Your first French employee asks for a rupture conventionnelle, the French mutual separation agreement, while you run the company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore. Perhaps performance disappointed you both, perhaps the employee wants to leave with unemployment rights, perhaps you were about to start a dismissal and hope for a cleaner exit. For a foreign founder doing business in France, this procedure looks reassuringly contractual: two parties sign, an administration stamps the agreement, everyone moves on. In reality it is one of the most formalised separations in French employment law, with compulsory interviews, a fifteen-day withdrawal period, a severance floor computed by statute, an administrative homologation by the DREETS, the Regional Directorate for the Economy, Employment, Labour and Solidarity, and a twelve-month litigation clock before the labour court. Get any step wrong and the agreement is void, which usually means the separation produces the effects of a dismissal without real and serious cause, with damages on top of money already paid. This article explains, for a foreign employer with staff in France, what a rupture conventionnelle is and is not, how the interviews and the withdrawal right work from abroad, how homologation is filed and answered, how the minimum severance is computed, and what courts did in 2025 and 2026 when the deal collapsed. It assumes an open-ended contract, a CDI, Contrat à Durée Indéterminée, the standard French permanent contract, and a private-sector employee without a protected mandate. Protected employees follow a different authorisation track, described below. If you are still setting up, our guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, from bank account to Kbis, VAT and first hire covers the foundations this article builds on.

I. Signing a Rupture Conventionnelle From Abroad: Interviews, Withdrawal and Filing

A. How do the interviews, the signature and the 15-day withdrawal right work?

A rupture conventionnelle is strictly consensual. Article L1237-11 of the Labour Code states the rule in one sentence: “La rupture conventionnelle, exclusive du licenciement ou de la démission, ne peut être imposée par l’une ou l’autre des parties.” In English: a mutual separation, which excludes both dismissal and resignation, cannot be imposed by either side. It results from an agreement signed by both parties to the contract. For a foreign employer, the first practical consequence is that you cannot use this procedure to get rid of an employee who does not want to leave, and you cannot present a pre-filled form as a take-it-or-leave-it offer the day after a poor performance review. Pressure, threats or a rushed signature feed the consent challenges described in Part II, and courts annul agreements signed under constraint even after the administration has stamped them.

The procedure starts with one or more interviews. During these meetings the employee may be assisted, and the assistance rules are asymmetrical in a way that surprises foreign founders. Article L1237-12 of the Labour Code provides that the employee can be assisted either by a person of their choice from inside the company, including a union office-holder, a staff representative or any other employee, or, where the company has no staff representative body, by an outside staff adviser, a conseiller du salarié, chosen from an official list drawn up by the administration. Your first hire works in a company with no staff representatives, so expect an outside adviser to sit in. The employer may only be assisted if the employee uses this right, and even then the employer’s assistant must come from inside the company or, in companies with fewer than fifty employees, from the employer’s trade organisation or be another employer from the same sector. Each side must warn the other in advance. In practice, when your employee announces that a conseiller du salarié will attend, reply in writing, confirm the date with enough lead time, and designate your own assistant promptly: your French accountant, your local manager, or counsel acting under a written mandate. If you attend by video link from abroad, state it in the meeting notes and make sure the employee was informed beforehand, because any irregularity in the interview stage becomes an annulment argument later.

The interview must genuinely address the principle of the separation and its terms: the departure date and the amount of the specific severance, the indemnité spécifique de rupture conventionnelle. The agreement is then signed, in practice on the official Cerfa form plus any detailed convention the parties attach. Keep the signed original and a timestamped copy. From the date both parties sign, each side has fifteen calendar days to withdraw. Article L1237-13 of the Labour Code is explicit: “A compter de la date de sa signature par les deux parties, chacune d’entre elles dispose d’un délai de quinze jours calendaires pour exercer son droit de rétractation.” Calendar days means weekends and public holidays count. The withdrawal is exercised “sous la forme d’une lettre adressée par tout moyen attestant de sa date de réception par l’autre partie”, a letter sent by any means that proves the date the other side received it.

