More than nineteen billion euros per year! This is the amount of bonuses and allowances paid in France only to civil servants. A colossal sum, financed by taxation, and distributed by means of… 543 different devices.
Yes, 543 bonuses! Some are legitimate: they compensate for a difficult assignment, a particular responsibility, a rare skill or a real professional constraint. But their accumulation, their opacity, their spectacular progress and their unequal distribution, reveal above all an administration that the state itself no longer seems capable of controlling.
Between 2015 and 2025, the cost of these premiums rose from €11.8 billion to €19.1 billion. An increase of 61.8% in ten years, almost three times the increase in prices over the same period.
So here is a government that constantly asks the French to make sacrifices (when it does not impose them on them); that increases levies; that reduces reimbursements; that closes public services; that leaves municipalities, hospitals or farmers to struggle with their difficulties… But at the same time, it tolerates an increase of more than 7 billion euros in the bonuses distributed to state employees.
Bonuses now represent, on average, 25% of the remuneration of state employees, compared to 20% ten years ago. They are therefore no longer an exceptional complement. They have become a second salary, parallel to the official salary, but much less legible and profoundly unequal.
This inequality exists first of all between the civil servants themselves. Bonuses represent only 19% of remuneration at the Ministry of National Education, but reach 67% at the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, for example.
In what rational system can such deviations be accepted? Let’s take the allowance for residence abroad. In 2025, it cost €486 million for 6,299 agents, or about €77,000 gross per person per year. And this sum is exempt from income tax!
Whether it is necessary to compensate for the real cost of expatriation, a dangerous situation or exceptionally difficult living conditions, no one disputes it. But can we still speak of simple compensation when it alone reaches the equivalent of several years’ salary of a French worker?
Another example: the compensation for the increase in the CSG still costs 573 million euros per year. Created in 2018 to respond to a particular situation, it even continues to benefit certain agents recruited after the reform. The teleworking package represents 30 million euros per year, including when teleworking is requested by the agent when it already allows him to save time and transport costs.
But perhaps the most revealing thing lies in this incredible administrative dust: 185 bonuses are awarded to less than a hundred people. Twenty-two of them represent less than a hundred euros per beneficiary per year.
How much does it cost to manage a bonus of a few dozen euros? How many forms, budget lines, circulars, validations and working hours do you have to mobilize to maintain it?
We discover a state that is almost amateur in its organization, but professional in its ability to spend. A state that knows how to create a bonus, but that does not know how to abolish it.
Because any compensation produces what the inspectors call a “ratchet effect”. Once granted, it becomes a vested right. Its justification may disappear; its beneficiary may change his or her situation; The system may lose all usefulness: the bonus remains.
A reform had been launched in 2014 to harmonise and simplify this system. Twelve years later, only four ministries have actually adopted the common system. And simplification has sometimes increased spending: the least generous administrations have reached the average, while the best endowed have retained their previous advantages.
Should we really see this as nothing more than incompetence? The accumulation of these categorical advantages also constitutes a form of institutional clientelism. A system in which each government buys social peace, circumvents reforms and maintains a professional clientele dependent on its arbitrations.
This is how the deep state is constituted: not a secret society, but a set of bodies, leaderships, unions, networks and administrative interests powerful enough to survive elections and neutralize the desire for reform.
Ordinary civil servants are not responsible for this drift. Many work conscientiously, sometimes for modest salaries. But the system has become selfish: everyone defends their advantage, each ministry protects its exceptions, while the taxpayer silently pays the bill.
These bonuses are dangerous for our sovereignty. For a France that wastes, that goes into debt to finance its current expenses and that refuses to control its own administrative apparatus becomes dependent on its creditors, the financial markets and external institutions. National independence begins with the state’s ability to govern its own spending.
