France work authorisation for non-EU staff and the shortage occupation list

In France the employer, not the worker, applies for the autorisation de travail. The application is filed on the state digital platform, and the administration has two months from a complete file to decide. If the job appears on the shortage occupation list for the region of the workplace, the labour market situation cannot be raised against the application.

That last point is the whole reason the list matters. In every other case the prefecture may refuse on the ground that the role could be filled from the domestic labour market, and the employer has to evidence an unsuccessful search. For a listed occupation in a listed region, that objection is unavailable by law.

The list, and why the region decides the answer

The current list is fixed by the arrêté of 21 May 2025, published in the Journal officiel of 22 May 2025, made under article L. 414-13 of the Code de l'entrée et du séjour des étrangers et du droit d'asile. It names occupations together with the geographic zones in which each is recognised as being in tension, and it is built on two criteria: sustained recruitment difficulty in the occupation, and a share of third country nationals in that occupation above the national average.

The regional structure is the trap. Each region has its own annex. A mason, a building labourer, a cook or an electrical technician may be listed in Occitanie and absent from the list for Île-de-France, and the assessment follows the address of the workplace rather than the registered office of the company. A group with sites in Toulouse and in Lille is running two different procedures for the same job title, and a file drafted for one site cannot simply be copied to the other.

The occupations that appear across most regional annexes are the ones European employers recruit at volume: home care assistants, nursing auxiliaries, cleaning staff, cooks, waiting staff, masons and building trades, electrical technicians, market gardeners and viticultural workers. The same arrêté underpins the regularisation route at article L. 435-4 of the CESEDA for workers already present in France, which is a separate procedure and should not be confused with a first authorisation for a worker abroad.

What the prefecture actually checks

The file goes to the foreign labour service, which examines four things before the residence element is considered. The employer must be up to date with its social declaration obligations. It must have no conviction or administrative sanction for illegal work or for breaches of occupational health and safety. The proposed contract must comply with employment law on working time and form. And the pay must be at least the SMIC or the applicable collective agreement minimum, whichever is higher.

Two months is the legal period from a complete file. A first application in practice runs closer to two to four months, because the clock only starts once nothing is missing, and the most common gap is an incomplete pay statement or an unsigned contract annex. Recruitment cannot be concluded before the authorisation is issued, so a start date promised to a worker in Kathmandu or Mumbai before the prefecture has decided is a date the employer does not control.

The tax the employer pays, and where French files fail

Hiring a non-EU worker on a contract of three months or more triggers the employer tax under article L. 436-10 of the CESEDA, collected by the Direction générale des finances publiques since 1 January 2023. For a contract of twelve months or more the tax is 55 per cent of the gross monthly salary, capped at 2.5 times the gross monthly SMIC. From 1 January 2026 that ceiling sits at a gross monthly salary of €4,557.58, which puts the maximum tax at €2,477.48 per worker. Shorter contracts of three to twelve months are taxed at fixed amounts tiered by salary band.

The tax falls on the employer and is declared annually to the tax administration. It is not a fee the worker can be asked to reimburse, and any arrangement that recovers it from pay is a breach of both the tax rule and the recruitment fee principle that governs ethical corridors from South Asia.

The recurring refusal is not a refusal on the merits. It is a file returned as incomplete, which resets the two month clock without anybody being told the clock has reset. An employer that submitted in March and assumes a May decision discovers in June that the file was never complete in March, and the harvest, the season or the project start has already passed.

The second failure mode is regional. A file drafted against the national reputation of an occupation, rather than against the annex for the region of the workplace, is assessed with the employment situation objection fully available. The prefecture then asks for evidence of a domestic search that was never run, because the employer believed the occupation was exempt. Both failures are visible in advance and both are cheap to prevent, which is the general pattern set out in why EU work permit applications are refused.

France issues the work and residence rights as one document under the framework described in the single permit explained, and its two month statutory period sits in the middle of the European range compared in the corridor by corridor timeline.

An employer planning a French site should settle the regional annex question before writing the job description, because the wording of the role decides which annex it is read against. What Werklist takes on at that stage, and what remains with the employer as the contracting party, is set out on our employers page.