Around 840,000 people today travel on the French rail network with free or nearly free tickets. This figure, the Cour des comptes established in its report on SNCF travel facilities, shows that employees in service, retirees, spouses, children, and other beneficiaries accumulate a tariff privilege that weighs on the company’s accounts to the tune of about €140 million each year. Yet this amount never directly exits the public purse.
Key takeaways
- A centennial privilege continues to benefit hundreds of thousands of people: but who exactly?
- €140 million vanish each year without ever being billed: how is this possible?
- Closed to new recruits since 2020, the system is nonetheless expected to endure for decades: why?
A right dating back to 1938, handed down through generations of railway workers
The mechanism is not a recent perk invented by a generous management. Article 16 of the decree-law of 12 November 1938 provides that circulation facilities can be granted to SNCF personnel and their dependants. For nearly nine decades, this text has structured the entire system: full free travel on certain journeys, a 90% reduction beyond an annual quota of tickets offered.
In detail, the rules vary according to status. Active and retired beneficiaries use their professional card, the Pass Carmillon, to enjoy free travel on trains without mandatory reservations on Intercités, TER and Transilien. They also receive a quota of reservation exemptions—eight per year, raised to sixteen for senior executives—and travel free on services that require a reservation, such as the TGV. Families are not forgotten: spouses or children can benefit from 16 free tickets per year, and a 90% discount once the quota is exceeded.
The number of beneficiaries is far from trivial. A decade ago, an annual public report from the Cour des comptes noted that more than 843,217 railway workers, retirees and dependants benefited from near-free travel across the entire SNCF network. The current figure, around 840,000, sits within this continuity, proof that the scheme endures through time and through successive reforms of the company.
Closed to new recruits since 2020, but still active for hundreds of thousands of households
That is the paradox of the system: it no longer recruits, yet it continues to grow in appearance. The status of railway worker, the sole passport granting direct access to these facilities, ceased to be offered to new hires as of January 1, 2020. This shift was confirmed at the time by SNCF human resources managers, who described the end of recruitment under the railway worker status from January 1, 2020 as one of the major internal changes of the period.
Concretely, this means that all employees hired under ordinary law after that date will never enter this special regime. But for those who had obtained it before the cutoff, nothing changes: they keep their rights for life and transfer them to their dependants. A government report from 2021 counted 328,144 active and retired employees of the historic company and 786,692 dependants who have benefited, since its creation, from circulation facilities. The stock of beneficiaries should therefore decline mechanically in the coming decades, as people retire and as the oldest dependants die, but full extinction will take decades more.
€140 million in seats occupied, no bill to pay
That is where the accounting subtlety lies. This amount does not correspond to any identifiable expense line in a budget, no transfer, no subsidy. It represents a foregone commercial opportunity: seats that could have been sold to a paying customer, occupied for free by a beneficiary of these facilities.
The Cour des comptes had already highlighted this phenomenon in a previous report on SNCF human resources, where it quantified the overall impact on revenue at a high level. The revenue impact is substantial, around €220 million according to that earlier assessment, a figure that included the entirety of the scheme before certain adjustments. Beyond the raw volume of unbilled tickets, the institution pointed to a more pernicious effect: the exclusion of paying travelers from popular routes. The presence of many beneficiaries on trains that are full or nearly full means that some customers can no longer board those trains, an effect particularly damaging on peak-time, high-revenue routes, which would cost about €30 million per year in lost revenue.
A retired railway worker boarding a TGV from Paris to Lyon for free on a Friday evening costs the State nothing, generates no line item in the national budget. Yet it occupies a seat that a paying customer would have filled at full price at that busy hour. It is this opportunity cost, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of trips each year, that shapes much of the €140 million assessed by the Cour des comptes.
A regime gradually brought under ordinary law
The arrangement is not completely immune to regulatory evolution. Starting January 1, 2024, the leisure travel facilities for all SNCF employees are treated as a benefit in kind and are therefore subject to payroll taxes, employer contributions and taxation. A significant change: until now, these free tickets did not appear on pay slips and effectively escaped income tax.
Yet this taxation does not alter the substance of the problem identified by the Cour des comptes: the scope of dependants, especially broad compared with other salary benefits in both the public and private sectors, continues to feed a flow of beneficiaries that extends well beyond active railway workers. As long as the last employees hired under the pre-2020 regime have not retired, and as long as their own dependants remain eligible, these 840,000 seats occupied free of charge each year will continue to appear, implicitly, in SNCF’s income statements.
Sources: igf.finances.gouv.fr | ressources.data.sncf.com | assemblee-nationale.fr
