Platform couriers are now guaranteed €19 per hour of activity — checked weekly

Since 1 September 2026, delivery platforms must guarantee an independent courier at least €19 per hour of activity. The previous guarantee — €11.75 — had been in force since April 2023, so this is more than a one-and-a-half-fold increase. The reference period changed at the same time: the calculation used to run over a month, and now runs over a calendar week.

What an "hour of activity" means — and why it is not an hour on the app

This is where the misunderstanding usually starts. The guarantee is not measured against the time spent connected to the app. It is measured against the time attached to deliveries actually performed.

The agreement puts it this way: what counts is the cumulative duration, for each delivery made during the calendar week, running from the moment the courier accepts a delivery offer to the handover to the final recipient, as estimated in advance by the platform.

Three consequences follow:

• waiting for orders and idle time in the app do not count;
• the duration used is the estimate made by the platform before the delivery starts, not a stopwatch measurement;
• tips actually paid to the courier are excluded from the income compared against the guarantee.

How the week is counted and when the top-up arrives

The calendar week runs from Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59. If average income per hour of activity over that week falls below €19, the platform pays the difference — no later than 7 days after the end of the week.

Moving from a month to a week is not only a technical change. With a monthly window, a good week offset a bad one and no top-up was due at all. Each week is now counted on its own, so top-ups occur more often and arrive sooner.

The guarantee applies platform by platform. Someone working for two services compares each one against €19 separately, rather than adding up total earnings.

Who is covered

The agreement covers goods delivery by two- or three-wheeled vehicles, motorised or not — bicycles, scooters, motorbikes — across the whole country. The courier's legal status makes no difference: auto-entrepreneur or entreprise individuelle, the guarantee is the same.

Car-based delivery falls outside this text, whose stated scope is two- and three-wheeled vehicles. Couriers employed as salariés by a delivery company are also outside it — the SMIC applies to them instead.

What to do in practice

• Keep the weekly statements from the platform. The top-up is computed from the platform's own data; without a personal record there is nothing to check it against.
• Compare hours of activity, not hours connected — otherwise the comparison with €19 is wrong by construction.
• Look at the figures weekly, not monthly. A top-up for a given week is due within 7 days of that week ending.

The common beginner's mistake is to assume €19 is guaranteed for every hour with the app open. It is not, and the gap between "hours online" and "hours of activity" differs from one courier to another.

Background

Sector-level dialogue between platforms and associations of independent workers has been running in France since 2023: the agreement of 20 April 2023 introduced the first minimum hourly income guarantee. Such agreements go through homologation by ARPE, the public authority for social relations on employment platforms; once homologated, the rule extends to all platforms in the sector. The current text is an avenant dated 10 July 2026, homologated in September 2026.

The signatories also undertook to open talks on a minimum income per delivery, factoring in distance travelled, including grouped and short rides. That remains an intention, not a rule in force.

The full text of the agreement is published by ARPE: avenant du 10 juillet 2026.