For France, the expected saving would be around €800m ($940m). The mechanism would work through a reduction in the GNI-based contribution, which serves as the EU budget’s balancing resource. Additional EU revenue, including fines, reduces the amount that member states need to provide.
France's Rising EU Bill
The request comes as France's payments to the EU are also rising significantly. For 2026, its contribution is estimated at €28.8bn ($34bn), approximately €5.7bn ($6.7bn) more than the amount initially budgeted for 2025. The increase is linked in part to higher EU spending and the implementation of the 2021–2027 financial framework.
The financial stakes are even higher in the longer term. The European Commission’s initial proposal for the 2028–2034 financial framework would raise France’s average annual contribution from approximately €26bn to €36bn, an increase of 38%. The prospect is particularly significant for Paris at a time when France is under pressure to reduce its public deficit and contain its debt burden.
France already pays more into the EU budget than it receives. According to Senate data for 2024, its net contribution was €7.9bn ($9.3bn), making it the bloc’s second-largest net contributor behind Germany, whose figure stood at €18.8bn ($22.1bn). The Netherlands and Italy followed at €4.9bn and €4.7bn respectively.
The effort to reduce France's EU payments comes alongside further spending cuts at home. On 14 September, Lecornu asked all ministries, except for defense, to keep their spending in 2027 at exactly the same level as in 2026. Matignon estimates that this last-minute adjustment could generate around €1.2bn in additional savings.
The prime minister had initially set ministry spending outside defense to increase by 0.4% in 2027. He subsequently reopened the spending ceilings sent to ministers in July, citing the deterioration in the economic outlook and the need to preserve room for maneuver during the parliamentary budget debate.
An Issue Long Championed by the RN
France's payments to the EU are thus taking on unusual prominence in the French budget debate. It has long been a central element of the Rassemblement National’s (RN) platform. As recently as June 2026, RN president Jordan Bardella proposed cutting France’s contribution to the EU budget by half. The proposal was also included in Marine Le Pen’s 2022 presidential platform, which presented the measure as a source of several billion euros in potential savings.
Le Pen has reiterated the issue more recently, linking it to the question of pensions. “We are told there is no more money. That we do not have a single euro to adjust pensions for inflation. But we pay €26bn to the European Union, including €10bn in net contributions”, she said in a television interview, citing recent figures.
What is new is not France's desire to limit how much it pays into the EU budget – the government has already sought to contain the increase – but rather the fact that the Prime Minister’s Office is now making the issue an explicit part of its cost-cutting strategy. A demand long championed by the RN is therefore entering the government’s economic agenda, albeit in a much more limited form and within the constraints of EU budgetary rules.
