Paternity leave in France: 3 + 4 days are compulsory, 21 are yours to place, and a new paid month opened on 1 July

In France, "leave for the birth of a child" is not one leave but several. They run back to back, they have confusingly similar names, and each has its own duration, its own compulsory core and its own payment conditions. Mixing them up is easy, and the cost of mixing them up is lost days and unpaid ones.

Congé de naissance: 3 working days

The service-public page sets congé de naissance at 3 jours ouvrables — three working days. This leave is compulsory, and it comes before paternity leave rather than instead of it.

Congé de paternité: 25 calendar days

The rules provide for 25 calendar days for a single birth and 32 calendar days for multiple births. That is on top of the three days of congé de naissance, not inclusive of them.

The leave is split in two:

• 4 calendar days immediately after congé de naissance — compulsory;
• the remaining 21 days (28 for multiple births) — placed at the employee's discretion.

So the stretch that must be taken consecutively, with no choice in the matter, is three working days plus four calendar days.

How the remaining days may be split — and how they may not

The remainder is taken either in one block or split — but into no more than 2 periods, each at least 5 days long. This is the detail people get wrong most often: spreading 21 days across three short stints is not provided for. Two periods, yes; three-day stints, no.

Two deadlines that slip past

• Tell the employer at least 1 month before the leave starts.
• Take the leave within 6 months of the birth or of the child's arrival.

The six-month window is not a formality. It is the one that most often closes quietly while a family is busy with a newborn.

Who is entitled

Under the rules the leave is granted to the employee with no length-of-service requirement. It is open to the child's father, and to the mother's spouse, PACS partner or cohabiting partner. For female couples, where there has been a joint anticipatory recognition of the child, the leave is provided for the mother who did not give birth.

The money: the condition that catches recent arrivals

Here is the fork in the road, and it bears directly on anyone who has not been in France long. The leave itself does not depend on length of service. The indemnités journalières — the health fund's payment for those days — do. The rules require both of the following:

• having worked at least 150 hours in the 3 months before the leave starts;
• holding a social security number for at least 6 months as at the start of the leave.

For someone who arrived a few months ago, that is the typical mistake: the right to the leave already exists, while the right to be paid for it does not yet. These conditions are worth checking before the dates are chosen, not afterwards.

New: congé supplémentaire de naissance from 1 July 2026

A further leave has been added on top of this structure. According to service-public, the congé supplémentaire de naissance is available from 1 July 2026 and concerns a birth or adoption from 1 January 2026 — or a child born earlier if the due date fell on or after 1 January 2026.

What is provided:

• 1 or 2 months per parent, which may be split into 2 periods of one month each;
• payment at 70% of net salary for the first month and 60% for the second, calculated on the gross salary of the 3 months preceding the leave;
• a ceiling set by the monthly social security ceiling, €4,005 as at 1 January 2026;
• paid by the health insurance fund;
• available only once maternity, paternity or adoption leave has been taken in full;
• both parents may take it simultaneously or in alternation.

That second-to-last point is another common error: this is a layer on top, not an alternative. Until the earlier leave has been used in full, the new one does not open.

What is worth establishing in advance

Before the conversation with an employer, three things are useful to know: the date your six-month window runs from; whether the 150 hours have been reached in the relevant period; and how many months old your social security number is. Those three figures decide whether the leave is paid, and they are established beforehand rather than on the day the request goes in.

For a salarié in the private sector the service-public page on congé de paternité is usually the relevant one; the civil service and certain other statuses are covered separately.

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Source: Service-Public.fr — Congé de paternité et d'accueil de l'enfant d'un salarié du secteur privé, Vérifié le 01 juin 2026. On the new leave: Congé supplémentaire de naissance : réponses à toutes vos questions, published 03/07/2026.