- The company has 60k budget.
- 25% goes to employer tax (charges patronales). 45k left. That's commonly called the gross salary (salaire brut).
- 25% goes to employee tax (charges sociales). 34k left. Commonly called the net salary (salaire net)
- Employee pays income tax at the end of the year. The rate is progressive and highly variable depending on personal situation. (30k left if you're single living alone).
Tip: Generally speaking I strongly advise to avoid discussing taxes with French citizens, fact is absolutely nobody understands where money goes to or how much. The usual payslip only shows the "charges sociales" itemized as 10 to 20 lines of things.
They include social security, unemployment benefits, retirement benefits, training ...
When your employee is sick, they can stay at home without losing their pay, and without your company paying for it. They can seek medical treatment without risking bankruptcy.
If you have to lower you activity because business is bad, you can put in place part time unemployment, and your employees won't lose money in the process...
Also, the fees paid by the employer are often subsidised through eg tax credits, reimbursements (up to a certain amount)... So that these numbers are not only inaccurate but also totally meaningless.
In English it's all translated to "tax" and rightfully so. English languages and cultures don't have subtle semantics like French does. For example everything in the UK is a tax, corporation tax, income tax, council tax, etc... (one exception being the UK national insurance).
And things like tax credits are only useful if you have the cash on hand immediately, and can wait up to a year to get it back. A brand-new venture may not have that.
Charges patronales and charges sociales are well explained in every payslip, i.e. where that money goes and how the employee/employer benefit from them.
Also, every person's net income tax is also explained and you can see where it goes.
At the end of the day, when a French person loses their job (even if they're a non-essential worker in any industry), they go home not worrying about a single damn thing... it's good to have such security, no?
However doing this would cause a mind shift where the employees would realize how large a fraction of their compensation package is in fact retained by the government either in the form of taxes or in the form of charges. A positive outcome of this is that it would force this realization, since so many people think healthcare/education/pension are free...
Another aspect to this is that different corporations have been allowed to charge these Charges patronales and charges sociales at different rates (for instance nurses pay 14% for retirement, whereas the rest of the population pays 28%...). Worse an entire half of the workforce, namely all the civil servants, have no Charges patronales and charges sociales at all (in other words, the French state is a special employer that gets away with not paying for these, paying for the actual pensions out of its general budget rather than its stowed-away-for-later funds.... and when the French state goes bankrupt, it just needs to raise more taxes on the private sector employees to make payroll on its pensions!).
