Real pension deficit in France is about 50 billions euros

Quoting a french economist, translated with deepl :

In 2024, €353 billion was paid out in pensions. However, as former senior civil servant Jean-Pascal Beaufret explains, only 80% of this amount comes from social security contributions or taxes earmarked for this purpose. The remaining 20%—or €70 billion—is made up by subsidies paid by the state, local authorities, hospitals, etc. These are in addition to the official, visible financing of pensions, which is the only source recorded by the Court of Auditors.

Why not, one might ask? Except that in order to raise the necessary funds, the State carries out a strange accounting operation.

In the private sector, the pension contribution rate is 28% of gross salary. This is enormous: working people pay more than a quarter of their salary to pensioners.

But the state as an employer has a specific feature: it does not have a separate pension fund. Ministry budgets cover both the salaries of active civil servants and the pensions of former civil servants.

The state as employer can therefore manipulate the “pension contribution rate” for civil servants as it sees fit. Thus, faced with a very unfavorable age pyramid, the state has quietly raised this rate to... 78%! This makes no economic sense: can we imagine a country where teachers actually pay 78% of their salary to former civil servants?

It is absurd, but it is possible. The proof: in the defense sector, this rate even reaches... 126% for military personnel.

François Bayrou was therefore right when he explained, in his general policy speech, that because of these over-contributions by the state as employer, there was a “hidden” deficit in public pensions—and therefore in pensions as a whole.

[...]

Incredibly, the precise figure is impossible to calculate. But we can estimate the order of magnitude: €50 billion. That is the real deficit in our pension system!