You run a French company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, and you have found the right person for your first or next hire in France. There is only one difficulty: the candidate is not French, and you are not sure whether their residence permit allows them to work. This question must be answered before the employment contract is signed, because French law places a verification duty directly on the employer, and the penalties for getting it wrong combine an administrative fine of tens of thousands of euros per worker, up to five years of imprisonment, back payment of wages and exclusion from public contracts. The good news is that the verification itself is a simple, free step with the local préfecture (the state authority representing the French government in each département, or administrative district), and that a careful file protects you even if the candidate’s documents later turn out to be forged. This article explains, for a foreign founder managing a French company from abroad, how to check a foreign candidate’s right to work, which permits allow employment without further steps, and what a missed check really costs. If you are still at the creation stage, read first our guide on setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, which covers the bank account, the Kbis (the official company identity certificate issued by the greffe, the registry of the Commercial Court) and VAT registration that must be in place before any hire.

I. Check the Right to Work Before Hiring: The Prefecture Verification and the Hiring Formalities

A. How Foreign Founders Verify a Work Permit With the Prefecture From Abroad

French law states the prohibition in the broadest possible terms. Article L. 8251-1 of the French Labour Code lays down a blanket ban: no one may, directly or indirectly, hire, keep in service or employ for any length of time a foreign national who does not hold a permit authorising paid employment in France. The full text is published on Légifrance, article L. 8251-1 of the Labour Code. Note three points that matter enormously for a founder abroad. First, the ban covers hiring “for any length of time”, so a two-week trial, a short fixed-term contract and unpaid extra days all count. Second, it covers indirect employment, so using an intermediary, a subcontractor or a staffing arrangement does not shield you. Third, the second paragraph of the same article adds that you may not employ a foreign worker outside the professional category, occupation or geographical area stated on their permit, where the permit mentions any. A permit restricted to one occupation or one region must be read line by line before you assign the employee to their post.

The employer’s verification duty is set out in article L. 5221-8 of the Labour Code, which requires the employer to confirm with the locally competent authorities that the foreign national genuinely holds a permit authorising paid employment in France, unless the candidate is registered on the jobseekers list kept by France Travail (the French public employment service, formerly Pôle emploi). See the official text on Légifrance, article L. 5221-8 of the Labour Code. The implementing provision, article R. 5221-41, designates exactly which authority to contact: the employer checks that the foreign candidate is in regular status as regards residence, and for that purpose applies to the prefect of the département where the employing establishment has its registered office. The employer therefore writes to the préfet (the prefect, the state’s representative) of the département where the employing establishment has its registered office. The official text is on Légifrance, article R. 5221-41 of the Labour Code.

In practice, the procedure described on the official service-public.fr pages works as follows. Before hiring a foreign national, the employer must check the authenticity of the residence permit authorising work in France with the prefecture of the place of employment, at least two working days before the planned start date. This verification is not required if the foreign national is registered with France Travail. If the prefecture gives no answer within two working days of receiving the request, the employer’s verification duty is deemed fulfilled. These practical rules are confirmed in English on service-public.fr, work permit for a foreign employee in France. For a founder living abroad, the operational consequences are direct. Build the two-working-day verification into every hiring timeline and never let a local manager or a candidate’s urgency push the start date forward. Send the request in writing, keep dated proof of dispatch and of receipt, and diary the two-day deadline so that silence can be documented as compliance. Keep a complete copy of the candidate’s permit and passport in the hiring file, and record the exact job title, occupation category and work location so they can be matched against any restriction written on the permit. Where the candidate is registered with France Travail, keep proof of that registration in the file instead, since it replaces the prefecture check. One further protection deserves attention: the criminal provision expressly spares the employer who, on the basis of a forged permit or a permit fraudulently presented by the employee, carried out the social security declaration and the verification with the competent authorities without any intention to participate in the fraud and without knowledge of it. A documented verification therefore protects you twice: it satisfies the administrative duty, and it is the factual basis of the good-faith defence if the documents were fake.

B. Which Candidates Can Work Immediately, Which Need an Authorisation, and the Declarations Every Hire Requires

Not every foreign candidate needs a prior work authorisation, and sorting candidates into the right group is the first step of the hiring decision. Nationals of European Union and European Economic Area states and Switzerland work freely in France with no permit and no prefecture check. For other nationalities, a valid residence permit bearing a work authorisation is required, and French regulations distinguish three families of permits: permits that by themselves authorise work with no separate application, permits that require a prior work authorisation request, and permits that require a distinct work authorisation alongside the residence document. The category, occupation and geographical mentions printed on the permit decide what the holder may actually do, under article L. 8251-1 quoted above. Students deserve a special warning for founders hiring junior profiles or interns: where a foreign student’s employment exceeds sixty percent of annual working time, namely 964 hours, the employer must apply for a work permit, and a personal declaration to the prefecture is required two working days before employing a foreign student. Where the candidate does not yet live in France, the employer must file the work authorisation request through the Interior Ministry online service for foreign nationals in France (reached via the service-public.fr work authorisation procedure) before any entry for work purposes. The official portal is presented on service-public.fr, online work authorisation request for hiring a foreign national, and the online application route is described on service-public.fr, online work authorisation request. Never promise a start date, sign a lease for the employee or announce the hire publicly before the authorisation is granted.

