Does the minimum wage destroy jobs? What the data can and cannot say

The salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance (SMIC), France's minimum wage, is worth €12.02 gross per hour on 1 January 2026 and €12.31 since 1 June. In 2024, a full-time minimum-wage earner received €1,403.29 net per month, or €16,839 a year; the median net wage of a full-time job was €26,279 the same year, according to the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE). The SMIC therefore represents 64.1% of the median wage — one of the highest ratios in the European Union (EU), according to comparisons by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which this page does not reproduce.

The question is a thirty-year-old debate: does a minimum wage so close to the median wage prevent the least qualified from being hired? This page does not settle it — aggregate series cannot — but it shows why the intuitive answer, read off a curve, is wrong in both directions.

The ratio of the SMIC to the median wage is remarkably stable: 62.8% in 2005, 64.1% in 2024 — a France ÉcoScan calculation, annualised net monthly SMIC divided by the median net wage in full-time equivalent. The SMIC has therefore not “caught up” with the median wage over the past twenty years; it has grown at the same pace. Relative to the first decile — the wage below which ten per cent of full-time jobs fall — it went from 91.0% to 94.1%: the bottom of the distribution has tightened onto the minimum.

Over the long run, the gross hourly SMIC rose by +106.6% between 1996 and 2024, the median net wage by +75.9% and the first decile by +83.8%. Most of the SMIC's lead over the median dates from before 2007: that is the era of the convergence of minimum rates during the switch to the thirty-five-hour week.

Meanwhile, the employment rate of 15-64 year-olds went from 61.6% in 1996 to 69.3% in 2025, and the unemployment rate from 10.5% to 7.7%. Read raw, the curve says that a high and rising SMIC coexisted with more employment and less unemployment. It says nothing about what would have happened without it.

What has changed is the SMIC's cost to the employer, which is no longer the SMIC. Since the 1990s, general social-contribution relief sharply reduces employer charges at the minimum wage; in 2024, all contribution exemptions amounted to €91.3bn on the scope of the basic compulsory schemes, according to the annex of the social security financing bill (PLFSS) for 2026. The debate on “the minimum wage and jobs” has therefore been, for twenty-five years, a debate on labour cost after relief — a quantity the wage series do not contain.

The other change is the structure of jobs: the youth employment rate went from 28.8% in 1996 to 34.5% in 2025, driven by apprenticeships, whose pay is below the SMIC. Part of low-skilled employment is now created below the minimum, through statuses that did not exist at this scale in 1996.

In 2024, the annualised net SMIC is worth 64.1% of the median wage and 94.1% of the first decile; the employment rate is 69.0% in the second quarter of 2026 and unemployment 8.3% in the second quarter of 2026, after averages of 69.3% and 7.7% in 2025. The SMIC is high in the wage distribution, and employment is high in history: the two facts coexist.