Apprenticeship: hiring aid for apprentices maintained in 2025 but reduced

Aid for hiring an apprentice will be maintained for all companies in 2025 but their amount will be lowered to 5,000 euros for SMEs and 2,000 euros for larger companies, the Ministry of Labor said on Monday.

“In the absence of a decision, the aid would only have concerned contracts preparing for baccalaureate and infrabac level diplomas and only for companies with fewer than 250 employees, i.e. less than a third of contracts,” explains the ministry in a press release.

Aid for companies with 250 employees or more will continue to be subject to additional conditions concerning the proportion of work-study students or professional integration contracts.

The government specifies that the choice was made “to preserve assistance for each contract, regardless of the level of diploma prepared”. Thus “we also allow companies to benefit from the skills essential to their development”, according to Minister of Labor Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, quoted in the press release.

A decree published “in January”

Thanks in particular to this aid which reduces the cost of an apprentice for the employer, the number of apprenticeship contracts has increased significantly in France, reaching over one million at the end of 2023.

But their cost for public finances more than doubled between 2018 and 2021, exceeding 20 billion euros, according to France Compétences. Also the 2025 draft budget, now obsolete, planned to make 1.2 billion savings on this aid.

According to Catherine Vautrin, at the head of a large ministry which also covers Labor, the maintenance of aid “testifies to our desire to maintain our ambition and our mobilization in favor of learning”.

The government decision must still be the subject of a decree which will be published “in January after referral to the National Commission for Collective Bargaining, Employment and Vocational Training (CNNCEFP)”, the press release further indicates.