Rules relaxed for French salary-savings scheme

Access to savings stored in a plan d'épargne entreprise (PEE) is getting easier for workers thanks to a recent relaxation of the rules controlling them.

The PEE is France’s main salary-saving scheme. Employees at firms that offer it see an amount deducted from their wages each month to go into the scheme, which the employer matches or exceeds.

Workers with entrepreneur individuel status can also open a PEE, but usually struggle to match the benefits salaried workers enjoy.

The savings accounts are usually high interest, while for employers the advantage is that the sums paid into the PEE are taxed at a much lower rate than if the money had simply been added to the worker’s salary.

When can I draw out PEE cash?

PEEs have a five-year initial period during which money paid in cannot be touched.

However, there is a growing list of exceptions, including if you leave salaried employment to set up on your own.

The exceptions have a strong social bent – the account can for example be unlocked if you get married, have a third child, get divorced and have to care for a child, are a victim of domestic violence or if you or your partner are incapacitated to the point where you cannot work any more.

Read more: ‘Round up’ banking enables people in France to save without realising

If you or your partner become a proche aidant (carer) to a family member, or if you are declared in surendettement (unmanageable debt), you can also have the savings unlocked.

Other cases include if your employment contract is broken or, in the case of someone with entrepreneur individuel status, the business is wound up.

The savings can also be accessed early if you or your partner start or take over another business, or use them to buy shares in a société coopérative de production (SCOP), the worker co-ops sometimes set up when businesses get into trouble.

Moving outside the workplace, accounts can now also be unlocked early to buy or enlarge a résidence principale, as long as planning permission or declarations of work certificates can be shown. Energy renovation, or repairs after a natural disaster, are also now valid reasons for requesting the money, as is buying an electric vehicle. 

Companies and workers can also join a collective plan d'épargne retraite (PER) scheme, the successor to the old Perco schemes.

Aimed at building up a savings pot for retirement (in addition to compulsory retirement contributions), PER schemes are much more restrictive in terms of access before retirement.

Only the death or incapacity to work of a spouse or partner, the end of unemployment rights, surendettement, being forced out of non-salaried work by a judicial decision or buying a résidence principale are justifications.

Similar restrictions apply if you have an individual PER, the successor to PERP, or contrat Madelin savings schemes.

Read more: What people in France earn and own - new official figures