France's Cour de cassation, Chambre sociale, ruled on September 16, 2026 that the three-year prescription for an action to recover the indemnite compensatrice de conge paye runs from the termination of the employment contract, not from the entry into force of Law No. 2024-364 of April 22, 2024. In Pourvoi No. 25-15.456 (Rejet, published to the Bulletin, ECLI:FR:CCASS:2026:SO00730, arret No. 730 FS-B), the court confirmed that an employee who sought payment of a paid-leave indemnity for a 2018 sick-leave period, more than three years after the contract ended, is out of time.
The decision matters because Law No. 2024-364 created the underlying right to paid leave during non-professional sick leave only on April 24, 2024, with retroactive effect to December 1, 2009 (Article 37). The employee and counsel argued that the three-year clock under Article L. 3245-1 of the Code du travail could not start before that right came into existence, and that the two-year transitional deadline in Article 37-II of the law, running from its entry into force, should instead govern. The court rejected both lines of argument.
Who is affected, and what changed?
Every French employer with employees who took non-professional sick leave and whose contract later ended is in scope. HR, payroll and employment-law teams must now treat any claim for the indemnite compensatrice de conge paye as a salary claim subject to the three-year prescription of Article L. 3245-1, running from the contract termination date. Where that termination occurred more than three years before the claim was filed, the claim is prescribed, regardless of when Law No. 2024-364 entered into force or how far back its retroactivity reaches.
Why prescription runs from termination, not from Law 2024-364
The court anchored its reasoning in the nature of the claim. Because the indemnity compensating untaken leave has the legal nature of a salary claim, it falls under Article L. 3245-1, which prescribes salary actions in three years from the day the claimant knew or should have known the facts enabling the action. For leave that the employee could not take because the contract ended, that anchor point is the termination itself, in application of Article L. 3141-28 of the Code du travail.
The two-year delai butoir in Article 37-II of Law No. 2024-364 governs, the reasoning implies, actions seeking the granting of leave days during an ongoing employment relationship, not the monetary indemnity due at termination. Conflating the two would let a claimant revive long-extinguished salary claims through a late-enacted right, which the court refused to allow.
| Claim | Prescription | Starts from | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Action for leave days during sick leave | 2 years | April 24, 2024 (law in force) | Art. 37-II, Law 2024-364 |
| Action for paid-leave indemnity (salary claim) | 3 years | Contract termination | Art. L. 3245-1, Code du travail |
How this fits the EU case law the law transposed
The ruling extends a line the Cour de cassation has followed since its September 13, 2023 decision (Pourvoi No. 22-17.340, published), which set aside Article L. 3141-3 to let workers accrue paid leave during sick leave, applying CJEU judgments Schultz-Hoff (C-350/06, January 20, 2009), Dominguez (C-282/10, January 24, 2012) and Stadt Wuppertal (C-569/16, November 6, 2018). Law No. 2024-364 codified that position in statutory form. What the 2026 arret adds is the prescription boundary: the new statutory right does not reset the limitation clock for the corresponding indemnity.
What to check now
For any employee whose contract ended after December 1, 2009 following a period of non-professional sick leave, identify the termination date and count three years forward. Claims filed inside that window remain actionable; those filed beyond it are now clearly prescribed. Review pending prud'hommes files and severance calculations accordingly, and flag any demand that relies on the 2024-364 retroactivity to revive an older, time-barred indemnity.
Continuous, per-jurisdiction monitoring surfaces a ruling like this the moment the court publishes it to its Bulletin.
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Next steps: audit open paid-leave indemnity claims against the termination-anchored three-year limit; brief payroll and legal on the split between the Article 37-II leave-day deadline and the L. 3245-1 salary-claim prescription; and re-check any settlement posture that assumed Law 2024-364 had revived prescribed claims.