Once the right-to-work question is settled, the standard French hiring formalities apply in full, and managing from abroad is no excuse for skipping them. Article L. 1221-10 of the Labour Code states that no hire may take place before the employer has filed the nominative declaration with the designated social protection bodies, which is the DPAE (déclaration préalable à l’embauche, the prior hiring declaration) sent to URSSAF (the body collecting employer and employee social contributions). The official text is on Légifrance, article L. 1221-10 of the Labour Code. The declaration must be filed before the employee starts work, and the employer must give the employee a copy or acknowledgement. Give the new hire a written employment contract in French, or bilingual with a French version prevailing in practice, stating the job title, qualification level, working time, place of work, remuneration and applicable collective bargaining agreement, and register the employee with the relevant pension and occupational health bodies. At each payday, article L. 3243-2 requires the employer to hand over the payslip (the bulletin de paie) whose mandatory mentions are fixed by decree. At every wage payment the employer hands over the payslip, the bulletin de paie, whose mandatory mentions are fixed by decree. See Légifrance, article L. 3243-2 of the Labour Code. From the first payroll onwards, wages and contributions are reported each month through the DSN (déclaration sociale nominative, the monthly online payroll return) filed with URSSAF. A foreign founder should therefore treat every hire as a four-step file: right-to-work verification with the prefecture, DPAE with URSSAF before day one, written contract aligned with the permit’s restrictions, then payslip and DSN. Missing the first step poisons all the others, because contributions paid on an unauthorised worker do not regularise the employment and can instead document the offence.

II. What a Missed Check Really Costs: Fines, Criminal Courts, Business Sanctions and the Way Back to Compliance

A. The Three Layers of Sanctions: Administrative Fine, Criminal Penalties and Professional Bans

The first layer is the administrative fine, imposed by the minister in charge of immigration on the basis of inspection reports, and it applies even without any criminal prosecution. Article L. 8253-1 of the Labour Code caps the fine at 5,000 times the hourly minimum garanti (the statutory reference amount used for this fine, close to the hourly SMIC, the French minimum wage), rising to 15,000 times that rate for a repeat offence, with the fine applied separately for each worker concerned. The maximum is therefore 5,000 times the hourly minimum garanti (the statutory reference amount used for this fine, close to the hourly SMIC, the French minimum wage), rising to 15,000 times in case of repetition, and the fine is multiplied by the number of workers concerned. At recent values this means a maximum of roughly twenty-one thousand euros per worker for a first finding, and around three times that for a repeat offence. The minister must weigh the employer’s financial capacity, the degree of intent, the seriousness of the negligence and the cost of removing the worker from French territory. The official text is on Légifrance, article L. 8253-1 of the Labour Code. Because the fine is applied per worker, a small team of three or four unauthorised employees can produce a total well above one hundred thousand euros, before any other sanction is even considered.

The second layer is criminal, and it targets individuals as well as the company. Article L. 8256-2 punishes hiring, keeping in service or employing an unauthorised foreign worker, directly or through an intermediary, in breach of article L. 8251-1, with five years of imprisonment and a 30,000 euro fine, the fine being applied separately for each worker concerned. Knowingly using the services of an employer of an unauthorised foreign worker carries the same penalties, and the sentence rises to ten years of imprisonment and a 200,000 euro fine where the offence is committed by an organised group. The official text is on Légifrance, article L. 8256-2 of the Labour Code. A parallel prohibition in article L. 8251-2 bars anyone from knowingly and directly or indirectly using the services of an employer of a foreign worker not authorised to work. See Légifrance, article L. 8251-2 of the Labour Code. Foreign founders sometimes assume that distance protects them; it does not, because the company itself is criminally liable as a legal person and its managers answer under the general rules of criminal responsibility. Article L. 8256-7 lists the penalties for legal entities found criminally responsible, including a fine under the rules of article 131-38 of the Criminal Code and the penalties of article 131-39 such as bans on the activity in the exercise of which the offence was committed and, for up to two years, court-ordered publication of the conviction on the Labour Ministry’s website. See Légifrance, article L. 8256-7 of the Labour Code. A published conviction is a commercial disaster for a young company selling to French clients, far beyond the fine itself.