The decisive point for an employer living abroad is what counts as exercising the right in time: sending or receipt. The Court of Cassation settled this on 14 February 2018 in a widely applied ruling, pourvoi number 17-10.035, holding that “une partie à une convention de rupture peut valablement exercer son droit de rétractation dès lors qu’elle adresse à l’autre partie, dans le délai de quinze jours calendaires qu’il prévoit, une lettre de rétractation”. In other words, posting the letter within the fifteen days is enough; the other side does not need to have received it before the deadline expires. In that case the employee had sent the registered letter on the final day and the employer received it four days later, and the appeal court had wrongly treated the withdrawal as late. The Court of Cassation quashed that reasoning: the withdrawal had been exercised in time because it was sent in time, as the court’s own findings showed. The full text of Court of Cassation, Social Chamber, 14 February 2018, no. 17-10.035 is published on the official court website.

This sending rule protects you as much as the employee: if you change your mind within fifteen days, send your withdrawal immediately and keep the proof of sending. But do not read it as an invitation to use slow post. A recent appeal decision shows how proof problems still destroy files. On 3 September 2026 the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, RG number 21/10978, dealt with an employee whose retraction letter and registered-mail receipts carried inconsistent numbers and dates, with the employer’s copy postmarked after the deadline and the employee’s copy returned for a postal addressing failure. The court expressly recalled the Court of Cassation’s rule, noting that the fifteen-day reflection period must not be shortened by transit time, “sans que ce délai de réflexion soit amputé par le décompte du délai d’acheminement de l’écrit portant rétractation à l’autre partie, qui est en outre, quel qu’en soit le mode, soumis à aléa”, and it accepted the withdrawal because “il est établi que la décision de rétractation a été prise pendant le délai de 15 jours calendaires, et notifiée à l’adresse de l’employeur avant le terme du délai, et nonobstant l’homologation intervenue”. The withdrawal stood despite the homologation that had already been granted. The lesson for a foreign employer is operational: always send the withdrawal by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt, and on the same day by email with read receipt to the address stated in the agreement, keep the posting slip with its number, and keep screenshots of the sending. If the employee withdraws, you receive the same protection in reverse: check the sending date, not only the date you opened the letter. The full text of Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, 3 September 2026, RG 21/10978 is available on the official court website.

B. How does DREETS homologation work when the employer lives abroad?

Once the fifteen-day withdrawal period expires without a withdrawal, the most diligent party sends a homologation request to the administration with a copy of the agreement, using the ministerial model form. Article L1237-14 of the Labour Code provides that “la partie la plus diligente adresse une demande d’homologation à l’autorité administrative, avec un exemplaire de la convention de rupture”, and that “Un arrêté du ministre chargé du travail fixe le modèle de cette demande”. In practice the request is filed online through TéléRC, the official portal for rupture conventionnelle requests, teleRc.travail.gouv.fr, and either side can file. As the foreign employer, do not wait for the employee to file: file yourself or through your mandated representative the day after the withdrawal period ends, because the fifteen-working-day instruction clock only starts when the administration receives a complete file.

The competent authority is the DREETS of the place where the employee works, the Regional Directorate for the Economy, Employment, Labour and Solidarity, which absorbed the former DIRECCTE network. If your employee works in Paris, the file goes to the DREETS of Île-de-France, and any dispute later goes to the Paris labour court, the conseil de prud’hommes de Paris, which has jurisdiction over Paris-based employment. State the exact work address on the form, because a filing sent to the wrong region loses weeks. The DREETS checks compliance with the statutory conditions and the freedom of consent of both parties. It has fifteen working days, jours ouvrables, from receipt to investigate under Article L1237-14: “L’autorité administrative dispose d’un délai d’instruction de quinze jours ouvrables, à compter de la réception de la demande, pour s’assurer du respect des conditions prévues à la présente section et de la liberté de consentement des parties.” Silence means approval: “A défaut de notification dans ce délai, l’homologation est réputée acquise et l’autorité administrative est dessaisie.” And the stakes are absolute: “La validité de la convention est subordonnée à son homologation.” An unapproved agreement is not a separation at all; the contract continues.

