More than 50 lines, obscure acronyms, numbers that add to or subtract from the gross salary. For many employees, reading their pay slip in detail can seem like a very complex ordeal. This is in any case what is confirmed by an OpinionWay study, carried out for the company SD Worx, on the relationship that French employees have with this document which is so important, but sometimes very difficult to decipher.
According to this survey, a little more than a third of French people questioned believe that they “are not sufficiently informed to understand their entire pay slip”. This difficulty mainly concerns employees working in large structures (42%), compared to those working in VSE-SMEs (27%).
According to the results of this survey, French employees also believe that they are not sufficiently informed in the event of changes to the pay slip, whether in form or substance. Nearly 35% of respondents believe they “are not informed by their payroll department of regulatory developments impacting their remuneration”. With a perfect example for this: the mention “net social salary” on the pay slip, which came into force in July 2023, and for which less than one in two employees received explanations from their payroll department.
A new simplified pay slip?
This lack of readability seems to go in the direction of the government, which announced at the end of April that it wanted to “simplify the pay slip to improve its readability”, by going from around fifty lines to only 15. For this, it is notably the list of different employee and employer contributions which would be largely pruned.
So, instead of having the details of the different contributions (health insurance, retirement, unemployment insurance) and the distribution of support between the employer and the employee – as currently displayed on your pay slip – these These would be grouped into two blocks: “employer social contributions and contributions” as well as “employee social contributions and contributions”. “All information will remain available upon request by the employee,” Bruno Le Maire clarified in April.
A project which is far from pleasing the unions. “We are rather very vigilant about this initiative which worries us,” warned the president of the CGT, Sophie Binet, believing that the Minister of the Economy wanted to “tackle social contributions”. Same story with the CFDT. “We are a little doubtful about this simplification project” reacted Jocelyne Cabanal, national secretary of the reformist organization, to FranceInfo. “Yes, there is educational work to be done on the pay slip, but making information disappear is not simplification, it is simplism. Under the pretext of simplification, we lose understanding,” she added again.