Unemployment benefit after a PIP in France: keeping the ARE

Four endings, and where each leaves the ARE

The allocation d'aide au retour à l'emploi — the ARE — turns on how the contract ended.

• A dismissal of any type keeps it, including one for faute grave. The classification that costs you the indemnity and the notice does not cost you the benefit.
• A rupture conventionnelle keeps it by construction. France Travail's own page says so, and it is the reason the rupture conventionnelle is France's dominant negotiated exit.
• A démission forfeits it, outside narrow cases of legitimate resignation.
• An abandon de poste is treated as a démission, and forfeits it the same way. A section below is about that one, because it is the ending people arrive at without deciding to.

If you are hoping to pass the plan, the list is for later. It is worth reading once now because two of the four endings are chosen in a meeting and one of them is chosen by not turning up.

The rupture conventionnelle keeps it, and its cushion is now shorter

The jurisdiction page has the machinery: meetings, a signed convention, fifteen calendar days in which either side may retract, then a homologation review of fifteen working days in which silence approves. A month end to end at least, and the indemnity can never be below the dismissal indemnity.

What this page adds is the benefit arithmetic, and it changed on 1 September 2026. For contracts ending on or after that date, the maximum duration of the ARE after a rupture conventionnelle falls: from 18 months to 15 for people under 55, from 22.5 to 20.5 for people aged 55 and 56, and from 27 to 20.5 for people of 57 and over. The trigger is the date the contract actually ends — not the signature and not the homologation. Since the process takes about a month at minimum, every rupture conventionnelle started from now on is due to land on the new durations. The reduction is in force: the government's own notice, updated on 2 September 2026, states the new durations for contracts actually ended from 1 September.

One thing to note beside it: only the individual rupture conventionnelle is capped this way; the collective version is not.

An earlier version of this page said that people of 55 and over can ask France Travail to extend the duration. That came from law-firm summaries rather than from France Travail, and the September 2026 check could not confirm it from an official source. It is not repeated here.

The other 2026 change runs the other way and does not touch you: the employer's levy on the exempt part of the indemnity rose from 30% to 40% in January. It makes the rupture conventionnelle more expensive to offer, which changes the employer's willingness and not your arithmetic.

Two clocks are worth writing down on the day the convention is signed: the fifteen calendar days of rétractation, and the fifteen working days of homologation. Consent given under pressure is a ground for annulment, and the retraction window is the ordinary remedy for a signature you regret.

Opening a right: six months, and twelve to register

Which ending you have is the first question and it is not the only one. The ARE has to be opened, and the conditions are the same whichever of the four endings above applies.

The affiliation condition is six months of work — 130 days or 910 hours — in the last 24 months, or the last 36 months from the age of 55. From 1 April 2026 a first-time claimant may open a right with five months instead of six. If the last job on its own does not reach the minimum, France Travail can look to an earlier contract, provided it ended within the twelve months before you registered.

You have twelve months from the end of the contract to register as a demandeur d'emploi, and that period can be extended for defined situations such as sick leave. Twelve months sounds generous and it is, but the delays below run from the end of the contract rather than from your registration, so there is nothing to gain by waiting and a right to lose by forgetting.

How long it runs is currently shortened across the board by a contracyclical reduction of 25%, which applies while unemployment stays below the threshold that switches it off. On the reduced figures the maximum is 548 days under 55, 685 days at 55 and 56, and 822 days from 57, against a floor of 182 days. A training complement can sit on top of that.

Those are maximums rather than entitlements, and the reduction is a policy setting rather than a permanent feature. Both are worth confirming with France Travail against your own dates, because this is the most reform-active jurisdiction in this guide and the figures above have moved twice in three years.

The delay nobody negotiates: what a large indemnity costs in time

This is the section that changes how a French exit should be negotiated, and it is missing from almost every account of the rupture conventionnelle, including the one this page used to give.

