Half of France's Secondary Teachers Now Log Significant Overtime

Every July, France’s education statistics office publishes a note that administrators tend to skim past — a dry accounting of who worked extra hours and how much they were paid for it. This year’s edition is not one to skim. According to the DEPP’s official statistical note on secondary-school overtime, published in July 2026 and covering the 2024-2025 school year, 85% of secondary teachers logged at least one hour of overtime, and half of all secondary teachers worked more than 1.5 overtime hours per week on average across the year DEPP Note d’Information n° 26-29. The average teacher earned €3,100 for that extra work over the year.

That figure sits inside a wider pattern of recruitment shortfalls, budget-driven position cuts, and independently measured stress indicators — a pattern school leaders working in other tight-budget, tight-recruitment systems should read as an early-warning signal rather than a French curiosity.

What the DEPP note actually found

The DEPP’s statistics are administrative, not survey-based — they come from actual payroll records across France’s public secondary system, which gives them more weight than a self-reported poll. The headline figures are straightforward: nearly nine in ten secondary teachers did some overtime in 2024-2025, and the median teacher’s overtime load crossed 1.5 hours a week. Overtime in the French system takes two forms — HSA (heures supplémentaires annualisées, effectively a fixed annual add-on to a teacher’s timetable) and HSE (heures supplémentaires effectives, extra hours paid as they occur, often for covering absences or the Devoirs faits homework-help program).

The gender gap inside the overtime numbers

The note also breaks the numbers down by sex, and the gap is not small. Men logged more HSE hours than women (24.4 hours per year versus 18.3), and that gap in hours worked — combined with the concentration of men in higher-paid grades — is associated with a 41% gap in average annual HSE pay — €1,265 for men versus €895 for women among HSE beneficiaries DEPP Note d’Information n° 26-29. A companion analysis of the prior year’s DEPP data found the same directional gap and traced part of it to subject and grade concentration: teachers in the higher-paid agrégé rank earn €1,916–€2,554 annually per HSA, compared with €1,181 for non-permanent staff, and men are overrepresented in that higher-paid tier Café pédagogique. The same analysis found overtime uptake varies sharply by subject — physics-chemistry teachers take overtime most often (84%), arts and music teachers least (59–64%) — which matters for administrators trying to anticipate where overtime pressure will concentrate inside their own timetable.

The staffing math behind the overtime hours

Overtime does not rise in a vacuum. Two independent sources — one national, one regional — describe a parallel pattern: fewer teachers being recruited into a system that still needs the same, or more, hours covered.

Fewer candidates, fewer positions, more overtime hours

A November 2025 French Senate budget report on school funding found that between 2016 and 2024, the number of candidates for secondary-teaching exams fell 32.2%, while the number of positions on offer fell only 17.8% — a widening gap between supply and demand for teachers Sénat, Rapport général n° 139. In 2022 alone, 2,070 secondary positions — 15.1% of those offered — went unfilled. The same report puts a price on the consequence: HSA overtime cost French public secondary schools €1.2 billion in 2024-2025. It also flags a budget detail administrators should watch: the Pacte Enseignant program, a bonus scheme introduced in 2023 to reward extra duties outside the classroom, saw its funding cut from €780 million in 2025 to an anticipated €480 million for 2026, even though only 27.8% of public-school teachers had taken it up.

What that looks like on the ground

A regional case from the académie de Normandie, published by the SNES-FSU teachers’ union in February 2026, shows how the national numbers translate into a single school district’s planning. For September 2026, the region cut 394.22 teaching hours — equivalent to 25 full positions — while HSA overtime hours rose by 146.88 across the academy compared to January 2025 allocations SNES-FSU Normandie. Over six years, the region has cut 246 positions — the union describes this as equivalent to closing three high schools — while the academy’s HSA overtime rate climbed from 11.7% to 13.3%. This is a single regional case, published by a union with an advocacy interest in the outcome, so it should be read as illustrative rather than representative of every French académie — but the direction it shows (fewer positions, more overtime absorbing the gap) matches what the national Senate and DEPP figures independently describe.

The workload-wellbeing link

None of the sources behind this article tested whether overtime causes burnout or attrition — the evidence here is correlational, not causal (more on the other contributing factors below). What they show, taken together, is that rising overtime is showing up alongside a broader decline in French teachers’ reported wellbeing, not that one is producing the other.

The OECD’s 2024 international teaching survey, TALIS, found that 18% of French secondary teachers report experiencing stress “a lot” in their work — a share that has risen 7 percentage points since 2018 — and 13% say their job negatively affects their mental health “a lot,” above the OECD average of 10% OECD, TALIS 2024 Country Note: France. Only 27% of French teachers report satisfaction with their salary, well below the OECD average of 39%, and overall job satisfaction sits at 79%, down 5 points since 2018 and below the OECD average of 89%. Among teachers under 30, 14% say they intend to leave the profession within five years — up 10 points since 2018. It’s worth noting these figures are self-reported, and the OECD itself cautions that TALIS results “reflect perceptions … shaped by social and cultural context,” so cross-country comparisons deserve some caution even where the France-specific trend lines are clear.

