"It's just to fool us": the pay slip remains illegible for a large majority of French people

Nearly 70% of French people do not understand their payslip , according to an Ipsos study for Payfit (a payroll software), published on Monday, September 8. Only 13% of French people are able to say the exact number of days off they have left to take from their payslip.

Faced with the vagueness, Enzo, a young 22-year-old marble worker, does as 80% of French people do when he looks at his pay slip and is only interested in one line: "What I'm looking for is mainly the last line, the net figure and no more, what I receive in my bank account," he explains to RMC .

His colleague, Bastien, 24, examines his pay slip a little more closely, but like 57% of those surveyed in the study, he says he gets lost in the jargon and technical terms: "It's not clear, these are rather complicated words and terms, I would like it to be simplified, and for someone to be able to explain to me in 4 lines what it means."

Faced with these questions, Emilie Le Dorze, an executive assistant at this SME with 14 employees, is on the front line: "If it were easier to understand on pay slips, it could avoid questions from employees, which I sometimes tell them I can't answer, and I have to find out," she assures RMC. "Most of the time, employees don't know why they're contributing, or what the rights behind it will give them. It's not clear!" she adds.

However, it is possible to make things clearer, according to Gérald, an entrepreneur in Denmark: "In Denmark, it's 3 lines. You have a gross line, a line for all common expenses, then the amount on which you will not pay taxes and this amount increases if you have children, rather than family allowances. After that, it's finished and the withholding tax is included in it," he explains on RMC Story .

"It's a company designed to confuse us. The less we understand, the less reason we have to complain. I think it's deliberate, otherwise we'd be one," Joëlle Dago-Serry says on the set of Les Grandes Gueules . "The goal is for us to understand nothing, like all our bureaucracy with paperwork everywhere," adds the self-employed entrepreneur.

But for better readability, we may have to wait a long time, as Bruno Le Maire 's promise of April 2024 to move to around fifteen lines has remained a dead letter.