Who is this for?
The Ministry of Labor has outlined, in internal documents, a plan named Pyme 375 that would help small businesses adopt a 37.5 hour workweek. The plan includes bonuses for extending hours for part time workers and for new hires, among other incentives. This approach is described in government materials consulted by policymakers (Ministry of Labor, 2025).
The Pyme 375 plan aims to win over employers and bring them into a tripartite agreement, which could streamline the parliamentary process required to enact a rule that, at present, does not have guaranteed support to become law. Official projections indicate that more than 80,000 companies and self-employed workers could adopt the measure, creating about 65,000 full-time job equivalents (Ministry of Labor, 2025).
The aid plan concentrates on smaller firms where margins are tighter and where many collective agreements already set the normal working week below the 40-hour cap.
What kind of help will be received?
The ministry offers two types of aid. Both take the form of reductions in social security contributions. In practice, beneficiary firms would save part of the labor cost for certain employees during the year-long period.
These bonuses apply to employees hired to compensate the hours reduced elsewhere in the workforce, or, if no new hires are made, to the extra hours added to existing part-time staff.
In either scenario, the company would save the social security contributions for those workers, not for the entire payroll. The savings amount to roughly 24% of the gross labor cost borne by a company per employee. For a worker earning the minimum wage, that translates to about 317 euros per month.
The government is considering capping these bonuses so they cannot exceed a monetary limit yet to be set (Ministry of Labor, 2025).
Who can be hired with the aid?
One essential requirement is that the person hired must already be registered as unemployed. It would not count if a firm merely files to hire a worker from another company; the individual must have an active unemployment record with SEPE, the public employment service.
There is priority for groups historically facing greater barriers to employment. The proposal states that the monetary aid increases by 55 euros when recruiting a woman, a person under 30, or a person over 55, and these benefits can be stacked if multiple conditions apply.