2026 France Salary Guide
Our 2026 Salary Guide offers over 190 salary benchmarks covering Marketing, Creative, Tech and emerging AI-related roles, to help you make smarter compensation and recruitment decisions in a rapidly changing talent market.
(Please note, this guide is currently only available in French.)
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What's Inside
Overview
The 2026 Salary Guide brings together the latest recruitment trends, insights into the world of work and remuneration benchmarks to help you build high-performing teams in 2026.
Now including City Multipliers
Use city multipliers to pinpoint salary benchmarks in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille and other French cities.
Director-Level and Above Salaries
Benchmark director-level and above salaries by company size and role, and see why senior leadership continues to command a premium.
Salaries for Emerging Roles
See salary data for emerging and in-demand roles, including AI Product Manager, Technical Artist, Creative Technologist, and NLP Engineer.
Strategic Recommendations
Get a clear playbook to prioritise pay for high-leverage skill stacks, strengthen retention, and support internal mobility.
AI changes everything
This year, AI has dominated headlines and changed the hiring landscape, so we’ve highlighted some of the most cutting-edge job functions across the industry with salary data available for these and other emerging AI roles in our guide.
AI Product Manager
The bridge between business needs and technical reality. The AI PM role has evolved from a niche title to one of the most critical leadership positions in tech. AI Product Managers oversee the lifecycle of an AI product, ensuring it actually solves a customer problem.
This role has become one of the most competitive and well-compensated specialisations in the technology sector. AI Product Managers are among the highest-paid emerging roles in France, commanding a premium salary as high as 110 000 € per year.
AI Automation Engineer
Automation Engineering is undergoing one of the most significant transformations in the entire tech sector. Gone are the days of strict “if-then” rules to handle repetitive tasks. This role has pivoted toward intelligent automation, where you build systems that can think, adapt, and learn.
As of early 2026, the demand for Automation Engineers in the France continues to grow, driven by the massive expansion of smart manufacturing, data centres, and AI-integrated systems.
Technical Artist
Technical Artist (TA) roles and responsibilities are rapidly evolving. Technical Artists not only bridge the gap between artists and programmers, they also now work at the intersection of creative intent and generative models.
As gaming and film studios move away from manual execution toward generative workflows, they need TAs to build the infrastructure that makes AI usable for artists. In this setting, they integrate tools like Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, or proprietary LLMs directly into software like Maya, Houdini, or Unreal Engine.
Synthetic data is the fastest-growing sub-sector for Technical Artists outside of entertainment. These TAs use game engines such as Unreal or Unity to build hyper-realistic 3D environments.