Committee votes on bill
The Social Affairs Committee (commission des affaires sociales) of the Assemblée nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, has approved a bill granting workers a right to climate leave, according to the French trade publication actuEL-HSE. The bill, signed by 35 MPs with Damien Girard as lead sponsor and tabled by the Écologiste et Social group according to French parliamentary channel LCP, was registered with the Assemblée nationale on 15 September 2026 as bill No. 3128. The committee vote is only an intermediate step: the text still has to go before the full Assemblée nationale before it can become law.
What the bill proposes
The bill contains four articles. Article 1 widens the right to withdraw from work (droit de retrait): when France’s weather service Météo-France issues an orange or red heat alert, workers may withdraw from their work situation even without a serious and imminent danger. Employers can only contest this if the labour inspectorate has found no shortcomings in their heat-prevention measures, which have been mandatory since a decree of 27 May 2025. Article 2 introduces the “congé climatique” (climate leave): workers who live or work in an area hit by a natural disaster or a heatwave gain the right to five days of paid leave per year, on top of ordinary holiday entitlement. This leave counts as working time for labour-law purposes and is paid as a daily allowance by the health insurance fund CPAM, up to the social security daily cap of 220 euros. An employer may postpone the start of the leave by up to 24 hours if too many employees would otherwise be absent at the same time. Article 3 funds the scheme through an extra 0.1 percent employer contribution, worth roughly 1 billion euros a year; article 4 offsets any shortfall in public revenue through higher tobacco excise duties.
Next steps in the legislative process
The committee vote does not yet make the bill law. A committee reading in the Assemblée nationale is only a preparatory step: only after debate and a vote in the full lower house, and then in the Senate, can the text – possibly amended – become law. A separate 2025 bill on climate leave for parents of school-age children when schools close is following a similar, separate track through the same committee.
Context
According to Éditions Tissot, Spain became the first European country to enshrine climate leave in law after the deadly floods in the Valencia region in October 2024. At EU level there is as yet no binding standard on workplace heat: the European trade union federations EFFAT, EPSU and EFBWW are campaigning (#TooHotToWork) for enforceable rules, such as maximum working temperatures and mandatory breaks with shade and water, as part of the Quality Jobs Act announced by the European Commission. Until such an EU-wide rule exists, the union federations say protection against heat at work depends on a patchwork of national rules and often on employers’ goodwill.
Source: actuEL-HSE.fr, “La Commission des affaires sociales vote un congé climatique” (16 October 2026).
Additional research: the open-data text of bill No. 3128 at the French Assemblée nationale, and articles from Éditions Tissot, Le Monde du Droit and the European trade union federation EFFAT.