A separate national survey published by the Observatoire Ecolhuma in May 2026 found that 47% of French teachers now reach clinical thresholds for emotional exhaustion — down from 59% in 2024, which sounds like an improvement, except the report itself cautions that the decline may partly reflect teachers adopting depersonalization as a coping strategy rather than experiencing genuine relief Observatoire Ecolhuma, Baromètre 2026. Read alongside the overtime data, these figures describe teachers who are working more hours inside a profession that, by its own workforce’s account, is under sustained strain.

Overtime is not the only factor

Overtime hours are one visible symptom inside a wider set of pressures, not a standalone explanation — and none of the sources behind this article tested whether overtime causes burnout or attrition. The Senate’s budget report documents a shrinking recruitment pipeline running years ahead of this year’s overtime spike; the Normandie case documents six years of position cuts predating it; and TALIS shows French teachers’ stress and satisfaction scores eroding since 2018, well before this specific DEPP note was published. Administrators who treat rising overtime as the whole story risk missing the recruitment and funding dynamics feeding it — and risk designing fixes that address the symptom without touching the underlying staffing gap.

What this means for school administrators

None of these figures are French-specific in their implications. Wherever recruitment pipelines are tightening and budgets are tight — a dynamic administrators in tight-budget systems elsewhere will recognize — the same overtime concentration is worth watching before it shows up in resignation letters.

Three practical steps follow directly from the data:

Track overtime distribution, not just totals. A school-wide average hides which teachers and subjects are absorbing the load — the DEPP and Café pédagogique data both show overtime concentrates by subject and grade, not evenly. In practice, this looks like a department head reviewing a simple monthly export of who covered extra periods and for how long, flagging any teacher who has exceeded three consecutive weeks above the school’s overtime threshold.
Build a lightweight early-warning signal for stress and attrition intent, since the TALIS data shows those indicators move well before a resignation is submitted. In practice, this looks like a two-question pulse check sent through a staff channel on the first Monday of each month — “How manageable was your workload this month (1-5)?” and “Did you exceed 3 hours of overtime this week?” — with an automatic note to the relevant department head if a teacher flags red three months running.
Reduce the informal, uncompensated coordination load that often hides inside overtime figures. Covering an absent colleague, chasing a parent reply, or re-sending a schedule change by phone all eat into hours that don’t always show up as HSA or HSE but still cost teachers time. In practice, this looks like a dedicated staff-only channel for same-day coverage requests — replacing the ad hoc phone tree — and a single end-of-term two-minute video update to parents instead of a dozen individual emails that would otherwise land in teachers’ evenings.

None of these steps fix a national recruitment shortfall or a shrinking budget line — that requires policy, not a school-level tool. What they can do is stop administrative overhead from adding to a workload that, by the government’s own numbers, is already stretched.

That last point is the operational requirement underneath all three recommendations: administrators need visibility into who is overloaded and a way to cut the coordination time that quietly inflates overtime, without adding another system for teachers to check. A dedicated communication platform is one implementation path for that — not the only one, but a direct one. BeeNet centralizes staff scheduling communication, parent updates, and coverage requests into a single channel, so the informal coordination load documented above doesn’t keep compounding on top of an already-rising overtime figure.

The staffing pressure behind these numbers isn’t going away on its own — recruitment pipelines don’t refill in a single budget cycle, and the position cuts already logged in Normandie and nationally will still be felt next September. For school administrators, the question isn’t whether workload visibility and lighter coordination overhead are worth building — the data above makes that case on its own. The question is when you act on it.

References

DEPP (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale). “Les heures supplémentaires des enseignants des établissements du second degré en 2024-2025.” Note d’Information n° 26.29, July 2026. https://www.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/depp-ni-2026-29hsepdf-518678.pdf
Gani, Djéhanne. “A qui profitent les heures supplémentaires ?” Café pédagogique, May 23, 2025. https://www.cafepedagogique.net/2025/05/23/a-qui-profitent-les-heures-supplementaires/
OECD. “Results from TALIS 2024 — Country Note: France.” 2025. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/10/results-from-talis-2024-country-notes_eafd703e/france_714d7439/50507701-en.pdf
Sénat (French Senate), Rapporteur Olivier Paccaud. “Projet de loi de finances pour 2026 : Enseignement scolaire.” Rapport général n° 139, Tome III, Annexe 13, November 24, 2025. https://www.senat.fr/rap/l25-139-313/l25-139-3138.html
SNES-FSU Normandie. “DHG des lycées publics de l’académie de Normandie : davantage d’élèves, mais toujours moins de postes !” February 3, 2026. https://normandie.snes.edu/dhg-des-lycees-publics-de-l-academie-de-normandie-davantage-d-eleves-mais.html
Observatoire Ecolhuma. “Baromètre 2026 – Santé Mentale et CPS à l’École.” May 27, 2026. https://ecolhuma.fr/enquete/barometre-2026-sante-mentale-et-cps-a-lecole/