Net-entreprises portal redesigned for centralized access and simplified filing
Published 2026-10-18
France's mandatory portal for payroll and social declarations is getting a redesign, so here is what every founder with employees still has to file, on time, regardless of how the login screen looks.
Net-entreprises is not optional software. It is the portal through which French law requires you to file the Déclaration Préalable à l'Embauche (DPAE) before you hire anyone, and through which URSSAF collects the contributions that keep that hire legal. When the site changes its interface, the obligations behind it do not move an inch, and missing a filing because you could not find the right menu gets treated the same as missing it on purpose.
What Net-entreprises actually is, and why it is not optional
Net-entreprises and urssaf.fr are the centralized filing channels through which French employers submit mandatory declarations: the DPAE, payroll data, and social contribution filings. Nothing about hiring in France happens outside this portal, because it is the single interface between an employer and the French social security system.
URSSAF (Union de Recouvrement des cotisations de Sécurité Sociale et d'Allocations Familiales) is the body that actually collects employer and employee social contributions. Net-entreprises is the channel; URSSAF is the collector. Confusing the two does not matter day to day, but understanding the chain matters once something goes wrong, because the portal records what you declared and URSSAF enforces what you owe based on it.
A 2026 redesign of the portal is reported in public sources, but no specific launch date, new navigation structure, or changed login mechanics are confirmed here. Treat any description of "new screens" with suspicion until you have checked net-entreprises.fr or urssaf.fr directly, because the one thing worse than an unfamiliar interface is a false memory of a familiar one.
The DPAE: the filing that cannot wait
The DPAE is the single most time-sensitive filing in the entire hiring process, and it is non-negotiable. It must be filed within the 8 days before the employee's start date, at the latest just before they actually begin work, and it goes through urssaf.fr or Net-entreprises.
In practice, the DPAE does three things at once: it registers the employee with URSSAF, it affiliates them to médecine du travail (occupational health), and it activates workplace-accident cover from day one. None of those three protections exist until the filing is submitted, which means an employee working without a completed DPAE is, legally, working without cover.
Skipping it is not an administrative slip you can fix later with an apology email. It is classified as travail dissimulé, undeclared work, a criminal offence in France. Treat the 8-day window as a hard deadline set in law, not a suggestion buried in a government form.
What happens after the DPAE: ongoing declarations through the same portal
Once the DPAE is filed, the obligations do not stop. Most companies file social contribution declarations monthly, while very small companies can file quarterly, but either way the reporting runs through the same portal infrastructure.
These are not paperwork exercises. Employer social charges run roughly 40% to 45% of gross salary, higher for cadres, which means total employment cost lands around 1.40 to 1.50 times gross salary, or roughly 1.80 to 1.90 times net pay. Those percentages are approximate and vary by sector and collective agreement, but the order of magnitude is consistent: what you declare through the portal each month is what your company actually owes, not a formality layered on top of the real cost.
The mutuelle obligation sits inside this same compliance layer and is frequently underestimated by founders hiring for the first time. Since 1 January 2016, following the 2013 ANI (Accord National Interprofessionnel) agreement, every private-sector employer in France must provide collective complementary health cover. The employer must pay at least 50% of the premium, the plan must meet the panier ANI minimum coverage standard, and exemptions are narrow, limited to cases like an employee already covered under a spouse's plan or certain apprentice situations. This is not optional and it is not negotiable down to zero.
The convention collective layer founders often miss
Before the first hire, identify the applicable convention collective (CCN), the sector-level collective bargaining agreement that governs pay and working conditions in your industry. The determining factor is the company's real principal activity, not simply the APE/NAF code assigned at registration, because the code is administrative shorthand and the CCN tracks what the business actually does.
Where a CCN covers your activity, it is mandatory, full stop. It sets minimum salary grids, job classifications, notice periods, severance terms, working-time rules, and sometimes a 13th-month bonus, all layered above the statutory floor set by the Code du travail. It also has to appear on the payslip, and employees must be informed of which one applies to them.
Tech and SaaS founders frequently assume SYNTEC (the CCN for engineering and technical consulting firms) applies automatically, but this has to be confirmed case by case against the real activity. Some companies fall under no branch CCN at all, in which case only the Code du travail floor applies, and assuming SYNTEC when it does not apply, or vice versa, produces payroll errors that surface months later.
A redesigned interface changes workflow, not obligation
Here is the core point: whatever changes on screen, menus, login flow, dashboard layout, the legal deadlines do not move. The 8-day DPAE window before a hire and the monthly or quarterly contribution filing cadence are fixed in law, not in the interface design of a government website.
Before your first filing, re-verify the exact current submission steps directly on net-entreprises.fr or urssaf.fr, because interface changes can shift where a form lives without changing what is actually due. A redesign can relocate a button; it cannot relocate a legal deadline.
In our experience, a pattern we see across founders doing their first hire alone is confusing "I found the form" with "I filed it correctly." The portal's internal logic assumes a level of familiarity with French payroll administration that a first-time foreign employer simply does not have yet, so a founder can click through an unfamiliar screen, believe the DPAE went through, and discover weeks later that a required field was never completed.
If you are hiring your first employee and want someone to confirm the setup before it becomes a problem, check your eligibility for Nounda's first-90-days support rather than guessing your way through a portal you have never used.
Why this matters more for non-resident founders specifically
A founder running a business from Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, or Turkey while hiring in France cannot walk into a CPAM office or an URSSAF counter to ask a clarifying question in person. For most non-resident founders, the portal is the entire interface with the French administration, with no local backup channel to fall back on.
An interface change that is a minor inconvenience for a French-resident employer, a different menu, a re-learned click path, becomes a real cost in time zone friction and language barrier for a founder sitting outside France, especially inside the tight 8-day DPAE window where there is no margin for a day lost to confusion.
As we observe working with these programs, founders who treat the first hire as "just paperwork" are the ones most likely to miss the DPAE window, because they underestimate how tightly the 8-day rule is enforced, regardless of where the founder is physically sitting. French labour inspectors do not grant leniency for time zones.
The practical checklist before the first hire
Run through this before you make an offer, not after:
- Identify the convention collective applicable to your company's real principal activity, not just its APE/NAF code.
- Confirm the current DPAE filing steps on the (possibly redesigned) portal well before the 8-day window opens, not on day seven.
- Budget for the mutuelle at a minimum 50% employer share, plus the 40 to 45% employer charge load on top of gross salary.
- Decide whether monthly or quarterly contribution filing applies to your company's size.
- Confirm the current SMIC figure for payroll budgeting rather than relying on a number that may already be stale; it drifts with annual and mid-year revaluations.
Each of these needs to be settled before an offer letter goes out, not discovered mid-DPAE-window when there is no slack left to fix a mistake.
How Nounda supports the first hire
Nounda's first-90-days support exists precisely for this kind of moment, where a legal obligation does not change but the tool used to meet it does, and a founder sitting outside France has no easy way to confirm what actually changed. As part of its post-landing support, Nounda walks founders through their first hire end to end: identifying the correct convention collective, filing the DPAE inside its 8-day window, setting up the mutuelle correctly, and making sure monthly or quarterly URSSAF declarations start on the right footing from day one.
This is not generic HR advice. It is the same operational layer Nounda provides through company formation and visa, carried into the first employee hire, so founders do not have to decode a government portal redesign alone from another time zone. See the pricing for how first-hire support fits alongside company formation and visa work, and get the details at nounda.com.