How many people does one 24/7 position need in France?

7 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in France is actually available for about 1,425 of them once 57.5 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 6.15, which rounds up to 7 whole people.

What is a relief factor?

The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In France that is 8,766 divided by 1,425, or 6.15. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.

Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for France?

Because it undershoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.8 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 6, against a derived answer of 6.15. The rule of thumb is 2.5 percent low, because France loses more days to leave and sickness than a quarter of the year covers.

Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in France?

It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 25 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.

How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in France?

Relief factor6.15

People per post7

Holding one position every hour of 2026 in France takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,425 of them, so the post needs 6.15 employees, which is 7 whole people.

One ring per person, one year each

Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.

Stack 7 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.

Where the number comes from

1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
2
France has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
3
Take out 9 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 25 days of statutory paid leave, 20.5 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 57.5 days lost.
4
That leaves 203.5 working days per employee, and at a 35-hour week that is 7 hours a day, so 1,425 available hours a year.
5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,425 available hours is a relief factor of 6.15, so the post needs 7 people.

Working days lost per employee, 2026
Weekdays in the year	261
Public holidays on a weekday	−9
Statutory paid annual leave	−25
Average sickness absence	−20.5
Training and onboarding (assumed)	−3
Working days available	203.5
At 7 hours a day	1,425 hours

Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in France, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.

The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.

What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here

The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In France that gives 6 against a derived answer of 6.15, so the shortcut is low by 2.5 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.

Hours only4.8

Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.

Plus a flat 25%6

The usual shortcut, under by 2.5%.

Derived6.15

From France's own leave, hours, and absence.

Other coverage shapes

The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.

Coverage	Hours a week	Relief factor	People
Round the clock, every day	168	6.15	7
Round the clock, weekdays only	120	4.4	5
Two shifts, every day	112	4.1	5
Extended day, weekdays only	60	2.2	3

If your contract is more generous

25 days is the statutory floor in France, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.

Annual leave	Relief factor	People per post
25 daysstatutory floor	6.15	7
28 days	6.25	7
30 days	6.31	7
33 days	6.41	7

The inputs, and what they do not say

How the leave figure is defined

French law states leave in JOURS OUVRABLES, not jours ouvres: 2.5 jours ouvrables per month of effective work, capped at 30 jours ouvrables per year (Code du travail art. L3141-3). Jours ouvrables are Monday to Saturday, so 30 jours ouvrables = 5 weeks = 25 working days on a 5-day week, which is the figure given here. The 11 statutory public holidays (art. L3133-1) are separate and are NOT counted inside the 30/25 days.

Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum

This page divides by a 35-hour week, the typical full-time contract in France, not by the 35-hour statutory figure. The two match here, so the distinction makes no difference to the answer.

What these figures cannot be used for

Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from the OECD labour force survey, while most other countries in this library use a national statistical source. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.

A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.

Research notes on France

LEAVE UNIT TRAP (the specific France error to avoid): the headline legal number is 30, but it is 30 jours ouvrables (Mon-Sat), not 30 jours ouvres (Mon-Fri). Service-Public.gouv.fr defines jours ouvrables as every day of the week except the weekly rest day (normally Sunday) and public holidays not usually worked in the firm, and states the entitlement equals 5 semaines. On a 5-day week that is 25 working days. A planner who enters 30 overstates French leave by a full working week. Employers may count in jours ouvres instead, but only if the result gives rights at least equal to the jours ouvrables calculation, so 25 is the floor.

PUBLIC HOLIDAYS ARE ON TOP: 11 named jours feries in art. L3133-1. Only 1 May is legally a paid non-working day for all; the other 10 are non-working by collective agreement or custom in most of the private sector, and some fall at weekends in a given year. Do not fold them into the 25.

WEEKLY HOURS: 35 h is the duree legale (art. L3121-27). It is a reference threshold that triggers overtime pay, not a ceiling. The hard ceilings are 48 h in any single week (art. L3121-20) and 44 h averaged over 12 consecutive weeks. The annual equivalent used for overtime when hours are annualised is 1,607 h (art. L3121-41).

COLLECTIVE VS STATUTORY: France is the reverse of the Germany/Nordics pattern. Collective agreements essentially never set the contracted full-time week below the statutory 35 h, so collectiveWeeklyHours is repeated as 35. That is the right number for FTE/payroll capacity (35 h/week = 151.67 h/month). But actual hours are higher: Eurostat lfsa_ewhun2 puts average usual weekly hours in the main job for full-time EMPLOYEES in France at 38.9 h in 2025 (unchanged 2023-2025). Two structural reasons: (a) many firms contract 37-39 h and give back RTT days so the annualised average returns to 35 h, and (b) most cadres are on a forfait annuel en jours with no weekly hour count at all, capped at 218 days/year (art. L3121-64). If the calculator models real coverage rather than payroll FTE, 38.9 h is the more honest input for salaried staff, and forfait-jours staff should be modelled in days, not hours.

