France spends more on families than almost all its neighbors. Yet it has fewer children than at any point since the end of the First World War. The problem is not the amount. It is that the money does not finance what is missing.

Sixty-six billion that no longer produce children

Social protection spending devoted to families amounts to €65.8 billion in 2024, or 2.25% of GDP [2]. Adding tax measures and local government spending, total public effort approaches €80 billion per year. With 3.6% of GDP dedicated to family policy in the broad sense, France ranks at the highest level in the OECD [2].

And yet the fertility rate stands at 1.62 children per woman in 2024 [1]. In 2024, 663,000 babies were born in France, a 21.5% decline from 2010 [1].

Spending rises, birth rates plummet. Before concluding that such spending is ineffective in principle, one must examine where the money goes.

Children treated less favorably than the European average

This impressive total masks its structure. France devoted 2.2% of its GDP to social spending in favor of childhood and maternity in 2023, at the level of the European average of 2.3% [9]. But France has more children than its neighbors, which mechanically raises the numerator.

Per child, the picture reverses: France devotes an average of €4,600 per year in purchasing power parity to those under 18 [9]. The average for European Union countries reaches €5,800. Germany, whose young population is nonetheless the lowest in Europe, devotes €11,100 per child [9].

France spends a lot. It has more children, and it gives less to each of them.

The total also conceals a ten-year drift. Family benefits registered a decrease of 1.2% per year on average in constant euros over the last decade [2]. Between 2015 and 2022, they declined 2% per year in real terms [4]. A series of deliberate choices produced this outcome.

What changed in 2015

The turning point is dated. The years 2015 and 2016 marked a notable reduction in spending allocated to family benefits. The means-testing of family allowances, introduced in 2015, saved approximately €760 million per year [4]. It also fundamentally changed the nature of French family policy.

By reducing transfers to the most affluent families, means-testing transferred no additional benefit to families with the most modest incomes [4]. Family policy gained an objective of vertical redistribution at the expense of horizontal redistribution—that which compensates, for all families, the cost of raising children.

This shift has a mechanical consequence. Removing benefits from upper-middle classes without transferring them to the poorest reduces the signal sent to all those who might hesitate to have another child. A cost-cutting policy dressed up as family policy produces exactly this effect [4].

The real bottleneck is the childcare wall

The heaviest mechanism is not monetary. It is physical. It is measured in childcare spots and family daycare providers.

Family daycare providers declined from 328,000 in 2013 to 227,000 in 2023 [12]. One hundred thousand professionals lost in ten years, while demand for care remained unchanged. The number of family daycare providers fell another 4.3% in 2023 [12]. And 42% of them will retire by 2035 [12].

On the childcare center side, growth is real but uneven. Between 2013 and 2023, collective care expanded by 22.7% [11]. This growth was primarily driven by micro-crèches, whose capacity is limited to 12 spots and which benefit from less constraining regulations. In 2025, the sector was short 13,500 positions [11].

It is families with intermediate incomes who pay the highest price. The poorest access subsidized childcare with limited out-of-pocket costs. The wealthiest finance home-based care. Middle classes, with incomes too high for social rates and too low to absorb the out-of-pocket costs of the market, often forgo a second or third child for lack of accessible solutions.

The INED estimates that French fertility should remain above the continental average despite the decline [10]. France has retained a demographic advantage built since 1945. It is squandering it.

Spending more will change nothing if it is the same money

The IGF-IGAS report from June 2026, commissioned by the Prime Minister, makes this clear: with 36 different programs, French family policies are poorly legible and poorly coherent, with poorly prioritized objectives [4]. Resources should be more directed toward the programs producing the most positive effects, particularly the care of young children [4].

The question this report poses is that of the producing mechanism. The shortage of spots comes from the architecture of who decides, at what scale, with what tool.

Early childhood policy is fragmented. Parental leave reforms pass through Social Security financing laws. Targets for creating spots fall under conventions on objectives and management.

Decisions regarding municipal responsibilities fall under still other texts. Tax breaks the State forgoes for families are a fourth matter. There is no lead actor. When no one is responsible for a childcare spot, there is no childcare spot.

Nicolas Dufourcq sets the budgetary framework in La Dette sociale de la France (Odile Jacob, 2025): approximately 10% of benefits distributed each year are financed neither by contributions nor by taxes, but by borrowing [15]. Debt money serves to pay out allowances whose real amounts are declining and which do not solve the childcare problem. Continuing to spend more on monetary benefits without transforming what is purchased with that money is a dead end.

