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Practical guide
On a forfait jours you stop counting hours and count days instead: an annual cap, rest days, and no more overtime. This guide explains who can be put on one, what the law guarantees, what a working day is worth and what you can negotiate.
The forfait jours is how working time is counted for most autonomous cadres in France: no fixed hours, no clocking in, a number of working days per year. It gives freedom to organise your time and takes away overtime pay. This guide explains when it is valid, what it guarantees you, what your working day is really worth, and what you can negotiate when you sign it.
Only two groups: cadres who organise their own timetable and do not follow the collective working hours, and non-cadre employees whose working time cannot be set in advance and who have real autonomy. An assistant who clocks in at fixed hours has no place on one, even with cadre status.
The law caps the forfait at 218 working days a year; the collective agreement can set fewer. In return, you are no longer bound by the maximum of 10 hours a day and 48 hours a week, but you keep the minimum daily and weekly rest, your paid leave and public holidays off. A forfait does not give RTT days as such: it gives rest days, what is left once weekends, leave, weekday public holidays and the forfait days are taken away from the year.
| 2026 count | Days |
|---|---|
| Days in the year | 365 |
| Saturdays and Sundays | − 104 |
| Paid leave (working days) | − 25 |
| Public holidays on weekdays | − 9 |
| Forfait days | − 218 |
| Rest days | 9 |
Calculation published by service-public.gouv.fr for 2026, redone here by the site; it changes every year with the public holiday calendar, and local public holidays (Alsace-Moselle) are taken away too.
On a forfait jours there is no longer a reference working week: the notion of overtime disappears, as service-public states plainly. A very heavy week is paid no more than a quiet one. That is the difference with an hours-based forfait (weekly, monthly or yearly), which builds in a planned volume of overtime, paid with a premium, and pays extra for hours beyond it. The guide to overtime details those premiums.
The counterweight is legal: if the agreement is void or unenforceable (inadequate collective agreement, number of days missing, workload never monitored), counting in hours comes back, and with it the right to claim the overtime worked. Hence the value of keeping a record of your days, even on a forfait.
Take a cadre on a 218-day forfait paid €48,000 gross a year. The site's engine gives €3,138 net a month before tax. Divided by the forfait days, the salary is worth €220 gross per working day. The legal annual working time of 1,607 hours would mean 7.37 h a day over those 218 days, and put the hour at €29.87 gross. Beyond that, every extra hour a day lowers your real hourly rate:
| Hours a day | Hours a year | Beyond 1,607 h | Real gross hourly rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 h | 1,744 h | 137 h | €27.52 |
| 9 h | 1,962 h | 355 h | €24.46 |
| 10 h | 2,180 h | 573 h | €22.02 |
The law sets no minimum salary specific to the forfait jours, but your pay cannot fall below the collective-agreement minimum for your classification, and it must reflect the demands placed on you: if it is clearly out of proportion with them, the employment tribunal can award compensation. To compare this forfait with an offer paid by the hour, enter these hourly rates in the hourly, monthly and annual pay tool.
You can agree to work more than your forfait by giving up some of your rest days. It takes a written amendment, valid for the current year and never renewed tacitly, and a premium of at least 10% for each extra day. Unless the collective agreement sets another ceiling, you cannot exceed 235 days, i.e. 17 days beyond the legal forfait. In the example, if a day is valued at the annual salary divided by the forfait days (your agreement may use another formula), selling back 5 days brings at least €1,211 gross, €242 per day.
On your payslip, pay for days sold back beyond 218 working days is treated like overtime: reduced employee contributions and income tax exemption, within the same annual ceiling of €7,500. With a shorter forfait, days sold back below 218 days do not qualify. Check that these days appear on a separate line of your payslip.
The employer must check regularly that your workload stays reasonable and that you can balance work and private life. Every year, an interview covers your workload, how your work is organised, that balance and your pay, unless the agreement provides otherwise. It is not a formality: missing monitoring can make the forfait unenforceable and reopen your right to overtime pay.
A forfait jours is negotiated in days as much as in euros: a forfait shorter than the cap, guaranteed rest days, remote working, the value of days sold back. Always reason in gross annual pay, the only unit that compares a forfait with an hourly offer, and set it against your real hours. The guide to cadre pay shows what the status changes on net pay, the one on negotiating a job offer how to put your case, and the estimate of what your CV is worth gives you the gross annual pay for your occupation so you can judge whether the forfait on offer measures up.
No. There must be a collective agreement that allows it and an individual forfait agreement, in writing and signed by you. An agreement that merely refers to the legal ceiling is not enough: it must set your number of working days. Without those documents you stay on the legal working week and your hours beyond it are paid as overtime.
9 days, according to service-public's calculation: take the weekends, paid leave and public holidays falling on weekdays away from the year, then the forfait. The figure changes every year with the calendar; an agreement can also set a shorter forfait, and therefore more rest.
Only if you accept it, through a written amendment valid for the year, and for a premium of at least 10% on the extra days. Unless the collective agreement sets another ceiling, you cannot exceed 235 days, i.e. 17 days beyond the legal forfait. In the guide's example, where a day is worth the annual salary divided by the forfait days, each day sold back brings at least €242 gross.
If the agreement is void or unenforceable (inadequate collective agreement, number of days not set, no workload monitoring), you go back to counting hours and can claim payment of your overtime, with evidence (diary, emails, badge records). Damages on top are not automatic: the Cour de cassation requires proof of a separate loss.
This guide gives you a method, not legal advice: the official rules and amounts are those of the sources above, as at their date.
The site's tools and features that go with this guide: the figures there are calculated by the code, never by the AI.