The agreement itself sets the departure date, but the law caps how early it can fall: under Article L1237-13 the date “ne peut intervenir avant le lendemain du jour de l’homologation”, it cannot be earlier than the day after homologation. There is no notice period, no préavis, in a rupture conventionnelle. The employee keeps working, and keeps being paid, until the agreed departure date, including during the withdrawal period and the DREETS instruction period. Do not stop paying salary, do not cut off email access, and do not treat the employee as departed once the papers are signed: until the day after homologation, you still have an employee, with all employer duties attached.

If the DREETS refuses homologation, the separation cannot proceed on that agreement. The parties may sign a fresh agreement and restart the whole sequence, interviews included, or abandon the mutual route. Note that a refusal, like the approval itself, can only be challenged together with the agreement before the labour court under Article L1237-14: “L’homologation ne peut faire l’objet d’un litige distinct de celui relatif à la convention.” Any dispute over the agreement, the approval or the refusal of approval falls exclusively to the conseil de prud’hommes, “à l’exclusion de tout autre recours contentieux ou administratif”, and court action must be brought within twelve months of the approval date, “à peine d’irrecevabilité, avant l’expiration d’un délai de douze mois à compter de la date d’homologation de la convention”. The full text of Article L1237-14 of the Labour Code, the full text of Article L1237-11, the full text of Article L1237-12 and the full text of Article L1237-13 are all published on Légifrance, the official French legal database.

Two special tracks matter for foreign employers. First, employees with a protected mandate, salariés protégés such as staff delegates or union representatives, cannot use the standard homologation: Article L1237-15 provides that “la rupture conventionnelle est soumise à l’autorisation de l’inspecteur du travail”, subject to labour inspector authorisation, and the contract can only end the day after that authorisation. The full text of Article L1237-15 of the Labour Code is on Légifrance. With a first hire this is rare, but verify in writing that the employee holds no mandate before signing; an undisclosed mandate discovered later poisons the file. Second, running the process from abroad works only with a clear mandate chain: give your French representative a written power to attend interviews, sign the Cerfa, and file on TéléRC, keep every exchange timestamped across time zones, and diarise three dates the day you sign, the last day of the fifteen calendar days for withdrawal, the earliest date to file with the DREETS, and fifteen working days later when silence means approval. Missing any of the three restarts or voids the procedure.

II. What a Rupture Conventionnelle Costs and What Happens If It Fails

A. How is the minimum severance computed: legal floor, collective agreement and example?

The agreement sets the amount of the specific severance, but the law sets the floor. Article L1237-13 states that “le montant de l’indemnité spécifique de rupture conventionnelle qui ne peut pas être inférieur à celui de l’indemnité prévue à l’article L. 1234-9”, it cannot be lower than the statutory dismissal severance. That statutory severance requires at least eight months of continuous service: Article L1234-9 of the Labour Code provides that an employee on an open-ended contract, dismissed with eight months of uninterrupted seniority with the same employer, is entitled to severance except for serious misconduct, with calculation methods set by regulation. The full text of Article L1234-9 of the Labour Code is on Légifrance. Below eight months of service, no statutory minimum applies, but the parties still fix an amount, and offering nothing to an employee with several months of service invites both a DREETS refusal and a later consent challenge.

The regulatory formula is set by Articles R1234-1 and R1234-2. Article R1234-1 states that the severance cannot be less than a sum computed per year of service including months beyond full years, with incomplete years counted pro rata by full months. Article R1234-2 then gives the rates: “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.” In English: one quarter of a month’s salary per year of service for the first ten years, one third per year beyond ten years. The full text of Article R1234-1 and the full text of Article R1234-2 are on Légifrance. Take a concrete first-hire example. Your employee joined three years and six months ago, with an average gross monthly salary of 3,200 euros over the reference period. The legal floor is 3.5 years times one quarter of a month: 3.5 × 800 = 2,800 euros gross. With one year and two months of service at 2,900 euros average, the floor is 14 full months counted pro rata, roughly 1.17 years × 725 = about 846 euros. These are minimums, not targets: most employees request a multiple, often two to six months, in exchange for waiving the protections of a dismissal dispute, and the DREETS looks more kindly on files where the amount is reasoned than on files stuck exactly at the floor with no explanation.

