France Travail's mobility and childcare aids: what a training organization should know

A trainee who has to travel 80 kilometers to reach your center, or a single mother hesitating to enroll for lack of childcare: these situations come up regularly in conversations with candidates for France Travail-funded training. Two aids exist precisely to remove these barriers — the mobility aid (AMOB) and the childcare aid (AGE) — yet they remain little known, including among some training organizations that could usefully point their trainees toward them.

The mobility aid (AMOB): transport, lodging and meals

The mobility aid covers travel, lodging and meal costs incurred to reach a training course or a job interview. For training, three flat rates apply: €0.23 per kilometer traveled by personal vehicle (or coverage of a transport ticket), €31.20 per night of lodging within the limit of actual costs incurred, and €6.25 per day for meals. The total is capped at €5,200 over the previous twelve months, across all types of mobility aid combined.

Two cumulative conditions trigger eligibility. First, distance: the round trip between home and the training venue must exceed 60 kilometers or two hours (20 kilometers outside metropolitan France). Second, a means test: the aid targets jobseekers who are unemployed with no benefit, or whose daily allowance stays below the minimum rate of the return-to-work allowance (ARE). A trainee already receiving the full ARE rate isn’t eligible — which explains some of the refusals trainees occasionally receive without the organization understanding why.

The childcare aid (AGE): a barrier too often underestimated

Since May 2024, the childcare aid has been open to any jobseeker raising one or more children under 12 alone, whether they’re returning to work, entering training, or signing a subsidized contract. For training of at least 15 hours a week, the amount is €416 for one child, plus €62.40 per additional dependent child — up to roughly €540.80 for three children or more. The aid is granted for a maximum of twelve months from the start of training, and cannot be claimed again within a year of a previous payment. As with AMOB, a means test applies: the applicant’s daily allowance must not exceed a threshold set by France Travail.

In practice, the request is filed from the trainee’s personal account on francetravail.fr, within three months of starting training, along with proof of childcare arrangements. The training organization doesn’t process the file, but it’s often asked to provide the attendance certificate or the projected training schedule that accompanies the request.

What this means for your organization

These two aids aren’t directly part of your Qualiopi obligations, but they touch on something the framework does cover closely: informing the public. Indicator 1 requires communicating about the financing options available to access the course, a requirement further tightened by the Qualiopi decree of 1 August 2026. Flagging AMOB and AGE to candidates who live far away or who are single parents, right from the intake interview or in the welcome booklet, isn’t just a courtesy — it’s a direct factor in retention, since a trainee who finds out about these aids too late, or not at all, risks dropping out for purely material reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the teaching.

On the practical side, two habits are worth building in: mentioning these schemes in the enrollment notice or confirmation email, and reminding trainees that an AMOB or AGE application should be started before, or right at the start of, training — not after several weeks of absences have already piled up. For trainees with a disability, these aids often combine with other schemes tracked by the organization’s disability liaison officer, who is worth involving in parallel rather than sending the trainee down separate, disconnected paths.

What the research says about parenthood and access to training

The childcare barrier isn’t just anecdotal: a study by Misun Lim and Sascha dos Santos, published in 2025 in the European Sociological Review, followed household cohorts in Germany and the United Kingdom over several years to measure the effect of parenthood on participation in job-related training (see the study). The authors show that having a child causes a lasting drop in mothers’ participation in this type of training, an effect markedly stronger than for fathers, and one that persists well beyond the early years of parenthood. Applied to the French context, this finding helps explain why a scheme like AGE, targeted at single parents of children under 12, addresses a real and well-documented barrier rather than a marginal case — and why actively making it known to your female candidates is part of a genuinely inclusive approach to training access.

Other aids to combine depending on the trainee’s situation

AMOB and AGE aren’t mutually exclusive: a single parent facing a long commute can claim both, provided each eligibility condition is met separately. They can also combine with the individual training aid (AIF) when the course fee itself isn’t fully covered elsewhere, or with regional top-ups offered by some regional councils (boarding accommodation, discounted meals) that sometimes go beyond the national flat rates. Before pointing a trainee toward a specific scheme, the safest habit is to have them check their eligibility directly in their France Travail personal account, since means-test thresholds change regularly — your role is to inform them the scheme exists, not to process the application on their behalf.

Take action

Knowing the ancillary aids available alongside training — mobility, childcare, and more broadly the schemes covered in our overview of France Travail funding — is part of what sets apart an organization that’s genuinely focused on its trainees. The Complete Kit Certif at €297 gives you the communication templates and evidence expected for indicator 1, including transparency on available financing options. If you’re just starting out, the ebook “Create your training organization in 30 days” at €67 walks through the full set of information obligations toward your future trainees, and the Kit + Ebook bundle at €347 combines both to build a solid quality file ahead of your first audit.