SICKNESS FIGURE AND ITS CONVERSION: OECD Health Statistics publishes this in WEEKS, not days. France = 4.1 weeks of sickness absence per full-time dependent employee in 2025 (also 4.1 in 2024, 4.0 in 2023, 3.3 pre-COVID in 2019). Converted at 5 working days per week: 4.1 x 5 = 20.5 working days per year. That 5-day convention matches how OECD's own France series has been reported historically (3.3 weeks for 2017 was reported as ~17 days). The series is self-reported, sourced from the EU Labour Force Survey for European countries, covers both full-week and part-week absences, and excludes maternity leave.

WHY OTHER FRENCH NUMBERS DIFFER: private absenteeism barometers (Malakoff Humanis, Apicil/JLO) put 2024 at roughly 22-25 days per employee because they measure all absence including work accidents and count calendar-based stoppage duration; DARES survey-based figures come out lower (single digits) because they ask about a bounded recent period and miss long-term absence. Those are not comparable to the OECD series and were not used as the source. DARES' own site is behind a JavaScript bot wall and could not be read directly, so no DARES figure is cited here.

RESIDUAL UNCERTAINTY: the 2025 OECD observation was carried no observation-status flag, so it is treated as final rather than provisional, but it is only one year old and could be revised. If you want a more conservative input, 4.0 weeks (2023) = 20.0 days. Also note 20.5 is an average over full-time employees economy-wide; sickness absence in shift-based sectors (health, care, transport, retail) runs materially above the national mean, so a coverage calculator for those sectors should treat 20.5 as a floor.

Sources

Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.

statutoryWeeklyHours = 35. Art. L3121-27: "La duree legale de travail effectif des salaries a temps complet est fixee a trente-cinq heures par semaine."
Ministere du Travail - Code du travail numerique (official)2026
Absolute weekly ceiling = 48 h. Art. L3121-20: "Au cours d'une meme semaine, la duree maximale hebdomadaire de travail est de quarante-huit heures."
Ministere du Travail - Code du travail numerique (official)2026
Annual reference 1,607 hours. Art. L3121-41: overtime is hours worked beyond 1 607 heures where the reference period is annual.
Ministere du Travail - Code du travail numerique (official)2026
statutoryAnnualLeaveDays basis. Art. L3141-3: "Le salarie a droit a un conge de deux jours et demi ouvrables par mois de travail effectif chez le meme employeur. La duree totale du conge exigible ne peut exceder trente jours ouvrables." = 30 jours ouvrables = 25 working days on a 5-day week.
Ministere du Travail - Code du travail numerique (official)2026
Unit definition confirming 30 jours ouvrables = 5 semaines, that jours ouvrables exclude the weekly rest day and public holidays not usually worked, that jours ouvres are the 5 actually-worked days per week, and that a jours ouvres calculation must give at least equal rights.
Service-Public.gouv.fr (DILA, French government) - Conges payes du salarie dans le secteur prive, fiche F22582026
11 statutory public holidays, separate from paid annual leave. Art. L3133-1 lists 1 Jan, Easter Monday, 1 May, 8 May, Ascension, Whit Monday, 14 July, 15 Aug, 1 Nov, 11 Nov, 25 Dec.
Ministere du Travail - Code du travail numerique (official)2026
Forfait annuel en jours capped at 218 days/year. Art. L3121-64: "dans la limite de deux cent dix-huit jours s'agissant du forfait en jours".
Ministere du Travail - Code du travail numerique (official)2026
sicknessDaysPerYear source figure: France 4.1 weeks of sickness absence per full-time dependent employee, 2025 (4.1 in 2024, 4.0 in 2023, 3.3 in 2019). Converted x5 working days = 20.5 days. Dataset: Sickness absences from work, unit WK_Y_PS, self-reported, EU-LFS based.
OECD Health Statistics - Sickness absences from work (DSD_HEALTH_STAT@DF_AWDI)2025
Reproducible query returning the France series used above (verified HTTP 200, returns FRA 2014-2025 in weeks per year).
OECD SDMX public API2025
Corroboration for the gap between contracted and actual hours: average usual weekly hours worked in the main job, full-time EMPLOYEES (wstatus SAL), age 20-64, France = 38.9 h in 2025 (38.9 in 2024, 38.9 in 2023).
Eurostat, lfsa_ewhun22025

Common questions

How many people does one 24/7 position need in France?: 7 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in France is actually available for about 1,425 of them once 57.5 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 6.15, which rounds up to 7 whole people.
What is a relief factor?: The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In France that is 8,766 divided by 1,425, or 6.15. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for France?: Because it undershoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.8 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 6, against a derived answer of 6.15. The rule of thumb is 2.5 percent low, because France loses more days to leave and sickness than a quarter of the year covers.
Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in France?: It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 25 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.