommended above, price both scenarios before choosing the path, and never sign a dismissal letter drafted for ordinary unfitness where the file shows a work accident history.
B. What does the labour court award when the reassignment search was superficial?
The sanction for a dismissal pronounced in disregard of the reassignment rules is among the heaviest in French dismissal law. Article L1226-15 of the Labour Code provides that the tribunal may propose reinstatement with acquired benefits maintained, and that where either party refuses reinstatement, the judge awards an indemnity fixed under the specific scale of Article L1235-3-1, which cumulates with the compensatory and where applicable special severance payments of Article L1226-14. In figures, the specific scale for breach of the reassignment duty starts at a high floor and rises with seniority, well above the ordinary Macron scale for dismissals without real and serious cause, and it comes on top of the back-pay liability for the period after the one-month deadline and the ordinary severance. A single employee with three years of service, dismissed on a one-paragraph impossibility letter with no documented offers and no analysis of the doctor’s conclusions, can therefore cost the company the resumed salary for the months of inertia, the severance, and a sanction indemnity measured in many months of pay, plus counsel fees on both sides where the tribunal so orders. The arithmetic should be done before the dismissal letter is signed, not after the summons arrives, and it should be compared honestly with the cost of a genuine search or a negotiated departure while that window remains open.
Procedural challenges add a second layer of risk that distance tends to aggravate. The dismissal letter must state the unfitness route precisely, because a letter that invokes ordinary personal grounds without mentioning the opinion, the search and its outcome invites the judge to treat the dismissal as an ordinary dismissal without real and serious cause, judged against the ordinary scale with its own procedural penalties. Time limits cut both ways and must be calendared from abroad: the employee’s action challenging the dismissal is subject to a twelve-month limitation running from notification of the termination, since “Toute action portant sur la rupture du contrat de travail se prescrit par douze mois à compter de la notification de la rupture” (Article L1471-1 of the Labour Code), which means the complete file, meaning the opinion with its conclusions, the job study elements, the offers with proof of dispatch, the refusal or impossibility documents, the meeting and notification letters with postal receipts, and the final documents, must be preserved and accessible for at least that year. Companies that keep the file in the desk drawer of a Paris apartment nobody visits during the limitation year discover too late that counsel cannot defend a case whose exhibits are locked behind a door on another continent. Centralise the file electronically from day one, with counsel holding a complete copy.
For Paris and Île-de-France employers, two local points deserve attention. First, territorial jurisdiction for the challenge lies, at the employee’s choice, notably with the tribunal of the place of work, so a Paris-based employee will normally bring the case before the Paris labour court, whose proceedings are conducted entirely in French with strict rules on the exchange of exhibits, called pièces, and submissions, called conclusions, and where representation by a French employment lawyer, called avocat, is in practice indispensable for a foreign respondent. Second, the occupational health service and the regional labour administration, called DREETS (direction régionale de l’économie, de l’emploi, du travail et des solidarités), operate on Paris timelines that assume a responsive local contact: medical examinations are scheduled at short notice and rescheduling from abroad takes days, so designate a reachable representative now rather than after the summons. None of this requires the founder’s presence in France. All of it requires a monitored address, a responsive representative, counsel instructed before the deadlines, and a file that answers the tribunal’s questions before they are asked. The companies that lose these cases are rarely those with the worst medical situations. They are those whose search exists only in the dismissal letter.
Conclusion
An unfitness finding managed from abroad succeeds or fails on five disciplines that a foreign employer can impose from day one. Treat only the occupational doctor’s reasoned opinion as the triggering act, contribute to the job study and the exchange before it is issued, and challenge promptly under the accelerated procedure an opinion that misdescribes the posts or the capacities. Search genuinely for another post across the French perimeter, put each real possibility to the employee in writing with pay, hours and location, and where nothing exists notify written impossibility reasons that analyse the doctor’s conclusions instead of reciting formulas. Calendar the one-month examination date from the day the letter arrives, restart the salary on time where neither reassignment nor dismissal has occurred, and dismiss only once impossibility, refusal or an express medical exemption is established, through the summons, hearing and reasoned-letter procedure with its five-day and two-day intervals. Pay the exact exit, with the unworked but counted notice, the statutory severance at eight months of service, and double severance with the notice equivalent where the origin is occupational, deliver the three final documents exactly, and preserve the complete file past the twelve-month challenge period. Classify the origin early, price the sanction scale before signing, and compare it coolly with a genuine search or a negotiated exit while the choice is still yours. The tribunal does not punish foreign employers for living abroad. It punishes files in which the reassignment search never happened.