The third layer is professional and financial, and it can hurt more than the fine. Employers found in breach face exclusion from public procurement, withdrawal of public employment aid, temporary closure of the establishment ordered as an additional penalty, and joint liability for the worker’s back wages, unpaid contributions claimed by URSSAF and the flat-rate contribution for employing an unauthorised worker. URSSAF auditors and labour inspectors (inspection du travail) routinely examine hiring files during controls, and an unauthorised worker discovered during an accident at work, a site inspection or a payroll audit triggers all three layers at once. The practical lesson for a founder abroad is to price the risk honestly: one unchecked hire can cost the equivalent of several years of that position’s gross salary once the administrative fine, the criminal fine per worker, back pay, contribution adjustments and the loss of contracts are added together. That arithmetic is precisely why large French groups centralise the prefecture verification and refuse any start date before the two-day answer period has run. A small foreign-owned company should apply exactly the same discipline, with a written rule that no one in France may authorise an early start.

B. Controls, Regularisation and Defence: What to Do When the Inspection Comes or the File Is Already Wrong

Controls usually arrive through the labour inspectorate, URSSAF auditors or joint operations, and they focus on documents: permits, prefecture correspondence, DPAE receipts, contracts, payslips and DSN filings. When inspectors identify an unauthorised worker, minutes and reports are drawn up and transmitted, and the administrative and criminal tracks run in parallel. The employer’s file as it stands on the day of the control largely determines what happens next, which is why every verification request, prefecture reply, France Travail registration printout, DPAE acknowledgement and contract must be archived with dates from day one. If the prefecture never answered within two working days, produce the dated request and proof of receipt: the service-public.fr pages confirm the duty is then deemed fulfilled. If the worker presented forged documents, gather the file proving that the DPAE was filed and the prefecture verification genuinely performed without knowledge of the fraud, since that combination is the statutory shelter of article L. 8256-2. If the permit existed but restricted the occupation or area, compare the contractual duties and actual workplace against the permit’s mentions, because an employee working outside the stated category is treated as unauthorised for that post.

Where the file is already wrong, for example a worker started before any check or the two-day period was ignored under commercial pressure, the priority is to stop the ongoing offence and regularise what can still be regularised. Suspend the employment relationship from duties that require authorisation, seek immediate advice on whether a work authorisation application or a change of status can be filed for the worker, and prepare the payment of wages due for work actually performed, since unauthorised status never cancels the right to be paid. Quantify the contribution exposure with your payroll provider, because URSSAF will assess unpaid contributions and surcharges independently of the immigration fine. On the defence side, the administrative fine can be challenged before the administrative courts, where arguments turn on the reality of the verification steps, the employer’s good faith, financial capacity and the proportionality of the amount, while criminal proceedings require a defence on intent, delegation of powers within the company and the documentary record. Since the fine is capped by law but scaled per worker, reducing the number of workers retained in the proceedings or qualifying for the lower end of the scale has a direct financial effect. For founders managing from abroad, three organisational measures prevent the next case: a written hiring procedure making the prefecture check and the DPAE mandatory preconditions to any start date, a single designated person in France responsible for the file, and a quarterly audit of permits with expiry diary entries, because a worker whose permit expires during employment becomes an unauthorised worker on the day after expiry. The Ministry of Labour’s employer-hiring guidance, summarised on code.travail.gouv.fr, employer obligations when hiring, is a useful checklist to attach to that internal procedure alongside the service-public.fr work permit pages.

Founders managing from abroad should also keep one practical point in mind: the file must be usable by someone else. If the labour inspector visits your Paris premises while you are in another time zone, the person on site must be able to produce the permit copies, the dated prefecture request and reply, the DPAE acknowledgement, the written contract and the latest payslips within minutes. Store the complete hiring file in a shared, backed-up location with a clear naming convention, and give your local contact written authority to present it. A further diary point concerns renewals: many residence permits carry an expiry date shorter than the employment contract, and the day after expiry the employee becomes an unauthorised worker if no renewal has been obtained, re-opening every layer of sanctions described above. Ask every foreign employee to flag renewal applications early, record the expiry dates centrally, and suspend duties requiring authorisation if a renewal is delayed. Finally, remember that the verification duty applies to each new hire individually, including rehires after an interruption, and that internal transfers from a foreign parent company into the French entity are hires like any other for these purposes. Consistency is the whole defence: the same check, the same two-day wait, the same declarations, for every foreign candidate, without exception for urgency, seniority or personal recommendation.

Conclusion

Hiring a foreign employee for your French company while you live abroad is entirely possible, and many foreign-owned companies in France do it every month. The rule that makes it safe is simple: verify the right to work with the prefecture at least two working days before the start date, or confirm and file the France Travail registration, complete the DPAE before day one, align the contract with the permit’s occupation and area mentions, and keep dated proof of every step. That file defeats the administrative fine, grounds the criminal good-faith defence and survives a labour inspection or an URSSAF audit. Skip the check, and one hire can accumulate an administrative fine per worker, criminal fines and imprisonment exposure, publication of the conviction and exclusion from public contracts. Give every hire the same two-day discipline, diary every permit expiry, and never authorise an early start from another time zone.