Thirteen Payments a Year in One Country, Fourteen in the Other, and Neither Number Is the One You Should Actually Be Negotiating

🇫🇷 France · 🇮🇹 Italy

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

France will quote you a monthly salary and mean it. Italy will quote you an annual gross figure called RAL, split across thirteen or fourteen payments, and expect you to do the division yourself — and if you take either number at face value without checking the collective bargaining agreement underneath it, you will be off by an amount that matters.

Do's & Don'ts

🇫🇷 France

🇮🇹 Italy

France's pay structure looks deceptively simple on paper — a monthly gross salary — but the real compensation package is built from layers most newcomers don't ask about until they're already three months in. Sector-specific collective agreements (conventions collectives) set minimum pay scales above the SMIC and structure things like mandatory bonuses and progression rules, and much of French compensation culture runs through indirect benefits: meal vouchers (titres-restaurant), employer transport subsidies, and profit-sharing schemes like participation and intéressement, which per Boundless HQ's 2026 benefits guide can collectively add €200–€500 a month in effective value on top of base pay. The much-discussed "13th-month salary" is a case study in how easily assumption outruns fact: despite being treated almost as folklore among people who've never worked in France, Ravio and other payroll trackers report only about 3% of French employers actually offer it, making it something to verify contractually rather than expect by default.

Italy's pay structure is more explicitly multi-part by design, and understanding it requires learning a piece of vocabulary before you can even read an offer. RAL — retribuzione annua lorda, or gross annual salary — is the standard figure Italian employers quote, and it's split not into twelve equal payments but into thirteen (with the mandatory tredicesima typically arriving before Christmas) and, in many sectors, fourteen (the quattordicesima, usually paid before summer). Ravio's 2026 salary benchmarks put the national average gross salary around €32,991–€39,747 depending on the source and sector, with mid-level software engineers earning €55k–€71.4k in the country's stronger tech and finance hubs. The gap between gross and net is substantial and often underestimated by newcomers: combined INPS social security contributions and progressive IRPEF income tax bring most salaries down to roughly 55–65% of the quoted RAL, a discrepancy that Italy-focused expat guides consistently flag as the single most common source of first-paycheck disappointment.

The Reckoning: Both countries dress up their compensation packages with extra "months" of pay and non-salary perks, but they diverge sharply on how reliable those extras are. France's supplementary benefits are genuinely common but individually optional — the 13th month is folklore more than fact, while meal vouchers and profit-sharing are real but employer-dependent. Italy's extra payments are structurally embedded and far more predictable — the tredicesima is close to universal, and the quattordicesima follows sector convention rather than employer whim. Counterintuitively, this makes Italy's messier-looking pay calendar the more reliable one to budget against, while France's tidier-looking monthly salary hides more variability than its clean structure suggests.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone who moved from Lyon to Milan for a mid-career role described spending their first weeks confused about why their "annual salary" wasn't dividing evenly into twelve, until a colleague explained the tredicesima and quattordicesima system over lunch — information that wasn't in the offer letter itself.

Internations Milan — An American consultant relocating to Milan noted that everyone quoted their RAL casually in conversation the way Americans discuss base salary, but that comparing it directly to a US number without adjusting for the 13/14-payment structure and Italian tax brackets led her to overestimate her real earning power for months.

Blind (teamblind.com) — A tech worker evaluating an offer in Italy asked colleagues on the forum to help translate a RAL figure into a US-comparable monthly take-home, and the resulting thread became a small crash course in INPS and IRPEF deductions that the recruiter had never mentioned.

r/expats (via secondary reporting) — A German professional working in Paris described being surprised that their contract didn't include a 13th-month payment despite having heard the "French 13th month" referenced as a near-universal European perk, and only found out it wasn't guaranteed after asking HR directly.

Quora — A finance professional who worked in both Paris and Milan over a decade advised that the real skill in either country isn't negotiating the headline number, but learning to ask precisely which collective agreement or CCNL governs the role, since that document — not the recruiter's pitch — determines most of what actually lands in your account.

Conclusion

Whichever country you're heading to, stop comparing headline salary figures and start asking for the document that actually governs them: the convention collective in France, the CCNL in Italy. Both nations pad compensation with extras that sound generous in conversation and vary considerably in practice, so the only reliable move is to get the specifics in writing before you compare an offer to anything you've had before. My honest advice, the kind I'd give over an espresso rather than a boardroom table: ask "which collective agreement covers this role" before you ask "what's the salary" — the second question doesn't mean much without the first.