The floor rises further when a collective bargaining agreement, a convention collective, grants a higher dismissal severance. French appeal courts apply the conventional minimum to the rupture conventionnelle where it is more favourable than the legal one. On 4 July 2025 the Nîmes Court of Appeal, RG number 24/00029, held that “le salarié est en droit de prétendre à une indemnité spécifique de rupture dont le montant ne peut être inférieur à l’indemnité conventionnelle de licenciement”, the employee is entitled to a specific severance no lower than the conventional dismissal severance. In that case a sector agreement computed severance per half-year of service at rates above the statute, and the court rebuilt the whole calculation on the conventional formula, substituting its own monthly reference of 4,399.96 euros for the amount claimed, reaching 90,199.18 euros, deducting the 31,143.56 euros already paid, and ordering the employer to pay the balance of 59,055.62 euros. The message for a foreign employer is direct: before proposing any figure, identify the applicable convention collective, read its severance article, and compute both the legal and the conventional amounts. The higher of the two is your real floor. The salary base also matters: the court worked from gross annual salary including benefits in kind, and disputes over bonuses, thirteenth month and commissions change the reference average. Fix the base explicitly in the agreement. The full text of Nîmes Court of Appeal, 4 July 2025, RG 24/00029 is on the official court website.

The same decision, Nîmes Court of Appeal, 4 July 2025, RG 24/00029, recalls the payroll treatment that makes underpayment doubly expensive. The court noted “que les indemnités versées à l’occasion de la rupture du contrat de travail, non imposables à l’impôt sur le revenu, sont exclues de l’assiette des cotisations de sécurité sociale, dans la limite de 2 PASS”, meaning severance amounts paid on termination that are exempt from income tax are excluded from the social-security contribution base up to twice the annual social-security ceiling, the PASS, Plafond Annuel de la Sécurité Sociale. URSSAF, the body that collects French social contributions, the Unions de Recouvrement des Cotisations de Sécurité Sociale et d’Allocations Familiales, can reassess the employer on amounts above the exempt limits, so every euro above the floor needs payroll validation, not a handshake figure. At departure, the employee must receive three documents consistent with the judgment or agreement: the final payslip, the France Travail attestation for unemployment registration, and the solde de tout compte, the final balance receipt. The Nîmes court ordered all three reissued in compliance with its ruling. Budget the full cost before signing: the severance itself, paid leave compensation, any pro-rata bonus, the notice-free salary through the departure date, and the payroll charges on the taxable fraction.

B. What if the employee withdraws or the agreement is annulled: refusal, court and unemployment?

Start with the cleanest failure: a timely withdrawal. The Aix-en-Provence decision of 3 September 2026, RG 21/10978, shows the full chain. The employee’s withdrawal, sent within the fifteen calendar days despite chaotic postal evidence, stopped the procedure even though the DREETS had already homologated the agreement: “Le processus de rupture conventionnelle ayant été interrompu par l’exercice du droit de rétractation, la rupture doit être considérée comme irrégulière et être annulée.” The interrupted process meant the rupture was irregular and had to be annulled. Because the employee no longer sought reinstatement, the broken contract “produit les effets d’un licenciement sans cause réelle et sérieuse”, produced the effects of a dismissal without real and serious cause, with damages assessed within the statutory scale and partial judicial set-off against the specific severance already paid, which the employee had to return in part. For the foreign employer, two consequences follow. First, a homologation stamp does not cure a withdrawal: verify the sending date of any retraction letter before celebrating approval. Second, an annulled agreement converts into dismissal-grade liability, back pay, severance and damages, minus restitution of sums already paid. Never treat homologation as a point of no return.

