Sick leave is a work stoppage due to illness which allows the employee to be compensated during the interruption of his work during this leave. The National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts published a study in February 2023 which shows that the longer you work, the more you take sick leave. “An increase which would generate an additional cost of several tens of millions of euros”, as explained to us by La dispatch.

A group of researchers for INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) has closely studied the link between retirement age and health expenditure based on the latter since the pension reform of 2010 (increasing the legal retirement age from 60 to 62). Released on Thursday, May 11, the results of their research reveal “that yes, retiring later would induce a significant increase in health care costs in the short term”, as reported by Capital.

Indeed, the fact is that the probability of being off work due to illness has increased by around 12% among men, and 10% among women since the pension reforms of 2010. The Study tells us therefore that “postponing retirement increases the probability of consulting a specialist and ultimately leads to an increase in health expenditure, in particular among employees whose health expenditure is initially low”.

The National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts made the same observation as INSEE during its research in February 2023. Indeed, the use of sick leave has become more frequent over the years, for several reasons. The main one being quite simply the state of health due to efforts and age: “the measured effect being global, the increase in sickness absence can result both from the deterioration of the state of health linked to age and the lengthening of active life”, this study tells us.

If we focus on the report “Charge and products of health insurance” of 2018, the total cost of sick leave has increased from 6.3 to 7.1 billion euros in 6 years since the 2010 reform. Last year, in 2022, 42% of employees used one of these leaves. As this number can be expected to increase, the total cost of work stoppages due to illness will surely also increase, after the application of the pension reform which has just been adopted.