France has raised the bar on workplace safety. On 5 June 2026, the French Minister of Labour and Solidarity unveiled the Plan Santé au Travail 2026-2030, the country’s fifth national occupational health plan and the most ambitious yet. For employers operating in France, across construction, manufacturing, industrial operations, facilities management, and the public sector. It is a direct signal of where regulatory scrutiny is heading and what compliance obligations look like for the next five years.

The plan arrives against a troubling backdrop. France recorded 764 fatal workplace accidents in the private sector in 2024, the highest figure since 2018. In construction, heavy industry, and transport, the toll continues to mount. The French government’s response is a structured, five-priority roadmap that merges, for the first time, the previous standalone fatal accident prevention programme directly into the national health plan. The message is clear: preventing serious and fatal workplace accidents is no longer a secondary stream. It is the headline priority.  
  

What the PST 2026–2030 Actually Requires

The plan sets five strategic priorities that will be translated into regional enforcement programmes across France throughout the second half of 2026.

The first and most operationally significant priority is the prevention of serious and fatal workplace accidents, with a particular focus on young workers and temporary staff. France’s data consistently shows that workers in their first days or weeks at a new employer, whether permanent, temporary, or subcontracted, face a dramatically higher risk of serious injury. The plan targets this gap directly, requiring stronger onboarding protocols, better initial and continuing safety training, and more robust verification that workers have received and understood the training they need before starting work.

The second priority concerns the mandatory occupational risk assessment document, known as the DUERP. Every employer in France must maintain this document from the moment they hire their first employee. It must be updated at least annually for businesses with eleven or more staff, and companies with fifty or more employees must also maintain an annual prevention programme setting out specific planned actions, timelines, performance indicators, and cost estimates. Failure to maintain a compliant DUERP can result in fines of up to €7,500, and withholding it from employee representatives is a criminal offence carrying potential imprisonment. The PST 2026-2030 puts the quality and currency of this document back in focus.

The third priority addresses emerging risks, particularly those linked to climate change. Heat stress for outdoor workers is the most immediate concern, as well as risks from addictive behaviours in the workplace. Employers will be expected to assess and document these risks within their DUERP and prevention programmes.

The fourth priority focuses on reducing absenteeism through proactive, prevention-first approaches. The plan introduces tools such as a disengagement risk index to help identify workers who are at risk of prolonged absence before it happens.

The fifth priority is the strengthening of early-warning and crisis management systems in the workplace, including national networks for monitoring occupational diseases and new industry-sector specific tools.

The Compliance Challenge Underneath the Headlines

What the PST 2026-2030 exposes, beyond its policy ambitions, is a well-documented gap between what French law already requires and what employers are actually doing on the ground. Risk assessments that are outdated, training records that are incomplete, contractor onboarding that happens informally or not at all: these are not new problems. They are the same operational failures that appear in prosecution cases and inspection reports year after year, in France and across Europe.

The plan’s specific focus on temporary workers and contractors is particularly significant. In industries such as construction and manufacturing, where subcontracted and agency workers make up a large proportion of the workforce, the risk of a serious incident is highest precisely in the early days of a new assignment. If a contractor arrives on site without a documented and verified induction, without confirmation that their certifications are current, and without a clear record of who is responsible for their safety supervision, the legal exposure for the principal employer is real and serious.

France’s prevention passport, the passeport de prévention, is the digital record intended to track mandatory health and safety training across a worker’s career. The PST 2026-2030 specifically commits to strengthening this system, making training records more traceable and certifications more consistently recognised. For employers, this means that the informal approach of relying on workers to self-certify their qualifications is no longer adequate. Verification, documentation, and auditability are the new baseline.

How FlexManager Helps Organisations Meet These Obligations

The five priorities of France’s PST 2026-2030 map directly to the challenges that FlexManager is built to solve.

Contractor and temporary worker safety begins with a controlled, documented onboarding process. FlexManager’s contractor management module ensures that every worker arriving on site, whether permanent, temporary, or subcontracted, completes the correct safety induction, holds the required certifications, and is formally recorded before work begins. No worker starts without the right documentation in place.

Risk assessment management is central to DUERP compliance. FlexManager enables organisations to build, update, and share structured risk assessments at unit or site level, with full version history, change logs, and access controls that satisfy the 40-year retention requirement under French law. Risk assessments are live documents, not static files.

Workforce training and competency tracking addresses the training record gap that the PST specifically targets. FlexManager manages training records, certification expiry dates, upcoming renewal requirements, and mandatory qualification status across the full workforce, including contractors and agency workers, in real time.

Occupational health monitoring supports the health surveillance obligations that apply to workers exposed to specific occupational risks. FlexManager enables employers to schedule, record, and track health surveillance activities, with alerts when checks are due or overdue.

Finally, FlexManager’s incident reporting, near-miss recording, and real-time operational dashboards provide the early-warning infrastructure that the PST 2026-2030 expects from employers managing complex, multi-site, or multi-contractor operations.

If you want to see how FlexManager helps organisations build a compliance infrastructure that meets obligations, book a demo and see it in action.