Bruno Palier documents over twenty years of European comparisons what the alternative produces [16]. Countries that made universal early childhood care their basic infrastructure have maintained their fertility rates. They increased female employment, reduced inequalities of destiny among children from different backgrounds, and lowered the future cost of their social protection. Sweden, Denmark, and Germany since its 2008 reform are the most documented examples.

Making childcare provision a mandatory responsibility with a territorial lead

The 2027 decision concerns architecture, not amount. It is about transferring early childhood care responsibility to intercommunalities as a mandatory responsibility, with guaranteed and equalized funding by CNAF, and a guaranteed right of access for every child under three.

In concrete terms, today no one is legally required to open a childcare spot. Tomorrow, each intercommunality would be required to cover the needs of its territory. A target funding level, public monitoring of available spots, and an equalization mechanism would prevent rural areas from being left behind.

The June 2026 IGF-IGAS report proposed precisely this evolution: a mandatory responsibility of the municipal bloc, coupled with necessary financial support, with an identifiable territorial lead [4]. UNAF proposes adding a role as guardian of territorial equity entrusted to CAFs, through departmental oversight and strengthening of equalization tools [14].

The shift that Palier documents is this: moving from the regime of monetary benefits that compensate after the fact to one of services that enable upstream [16]. This shift has an initial cost—building spots, training professionals, redirecting the 36 scattered programs toward a single measurable objective. It has a return: middle-class mothers who can work and who have another child generate contributions, growth, and lower future social spending.

Hippolyte d’Albis reminds us in Économie des âges de la vie (Odile Jacob, 2026): transfers between generations form a chain in which each link conditions the next [17]. A system that invests little in early childhood shifts costs onto parents, particularly mothers. It reduces fertility, increases inequalities of destiny among children, and ends up weighing on all other branches of social protection.

The idea of an enforceable right to childcare was abandoned during consultations on the Public Early Childhood Service. It is precisely this renunciation that the 2027 campaign must reopen. Making an access right enforceable designates a responsible party. It exits the system where everyone finances and no one answers. A transfer of responsibility, with an identifiable actor and verifiable results.

France built an ambitious family policy over a century. It progressively emptied it of content by transforming it into a tool of monetary redistribution under budget constraint. The 2027 question is whether to restore its primary function: guaranteeing each child a spot, and each parent the freedom to have another one.

Sources

[1] INSEE, “Demographic Overview 2024,” INSEE Première no. 2033, January 2025, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8327319 (accessed 14/09/2026).

[2] DREES, Social Protection in France and Europe in 2024: Results of Social Protection Accounts, 2025 Edition, December 2025, https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communique-de-presse/panoramas-de-la-drees/251217-protection-sociale-france-europe-2024 (accessed 14/09/2026).

[4] IGF/IGAS, Spending Review on the Effectiveness of Family Policies, June 2026, https://igas.gouv.fr/revue-de-depenses-relative-lefficacite-des-politiques-familiales (accessed 14/09/2026).

[9] Eurostat/SESPROS, data via Spending in Favor of Families in International Comparisons, DSS, https://evaluation.securite-sociale.fr/home/famille/1-1-2-depenses-en-faveur-des-fam.html (accessed 14/09/2026).

[10] INED, study on desire for children and fertility, cited in Maire-Info, “The Decline of French Birth Rates Is Set to Last,” July 2025, https://www.maire-info.com (accessed 14/09/2026).

[11] IGF/IGAS, Micro-Crèches: Financing Models and Quality of Care, January 2024, https://www.igf.finances.gouv.fr/files/live/sites/igf/files/contributed/Rapports%20de%20mission/2024/Rapport%20Micro-cr%C3%A8ches_Version%20Web.pdf (accessed 14/09/2026).

[12] CNAF/National Observatory of Early Childhood (ONAPE), 2024 Report, cited by the Senate, question no. 993S, March 2026, https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2026/qSEQ26030993S.html (accessed 14/09/2026).

[14] UNAF, Public Early Childhood Service: UNAF’s Key Proposals, 2023, https://www.unaf.fr/ressources/service-public-petite-enfance-propositions-phares-unaf/ (accessed 14/09/2026).

[15] Nicolas Dufourcq, France’s Social Debt. 1974–2024, Odile Jacob, October 2025.

[16] Bruno Palier, Social Investment Strategy, Directory of Official Journals/CESE, 2014; and Women, Youth and Children First: Social Investment and Quality Economics, PUF, 2022 (with Clément Carbonnier), https://shs.cairn.info/les-femmes-les-jeunes-et-les-enfants-d-abord–9782130632863?lang=fr (accessed 14/09/2026).

[17] Hippolyte d’Albis, Life Ages Economics: Ending the War Between Generations, Odile Jacob, 2026.