During his professional career, it is not uncommon to have to interrupt his activity due to health problems or an accident at work and to have to take sick leave for an indefinite period. As your retirement approaches, you wonder about the consequences of these stops and their impact on your retirement age, as well as the calculation of your pension. We take stock for you.

To calculate your basic retirement pension, your average annual salary, as well as the number of validated quarters, are taken into account. While the first of them is calculated on the basis of the salary received during the best twenty-five years of your professional career, the full rate is equal to 50% of the average annual salary. In the case of sick leave of less than 60 consecutive days, there is no impact on your retirement pension. Things are different for a prolonged sick leave.

If you take a prolonged sick leave, for more than 60 consecutive days, and this entitles you to a daily allowance, negative consequences can be observed on the amount of your future pension. Thus, the amount of daily allowances paid by Social Security during sick leave is not taken into account in your basic annual salary from which your retirement pension is calculated. In general, when you are compensated for sick leave, you do not contribute to your retirement.

In the case of a work stoppage for illness, you do not contribute to your pension in salary, but you benefit from additional quarters called “trimesters assimilated illness”. They are thus added to your account and allow you to acquire pension rights. The CPAM thus allows you to obtain a quarter every 60 days of compensation.

However, there is a threshold not to be exceeded: you cannot accumulate more than four additional quarters per year. Consequently, if you are on sick leave for a long period, it is possible that you will lose quarters of contributions and therefore pension rights.

Remember that your sick leave logically has no impact on the age at which you can retire at full rate. They have no effect on your retirement, except in the specific case of early retirement for a long career.

Therefore, to retire earlier, thanks to the long career scheme, you need to contribute a certain number of quarters. The “assimilated” additional quarters can thus be taken into account up to a certain limit, but it is essential to fully understand the consequences of your sick leaves in order to protect your pension rights.