Under French law, employers may enter into a day-rate agreement (forfait en jours) with employees who have genuine autonomy in organising their working time. To compensate for the absence of working-hours monitoring, the employer must hold an annual individual meeting on workload, work organisation and work-life balance, and put in place an effective system for monitoring working time.
This scheme is under intense scrutiny by Courts and is often one of the claims that employees make, in addition to challenging their dismissal. It is thus of a crucial importance to monitor the application of the scheme to employees closely to mitigate the financial risks.
The Court of Cassation has previously ruled that, where the employer fails to comply, the day-rate agreement is ineffective and the employee may claim overtime pay, but the breach does not, in itself, entitle the employee to compensation: the employee must prove a distinct loss (Cass. soc., 11 March 2025, no. 24-10.452).
A ruling of 18 March 2026 confirms this approach. In this case, an HR director claimed damages on the ground that no annual workload meeting had been held and no working-time monitoring system had been put in place. While the lower court did find failings in relation to both elements, it also examined the employee’s electronic diaries and the listing of the 25,000 emails he had sent over five years, and found neither evidence of maximum working hours being exceeded, nor a pattern of late-night work. The mere absence of workload meetings was therefore insufficient, in the absence of evidence of actual loss, to support his claim for compensation.
The distinction with the case law on exceeding maximum working hours, where prejudice is automatically presumed, turns on the nature of each breach: exceeding maximum hours objectively deprives the worker of rest time, whereas the absence of an annual meeting is the loss of a preventive safeguard. It would be harmful only if the workload turned out, in concrete terms, to be excessive.
