Licenciement Abusif in France: The Barème and When It Does Not Apply

Losing a job in France and suspecting the stated reason was invented, exaggerated or simply not serious enough is one of the most common reasons an employee opens the Code du travail. French law calls a dismissal without a valid reason a licenciement sans cause réelle et sérieuse, and licenciement abusif is the everyday phrase people use for the same idea. What decides the outcome is not the label but the category the defect falls into, because French law sorts a bad dismissal into three boxes and each box carries a different remedy.

The most consequential split runs between a dismissal that is merely unjustified and one that is null. An unjustified dismissal is compensated inside a statutory grid, the barème introduced in 2017 and set out at Article L1235-3, which fixes both a floor and a ceiling by seniority. A null dismissal, which covers harcèlement moral or sexuel, discrimination and the violation of a fundamental freedom, escapes that grid entirely and carries a floor of six months of salary with no ceiling at all. Anyone who reads only the capped table would understate what the law provides in those cases by a very wide margin.

Information last verified on 21 July 2026. This page presents general legal information, not legal advice.

Jurisdiction scope: This page covers French national employment law (the Code du travail) as it applies to private sector contracts in mainland France. It does not cover public sector employment, which is heard by the administrative courts, or the law of any other country.

Three Different Defects, Three Different Remedies

The starting point is characterisation. Service-Public sets out the same three outcomes a conseil de prud'hommes can reach when an employee contests a dismissal for personal reasons: the dismissal is null, it is without real and serious cause, or it is irregular.

A dismissal is sans cause réelle et sérieuse when the reason given does not hold up. The cause must be real, meaning it rests on objective facts that can be checked, and serious, meaning those facts are grave enough to justify ending the contract. A reason that is genuine but trivial fails the second limb.

A dismissal is nul when it is founded on a ground the law forbids. Nullity is not a stronger form of unfairness, it is a different legal state: the dismissal is treated as having no valid existence, which is why reinstatement is available on the employee's demand rather than merely proposed.

A dismissal is irrégulier when the reason is acceptable but the employer skipped a procedural step. Article L1235-2 caps the indemnity for that defect alone at one month of salary, which is why the three categories should never be blurred together.

The Barème: What a Judge May Award for an Unjustified Dismissal

Article L1235-3 opens by allowing the judge to propose reinstatement with retention of acquired benefits. Either side may refuse that proposal, and in practice one usually does.

Where reinstatement is refused, the article requires the judge to award the employee an indemnity payable by the employer, the amount of which must fall between the minimum and maximum figures in the statutory table. Seniority is counted in full years and the figures are expressed in months of gross salary (salaire brut).

The table below reproduces the general regime as it appears in the current version of Article L1235-3 on Légifrance.

Two features of the table are easy to miss. The floor settles at three months from two years of seniority onward and never rises again, so length of service moves the ceiling rather than the floor. And the ceiling stops climbing at 29 years: an employee with 40 years of service faces the same 20 month maximum as one with 29.

Smaller Employers: Lower Minima, Same Ceilings

Article L1235-3 then provides a second table for dismissals in a company that habitually employs fewer than eleven employees. It is important to read what that table actually changes.

The reduced table lowers only the minima. The maximum column is untouched, so the ceiling for a given seniority is identical whatever the size of the employer.

Beyond ten years of seniority the reduced table stops, and the general minimum of three months applies to small and large employers alike.

When the Barème Does Not Apply At All

This is the point most summaries of French dismissal law handle badly, and it changes the arithmetic completely. Article L1235-3-1 states that Article L1235-3 is not applicable where the judge finds the dismissal tainted by one of the nullities it lists.

Where a null dismissal is established and the employee does not seek continued performance of the contract, or reinstatement is impossible, the judge awards an indemnity that may not be lower than the salaries of the last six months. The article sets no maximum, so the capped table above simply does not govern the award.

The nullities listed in Article L1235-3-1 are the violation of a fundamental freedom; facts of harcèlement moral or harcèlement sexuel under Articles L1152-3 and L1153-4; a discriminatory dismissal under Articles L1132-4 and L1134-4; a dismissal following a legal action on equal treatment between women and men, or following the reporting of crimes and offences; the dismissal of a protected employee because of the exercise of their mandate; and dismissal in breach of the maternity and work accident protections at Articles L1225-71 and L1226-13.

The same article adds that the indemnity is due without prejudice to salary owed under the protective statutes, and without prejudice to the statutory, collectively agreed or contractual indemnité de licenciement. In other words the six month floor is a floor on one head of compensation, not a global settlement of everything owed.

The practical consequence is blunt. An employee whose dismissal followed harcèlement moral and who reads only the barème table would be reasoning from a rule that does not apply to their category of claim at all.

Why a Judge Cannot Go Above the Ceiling

For unjustified dismissals the ceiling is genuinely binding. Lower courts had begun setting the barème aside case by case, on the view that Article 10 of ILO Convention 158 required an adequate indemnity that the grid sometimes failed to deliver.

On 11 May 2022, sitting in plenary formation on pourvois 21-14.490 and 21-15.247, the chambre sociale of the Cour de cassation closed that route. It held the barème compatible with Article 10 of ILO Convention 158, held that the assessment of compensation for an unjustified dismissal does not lend itself to a case by case conventionality review, and held that Article 24 of the European Social Charter has no direct effect in French law.

Part of the Court's own reasoning was that French law reserves uncapped compensation for the gravest employer conduct. Its communiqué states expressly that the compensation of null dismissals is not subject to the barème, and that the grid therefore varies with the seriousness of the employer's fault as well as with seniority and pay.

The Comité européen des droits sociaux has since ruled on complaints brought against the French barème and found it incompatible with Article 24 of the European Social Charter. Its decisions carry no binding force in French law, so the table above remains the operative rule before a conseil de prud'hommes.

What the Employer Owes On Top

Article L1235-4 requires the judge, in the cases it lists including Article L1235-3, to order the employer at fault to reimburse the unemployment insurance bodies for benefit paid to the dismissed employee between the dismissal and the judgment, for all or part of that benefit, up to a limit of six months per employee. That order is made of the court's own motion where those bodies have not intervened in the proceedings or have not stated the amount paid, and it is not money that goes to the employee.

The barème award also sits alongside the ordinary end of contract entitlements. Those include the statutory indemnité de licenciement, pay in lieu of préavis where the notice period was not worked, and the indemnité compensatrice de congés payés for untaken leave.

Whether those entitlements are due at all depends on the ground relied on. A dismissal characterised as faute grave or faute lourde removes the severance indemnity and the notice pay, which is one reason employers reach for that characterisation and employees contest it. Where the dismissal was presented as economic rather than personal, a different set of procedural obligations applies and their breach can itself found the claim.

Deadline and Forum

A claim contesting a dismissal is brought before the conseil de prud'hommes, and Article L1471-1 gives twelve months from notification of the termination. That deadline is short, and the exact day it starts running has been clarified recently in a way that favours employees.

The full mechanics of the procedure, the other limitation periods that apply to pay claims and harcèlement claims, and the point from which the twelve months is counted are set out on the dedicated page for the conseil de prud'hommes.

Employees who cannot fund a lawyer should note that legal representation is not compulsory before the conseil de prud'hommes, and that aide juridictionnelle can cover a lawyer's fees where the means conditions are met. Further material on dismissal, pay and termination sits on the France employment law hub.