Three hundred sixteen billion euros. That is the amount local authorities committed in 2024 to cohesion and territorial development policies, according to the calculations of the Court of Auditors. In addition, 18.5 billion euros come from the budgetary mission “Cohesion of Territories” and about 15 billion in derogatory tax expenditures (rural revitalization zones, urban free zones, overseas exemptions). A colossal treasure, and yet: neither the State nor the local authorities can say precisely what this money produced on the ground.
The finding is laid out in black and white in the 2026 Public Annual Report of the Court of Auditors, dedicated to “Territorial Cohesion and Territorial Attractiveness,” released on March 25, 2026. According to the Court, local authorities contributed at least 316 billion euros to cohesion and territorial development policies in 2024 alone. A staggering figure, but inherently unclear by design: the public expenditure dedicated is impossible to quantify precisely between the Cohesion des territoires mission (18.5 Md€), the tax expenditures (about 15 Md€) and the 316 billion from the communities, and this figure does not even include cross-cutting health, transport, or education expenditures that nonetheless help balance the territories.
Key takeaways
- 316 billion euros disappear every year into an opaque budgeting mechanism
- No administration currently has the capacity to link a spend to a measurable result
- Disparities between rich and poor regions persist despite fifty years of ongoing spending
A proliferation of front offices, no dashboard
The problem isn’t so much the amount involved as the complete absence of steering. Budgets pile up, front offices multiply, but there is no common dashboard to monitor everything. Financial magistrates repeatedly return to this same term, almost like a hallmark of their findings: the refrain in the report is a patchwork approach.
Concretely, credits pass through a multitude of channels that do not speak to each other. The funds are dispersed among a multitude of actors—the State, ANCT, ADEME, ANRU, and local authorities—without real coordination or performance indicators. The result? A single territory can receive funding from five different front offices for overlapping objectives, with no administration charged with synthesizing. Local public accounting, fractured among the DGFiP, the prescribing ministries and thousands of municipal, departmental and regional authorizing officers, lacks any shared nomenclature that would allow linking an expenditure to a measurable result.
This lack of clarity isn’t a technical detail confined to accountants. This budgeting opacity isn’t trivial: it undermines any attempt to run policy by performance. The State may sign rurality contracts, fund France Services houses, or subsidize the reindustrialization of a working basin, but today it has no reliable way to know whether these schemes genuinely reduce territorial gaps or merely perpetuate a costly status quo.
Disparities persisting despite spending
And the gaps, precisely, remain wide open. GDP per capita ranges from €32,652 in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté to €69,288 in Île-de-France—a ratio of more than one to two, despite decades of targeted policies. The Court also reminds us that this finding is not new: in its response to the financial jurisdiction, the government itself acknowledges the historical scale of the effort. The Prime Minister notes that the State has consistently devoted for nearly fifty years a yearly financial effort of around €70 billion to policies directly or indirectly contributing to territorial balance. Fifty years of continuous spending, and seventy billion, an amount that has obviously never undergone a consolidated audit.
This is not the first time the Court has highlighted such blind spots in the transfers from the State to the local authorities. In its Local Public Finances report published on September 30, 2025, it already noted that the State’s maneuvering room over these flows remains very limited: less than a third of these financial contributions can today be truly bounded by the State, whereas it should be everything, according to the magistrates. Two reports, two angles, one diagnosis: the machinery of allocations, transferred taxation and compensations has grown more complex through successive reforms, to the point that even the body charged with auditing public accounts struggles to reconstruct an overall view.
What the Court recommends, and where it stalls
In response to this assessment, the magistrates do not merely outline the situation. The Court urges guaranteeing a basket of essential public services and shifting from a dispersed expenditure logic to a coherent national strategy. In plain terms: stop stacking programs department by department, agency by agency, and first establish a baseline of services guaranteed across the territory, even if it means reorganizing funding around this objective rather than the other way around.
One major obstacle remains: the institutional fragmentation itself. As long as ANCT, ADEME, ANRU, and the State’s decentralized services continue to process their files separately, without a common accounting nomenclature or shared indicators of results, the Court’s recommendation will remain a pie-in-the-sky. The history of these territorial policies, the report notes, is also written to the rhythm of social anger—from the Gilets Jaunes to overseas tensions—that periodically remind us that territorial fracture cannot be closed with more front offices alone. The real question may no longer be how much the State and local authorities spend on territorial equality, but who, someday, will be able to verify it.
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Sources: toute-la.veille-acteurs-sante.fr | documentation.insp.gouv.fr | bdor.fr
