Elected officials' training budget: the 2% floor French councils must vote

When funding for local elected officials’ training comes up, the conversation almost always turns to the individual entitlement managed by the Caisse des dépôts. That is understandable: it is the most visible channel, the one that most resembles the ordinary vocational-training market. But for an approved provider, the other leg — the local authority’s own training budget — is often the more interesting one, because it carries grouped orders and rests on a legal obligation that few players exploit.

An obligation, not an option

The code général des collectivités territoriales sets out the right to training for elected officials in articles L. 2123-12 for municipalities, L. 3123-10 for departments and L. 4135-10 for regions. Each authority must put in place the arrangements necessary for every one of its elected members to exercise that right.

Two concrete obligations follow.

An obligation to deliberate. Within three months of its renewal, the deliberative assembly must vote on the exercise of its members’ right to training, setting out the orientations adopted and the funds opened for that purpose. This is not a procedural formality: it is the document that fixes, for the whole term, what the authority intends to fund.

A framed budgetary obligation. The forecast amount of training expenditure cannot be lower than 2% of the total office allowances that may be paid to the members of the assembly. The amount actually spent cannot exceed 20% of that same total.

That floor-and-ceiling pairing is instructive. The floor says training cannot be sacrificed; the ceiling says it cannot become a runaway budget line. Between the two lies a tenfold margin, which each assembly arbitrates.

What the floor means for an approved provider

The commercial reasoning starts from the base: the total office allowances that may be paid to the members of the assembly. That base depends on the authority’s population band and the composition of its council. It is public, calculable, and it gives an order of magnitude for the minimum budget the authority must enter.

Three practical consequences.

The budget exists even when nobody uses it. Many municipalities enter the floor and spend very little of it, for want of offers or of time. A provider arriving with a legible offer does not create the budget; it makes it usable.

The vote is your way in. It sets the orientations: if your theme is not in it, the order is harder to justify. Positioning yourself early, while the assembly is preparing that vote, beats canvassing a year later.

Only approved providers are chargeable. Courses linked to the exercise of the mandate must be delivered by an approved provider to be charged to that budget line. That is precisely what the ministerial approval guarantees: not pedagogical superiority, but eligibility of the expenditure.

Time, the other resource

Funding alone does not bring an elected official into a classroom. They must also be able to attend. That is the point of the eighteen-day training leave available to municipal elected officials for the exercise of their right to training.

This matters more than it seems. In an article published in 2022 in the journal Formation emploi, Pierre Camus shows that local elected officials’ actual take-up of training depends above all on material conditions — resources, available time, personal circumstances — and contrasts those whose mandate is their main activity and source of income with those who must combine mandate and employment, a frequent situation for mayors of small municipalities (see the study). In other words, the budget may be voted and the leave open: if the format demands three consecutive weekdays fifty kilometres away, part of the council will not come.

A provider that builds its institutional offer around that constraint — sessions held in the municipality itself, short evening formats, distance sequences in between — stands out immediately, because it solves the real problem faced by the town-hall secretary organising the session.

The leave and the budget are also worth presenting together when you approach an authority. Elected members frequently know about neither: they assume that training costs the municipality money it does not have, and that attending means taking unpaid time off. Setting out, in one page, what the assembly has voted and what time entitlement exists removes both objections before they are raised.

Authority budget and individual entitlement: two sales logics

	Authority budget	Elected official’s individual entitlement
Who decides	The assembly, by a vote	The elected official alone
Nature of the need	Collective: training a council, an executive, a committee	Individual: status, career transition, personal skills
Framing	2% floor, 20% ceiling of allowances	Rights in euros, capped
Sales cycle	Long, institutional, via the chief executive’s office	Short, online, via a platform

The two channels are not worked the same way and do not address the same contact. The second — the individual entitlement, its amounts and its listing requirements — is the subject of our article on the catalogue and eligible themes.

One point deserves emphasis, because it is politically sensitive: the authority’s budget goes through a majority vote, whereas the individual entitlement belongs to the elected official whatever their place in the assembly. An opposition councillor can train without the majority’s approval. An offer covering only the institutional channel therefore forgoes part of its audience.

What training changes for the authority

The 2% floor is not a symbolic charge: it expresses an intent. In her doctoral thesis defended in 2022 at Université Paris-Saclay under the supervision of Thierry Côme, Sabrina Ghallal analyses the training of local elected officials as a tool for improving local-authority performance and, at the same time, as a lever for democratising access to elected office (see the thesis). That double register is a solid argument with a chief executive’s office: training elected members is not an individual perk, it is an investment in the quality of the assembly’s decisions.

Take action

Pick three authorities in your area, estimate their allowance base, and go and read their resolution on the right to training — it is public. You will then know what was voted, what was prioritised, and where your offer can fit. Our Approval of training organisations for local elected representatives page summarises the conditions for expenditure eligibility and gives access to our full downloadable guide.