Your ARE does not start when the contract ends. Three delays run first, all counted from the day after the ending, and in a fixed order:

1. The différé congés payés. Your holiday indemnity divided by your daily reference salary, rounded up. Paid-out leave you never took becomes days before the benefit starts.
2. The différé spécifique, which applies to the supra-legal part of any severance — the part above the statutory indemnity. It is that amount divided by 109.6, and it is capped at 150 calendar days, or 75 after a licenciement économique.
3. The délai d'attente of seven days, which begins only once the two différés have run. It does not apply if it has already been applied in the previous twelve months.

Read the second one again, because it is the one with teeth. Every 109.6 euros of supra-legal indemnity postpones your benefit by a day, up to a ceiling of five months. A negotiated exit that looks generous on the total can leave you with no income at all for most of a year's first half, and the cap is the only thing that stops it being worse.

So the French negotiation has a second axis that people routinely miss. It is not only how much the indemnity is, it is how it is split. The statutory part carries no différé spécifique; the supra-legal part buys delay at a fixed rate. Two offers with the same headline can start paying months apart, and the question to put in writing before agreeing anything is what the split is and what différé it implies.

None of that makes the rupture conventionnelle a bad ending. It remains the one negotiated exit in this guide that preserves the benefit by design. It means the arithmetic is about timing as well as amount, and the timing is the half nobody quotes you.

Abandon de poste: the ending that converts itself

Since April 2023 an employee who abandons the post is presumed to have resigned. The Conseil d'État upheld the decree in December 2024, so the mechanism is settled rather than contested.

The procedure is specific. The employer must issue a mise en demeure, by registered letter or delivered against receipt, setting a deadline to return of at least fifteen calendar days. When that deadline expires the presumption applies, and a presumed resignation draws no ARE. You can rebut it with a legitimate reason — a medical one, the exercise of a right of withdrawal, a disputed modification of the contract — and a contest goes straight to the judgment panel of the prud'hommes, which must rule within a month.

The practical point matters most on a plan that has become hard to face: disengaging by simply stopping is the one response that converts a benefit-preserving ending into a benefit-losing one. Elsewhere, disengagement costs you the record and the negotiating position. In France it has a statute attached.

A dismissal keeps it, whatever the letter says

Because a dismissal for faute grave keeps the ARE, the classification of a dismissal is not a benefit question in France. It is a money question. Insuffisance is not a fault, and an employer who dismisses for faute grave on facts that are really insuffisance gets the dismissal requalified, with the indemnity and the notice that follow. Read the letter for that. The benefit is not what is at stake in it.

Spain shares the first half of that: the type of dismissal does not matter for the benefit there either. It differs on the second — a mutual agreement not papered as a dismissal costs the benefit in Spain, and in Germany and Estonia the mutual-agreement exit is the risky one. France is the jurisdiction in this guide where the negotiated exit is safe by design and the walk-out is the trap.

What France Travail asks of you afterwards, and why omissions cost later

Registration is the beginning of an obligation rather than the end of a process. Each month you actualise on the published calendar, online, by telephone on 3949 or at an agency, and you declare changes as they happen: resuming work, starting training, sick or maternity leave, moving, an absence of more than seven consecutive days, a residence permit about to expire.

The two consequences of not declaring are worth understanding because neither shows up this month:

• Hours you do not declare do not count toward rechargement, which is the mechanism that extends or reopens a right on the strength of work done while claiming.
• Earnings you do not declare are left out of the salaire journalier de référence, which is what the next claim is calculated from.

So an omission does not reduce today's payment. It reduces the next entitlement, quietly, and is discovered at the worst possible moment. A false declaration is a separate matter and carries a penalty of up to three thousand euros.

The practical habit is the same one this guide asks for during a plan: keep the dates. A short note of what changed and when, made the day it happened, turns each monthly actualisation into a transcription rather than a reconstruction.

Confirm your own dates with France Travail

Fairhanded is not a law firm, and France is the most reform-active jurisdiction covered here: two changes landed in 2026, and the durations above should be confirmed with France Travail for your own dates. Before signing a rupture conventionnelle, or before a deadline to return expires, take it to a French employment lawyer.