Three hundred and sixteen billion euros. That is the amount that municipalities, intermunicipal authorities, departments, and regions committed in 2024 to cohesion and territorial development policies, according to the Court of Auditors, with local authorities contributing at least 316 billion euros to cohesion and territorial development policies for the year 2024 alone. This figure appeared in the Public Annual Report 2026 of the institution based on Rue Cambon, released on March 25. And behind this colossal financial mass lies an admission of impotence rarely voiced so bluntly by financial magistrates: no one, neither at the state level nor within the local authorities, can say what this money has actually produced.
À retenir
- An enormous sum disappears into the opacity of local budgets
- Double counting artificially inflates the figures and makes comparisons impossible
- Despite hundreds of billions spent, territorial inequalities remain entrenched
A colossal figure, with no traceability
The amount alone is impressive. But what worries the Court is not the size of the figure, but its opacity. The headline figure is dizzying, yet it is the complete lack of traceability that unsettles the financial magistrates. Concretely, these 316 billion euros do not even cover the entirety of the territorial public effort: expenditures related to health, transportation, or other cross-cutting sectors are not included there. The real bill is even higher, and no one can determine its exact amount.
To these local sums are added state credits. 18.5 billion euros from the budgetary mission “Cohesion of Territories” and about 15 billion in derogatory tax expenditures, Rural Revitalization Zones (ZRR), Urban Free Zones, overseas exemptions. But this state bloc itself is not what it seems. A large portion of this envelope actually finances something other than territorial policy in the strict sense: 88% of this sum actually funds housing subsidies and emergency shelter, not territorial policy in the proper sense. As a result, adding the budget lines to obtain a coherent national total proves to be an impossible task.
The Court also highlights a methodological bias that artificially inflates the 316-billion figure: double counting. Local authorities spent 316 billion euros in 2024 on their services, but this figure is inflated by double counting: when a department pays a subsidy to a municipality, the sum appears in both budgets. The same euro of public money can therefore be counted twice, or even three times depending on how many levels pass it along. This makes any comparison over time or between territories particularly risky.
The heavy legacy of decentralization
How did we get here? The answer goes back to the major decentralization laws of 1982, which allocated competencies among municipalities, departments, and regions without always drawing clear boundaries. Forty years later, this tangle yields its perverse effects: no one knows anymore who funds what, or in what proportion. The Court of Auditors states this plainly, pointing to a structural malaise: territorial policy rests on a constellation of actors—the central state, the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT), ADEME, the National Agency for Urban Renovation (ANRU), the Interministerial City Committee (CIV), local authorities—and on too many schemes to be effectively managed.
The word that keeps recurring in the report is “sprinkling.” “Public spending devoted to the cohesion and attractiveness of territories is particularly difficult to grasp, given its fragmentation among many public actors,” the magistrates write. A polite way of saying that public money dissolves in a multitude of gateways, without an overarching vision or a clearly identified lead.
This institutional fragmentation has a direct and concrete consequence: the absence of a common analytic accounting framework among the different levels. Each authority keeps its accounts in its own way, with its own budget nomenclatures, without a shared reference system that would allow linking a specific expense to a measurable outcome. It is impossible, under these conditions, to answer a basic question: exactly how much does urban renewal policy cost in a given city, euro for euro, or the rural revitalization scheme in a given department? The data simply does not exist in that consolidated form.
Territorial disparities that do not narrow
The most troubling aspect is that this outlay of resources does not translate into a reduction of regional inequalities. Despite decades of schemes and hundreds of billions spent, the French territorial divide remains wide. The GDP per capita ranges from €32,652 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté to €69,288 in Île-de-France, i.e., a gap more than double between the two regions.
How can such inertia persist despite the scale of the sums committed? The Court points to a logic of sterile competition between territories rather than complementarity. Each authority tends to wage its own battle to attract businesses and newcomers, even if it means competing with the municipality or region next door. Schemes, free zones, tax advantages proliferate, each hoping to pull its own share. But when everyone races in the same direction without coordination, the overall effect often cancels out. So much energy and public money spent to neutralize each other rather than to correct the country’s structural imbalances.
In light of this observation, the magistrates do not merely recount the situation. They put forward concrete avenues to escape the impasse. The Court recommends guaranteeing a basket of essential public services and shifting from a dispersed expenditure approach to a coherent national strategy. A way of saying that the goal is not necessarily to spend more, but to spend better, with a shared course among all levels rather than a sum of competing local strategies.
A detail worth noting to understand where the accounting mechanism stands: starting with the 2026 financial year, the two budget documents traditionally produced by each local authority—the management account kept by the public accountant and the administrative account kept by the local executive—must give way to a single financial account. A technical reform that could, in the long run, facilitate the centralization of data at the national level. But merging two accounting documents will not suffice to resolve the Court’s fundamental problem: without a common nomenclature linking each expense to a specific public policy and its results, the mystery of the 316 billion euros is likely to endure well beyond 2026.
Sources: portail.documentation.developpement-durable.gouv.fr | compta-finances-locales.collectivites.legibase.fr | bdor.fr
