Budget 2027: up to 32% of National Education credits will be devoted to civil servant pensions

Nearly a third of the credits of certain ministries will finance civil servants' pensions, according to an annex to the 2027 draft budget published Tuesday by the government, which sees a "crowding out effect" while contesting the idea of ​​a system more advantageous than the private sector.

In National Education, 28.5 billion euros out of 89.1 billion credits planned for 2027, or 32%, will ultimately be paid to the account which finances pensions, describes this document. The proportion is 30% at the Ministry of the Interior and around 13% on average for all ministries.

These figures were sometimes complicated to calculate depending on the scope chosen and the government on Tuesday praised “unprecedented transparency” with the publication of this report. These high rates are mainly explained by the demographic imbalance in the public sector, with less than one contributor per retiree compared to 1.5 for private sector employees. The State must correct this imbalance, which had a cost of 41.5 billion euros in 2025, reports the government. The demographic imbalance is caused both by the aging of the population but also by the growing share of contract workers, who are affiliated to the general system and not to that of civil servants.

For the government, retirement spending across all plans weighs on other priorities: between 2000 and 2023, the share of spending on retirees in relation to GDP increased while that of education fell. The same document judges the cliché of a civil servant regime more generous than that of the private sector to be “erroneous”. According to a study by the Drees (statistical service of social ministries) which he cites, civil servants would be a little better off if private sector rules were applied to them for the calculation of their pension (the generation born in 1958 would thus have a pension revalued by 1.5%).

Excluding the military, civil servants retired on average around a year and two months earlier than in the private sector in 2025, due to early departures open to certain categories such as police officers or nursing assistants, says the government. He intends to make an effort of 5.5 billion euros in his 2027 draft budget on retirees, including those in the civil service, by only partially indexing pensions in relation to inflation and by lowering the ceiling of an income tax deduction. The finance bill (PLF) is examined from Tuesday in the hemicycle of the National Assembly.