France’s Highest Incomes in 2025: New Stats

INSEE’s Portrait social for 2025 pulls back the curtain on a very small slice of France: the households sitting at the very top of the income and wealth scale.

The new edition lays out who they are, how much they earn, what they own, and how their position has shifted over the past two decades.

The picture starts with salaried workers. To enter the top 1% of full-time equivalent posts in France, someone needs to earn more than €10,219 net per month. The top 0.1% starts at €27,066.

Within the hundred best-paid posts in the country, you mostly find professional footballers, major corporate leaders, market traders, and senior engineers.

What stands out is the stability: many of these workers were already near the top of their generation fifteen years ago.

Income doesn’t tell the whole story, so the study moves to households. The threshold for the top 0.1% of adjusted household income reaches about €463,000 per year after taxes and benefits.

On average, they earn close to €1 million a year. Half of these households live in Île-de-France. Most are older couples, often married or in civil partnerships, with accumulated assets that go far beyond salaries.

INSEE also identifies a broader but still select group: households that rank high in both standard of living and wealth. Roughly 1.6 million households fall into this category. Their wealth begins above €716,300 and their standard of living above €39,100 per person.

Many are executives or independent professionals in their fifties or sixties. They often own property beyond their main home, hold substantial financial portfolios, and keep business assets.

Inheritance is a key factor: 62% of them have received one at some point, compared to 39% of households overall.

Looking at long-term trends, the report shows that top incomes have grown much faster than the rest between 2003 and 2022. The income gap has widened sharply.

In 2003, the highest incomes were about 21x the rest of the population; by 2022, they were 31x higher. This rise is uneven, with volatility at the very top, but the direction is clear.