Consent defects produce the same conversion. The administration checks apparent freedom of consent, but only the labour court rules definitively, and it does so within the twelve-month deadline of Article L1237-14, counting from approval, with exclusive jurisdiction over the agreement, the approval and any refusal. Agreements signed after harassment, moral pressure, a fraud on the employee’s understanding of their rights, or while the employee’s consent was impaired are annulled and reclassified. Foreign founders face three recurring traps: raising the rupture the day after announcing performance concerns, which reads as a disguised dismissal; negotiating alone with an employee who requested an adviser and was refused one; and letting the employee sign without a genuine discussion of the amount, the date and the unemployment consequences. Each trap is documented in the interview notes, the email thread and the timeline, which is why contemporaneous written records from abroad, with dates, attendees and amounts discussed, are your best defence. If the DREETS refuses approval because consent looks doubtful or the file is incomplete, do not refile an identical agreement the next day: fix the defect, hold a fresh interview, sign a new agreement, and run new withdrawal and instruction periods, or switch to the dismissal procedure with its own formalities, described in our guide to dismissing your first French employee from abroad, procedure, severance cost and labour court risk.

Employees sometimes attack the agreement on the amount itself, arguing that a severance far below what they could have claimed proves their consent was flawed. Appeal courts examine these claims but do not annul for a low figure alone where the floor was respected and consent was free; the Nîmes case above corrected the amount to the conventional floor and ordered the balance, plus compliant departure documents, without needing to void the whole separation for lack of cause. The practical reading is that the floor is a shield: compute it correctly, document the base, pay it in full, and the amount argument loses most of its force. Pay below the floor and you hand the employee both the balance and a consent narrative.

One reason employees request this procedure is unemployment cover, and the administration’s own guidance confirms it. The official service-public.fr guide to rupture conventionnelle in the private sector confirms that after a mutual separation, the employee may receive benefits from France Travail, the French public employment service formerly known as Pôle emploi, and that employees meeting the conditions, including a minimum prior work period, may receive the return-to-work allowance, the ARE, Allocation d’Aide au Retour à l’Emploi. Deliver the France Travail attestation immediately at departure: late or incorrect attestations delay benefits and generate damages claims that dwarf the postage you saved. Note that the employee’s ARE rights do not cost you anything directly, but they explain why employees push for this route rather than resigning, and why a fair severance closes files while a bare-minimum offer pushes the employee toward the twelve-month court clock.

For Paris-based employment, two local points close the file. First, the DREETS Île-de-France unit handling Paris filings applies the same fifteen-working-day silence-means-approval rule, but Paris volumes mean incomplete files wait: file a complete TéléRC dossier with the signed Cerfa, proof of the interview dates and the exact work address, and track receipt, because the clock runs from receipt of a complete request. Second, any challenge goes to the Paris conseil de prud’hommes, where the twelve-month inadmissibility deadline of Article L1237-14 is applied strictly, so calendar the anniversary of homologation and keep the approval notification with the agreement for a full year after departure, longer if a dispute is filed.

Conclusion

A rupture conventionnelle lets a foreign employer and a first French hire part by agreement, but every step is a condition of validity, not a formality. Hold genuine interviews and respect the assistance rules, sign a complete agreement with a reasoned severance at or above the higher of the legal and conventional floors, let the fifteen calendar days for withdrawal run and check sending dates rather than receipt dates, file promptly with the competent DREETS and diarise the fifteen working days to deemed approval, and deliver compliant departure documents on the agreed date. The 2018 Court of Cassation rule on withdrawal by sending, the 2025 Nîmes ruling on the conventional severance floor with its 59,055.62 euro balance, and the 2026 Aix-en-Provence annulment despite homologation all point the same way: courts protect the procedure, not the stamp. An approved agreement built on a correct floor and free consent closes the file and preserves the employee’s path to France Travail benefits; a rushed one converts into a dismissal without real and serious cause, with damages, back pay and restitution accounting to follow. From abroad, that difference is managed with three tools: a written mandate for your French representative, timestamped proof of every sending, and a severance computation you can show to the DREETS, to URSSAF and, if needed, to the Paris labour court within its twelve-month clock.