Starting a recruitment agency: how much does it really cost in 2026?

Opening a recruitment agency costs less than most founders imagine. Making a living from it costs far more than they plan for. The gap between the two comes down to a single figure that is almost never budgeted: the time between your first day of business and your first payment received.

Here is the real budget, item by item, with the public rates in force in September 2026 and their sources. Three costed scenarios at the end: the solo launch, the first full year, and the three-person agency.

What is mandatory, and what is not

Good news first: recruitment is not a regulated profession. No diploma, no licence and no financial guarantee is required to open an agency, and the business is registered through the one-stop business formalities portal (guichet unique) like any other commercial company (source: Bpifrance Création).

The APE code: there is no single one, and it really matters

You read everywhere that recruitment means code 78.10Z. That is the *theoretical* code, the one for "activities of employment placement agencies". In practice, French agencies are spread across at least four codes.

The breakdown comes from an analysis of the sector reported by myRHline; the official definition of each code is available from INSEE.

Why this is not a detail. The APE code is assigned by INSEE (the French national statistics institute) based on the activity you declare. It has no legal value in itself and does not on its own determine your collective agreement (convention collective), but it serves as a presumption: it is the first thing a body looks at to work out which agreement you apply, which workplace accident rate you pay, and which industry obligations you are subject to. An agency classified under 70.22Z "consultancy" and an agency classified under 78.10Z "placement" are not asked the same questions. Discuss it with your chartered accountant when you register, not two years later.

Three obligations do nonetheless govern the profession, and they carry an indirect cost that is worth knowing about.

• Free of charge for the candidate. Article L5321-3 of the French Labour Code (code du travail) is unambiguous: "No remuneration, direct or indirect, may be required from persons seeking employment in return for the provision of placement services." Your business model therefore relies entirely on the client company (source: Légifrance, code du travail, titre II Placement).
• Non-discrimination. No placement service may be refused on any of the grounds listed in Article L1132-1. In practice, this requires a traceable process and written assessment criteria.
• Annual reporting to the prefect. Article R5323-7 sets out the principle: a private placement agency regularly sends the prefect statistical information on its activity. Article R5323-8 sets out the format: every year, before 31 March, a statement following a template set by ministerial order, sent to the prefect of the département where your registered office is located, showing the revenue generated from placement and the number of people received, placed or registered. It is a form, not a report to write, and it is sent by post to the relevant prefecture department, in practice the DDETS (departmental directorate for employment, labour and solidarity). The notice of opening, for its part, has been absorbed by the one-stop portal since January 2023: you no longer need to send a registered letter before starting (sources: Légifrance, placement privé, Bpifrance Création).

Add the GDPR, which is not optional when your main asset is a candidate database: limited retention periods, informing data subjects, data security.

Item 1: set-up costs

This is the smallest item, and the one most available articles focus on. In reality, it accounts for less than 5% of the launch budget.

Legal notice rates are flat-rate and set each year by ministerial order. For 2026, the order of 19 November 2025, published in the Journal officiel on 28 December, sets the increase at 0.97% compared with 2025 (source: Le Coin des Entrepreneurs). Court registry fees for a commercial company come to €53.16 in total (source: L'Expert-Comptable).

Filing a trade mark at €190 for one class is the only optional item we advise you not to cut back on: your name is your first commercial asset, and recovering it after the fact costs infinitely more (source: INPI, tarifs applicables).

Realistic set-up budget: €200 to €400 if you draft your own articles of association, 1 500 € à 2 500 € if you go through a lawyer or a chartered accountant, support fees included.

Item 2: the structure, every month

These are the costs that come in whether you place anyone or not.

Accounting fees are not regulated, which explains differences of up to threefold for an identical service: ask for three quotes and compare the scope, not the price (source: Keobiz). As for insurance, consultancy activities sit at the lower end of the range, between €100 and €700 per year for a sole trader, and rather from €800 per year for an agency set up as a company (source: Orus).

A private office changes the equation completely: allow €245 excl. VAT per desk per month in Lille, €286 in Nantes, €317 in Toulouse, and up to €690 in Paris (source: LesCoworkings). For one person, a business address plus a hot-desk package is more than enough for the first twelve months.

Item 3: sourcing, your real raw material

This is where budgets spiral, because every tool looks essential on its own.

Sources: comparison of job board ad prices, HelloWork recruiter pricing, Talentplug, Broadbean.

Job multiposting: an item not to pay for twice

Posting a job ad on eight sites by hand means eight forms and eight sets of applications to track. Job multiposting tools solve this problem: Talentplug claims more than 250 sites, Broadbean more than 2,000 in 183 countries. Neither publishes a price list, everything is negotiated by quotation, with a free entry-level plan at Talentplug.

The right reflex: first check what your recruitment platform includes. Job multiposting is increasingly built into business software, and paying for a separate multiposting tool on top of an ATS that already includes one is a duplicate line that many agencies discover after a year.

LinkedIn licences in detail

This is the most misunderstood line in the budget, because LinkedIn publishes only one of its prices.

Sources: enrow, the only public price for LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn subscription prices, and for non-public licences, the survey by Laurent Brouat, Prix des outils, which compares around sixty tools on the French market with their annual prices excl. VAT. It is the most comprehensive reference in French, and it is independent of the software vendors.

Two classic pitfalls. Recruiter Lite is not Sales Navigator: the first finds candidates, the second finds clients. An agency doing both jobs quickly ends up with two subscriptions, nearly €2,600 per year per person. And the Recruiter price is never displayed: any figure you read online, including the one above, is an estimate reconstructed from real contracts. Ask for a quotation.

Alternatives to LinkedIn

LinkedIn is no longer the unavoidable gateway it once was. A generation of sourcing tools aggregates profiles from multiple sources, enriches contact details and automates outreach, for a fraction of the price of a Recruiter licence.

Sources: Kalent, TalentFindr, and the price survey by Laurent Brouat for HireSweet.

Three things to check before signing, and price is only the first.

• Compliance. These tools enrich personal contact details: mobile phone numbers, private email addresses. You become the data controller for this data. Legal basis, informing data subjects, retention period: these are your obligations, not the vendor's. Hosting in the European Union and an explicit GDPR policy are not selling points, they are prerequisites.
• Dependence on LinkedIn. Several of these tools rely, directly or indirectly, on data taken from LinkedIn, whose terms of use prohibit automated extraction. Ask the vendor where its profiles come from and what happens to you if its source is shut off.
• Overlap with your ATS. Many of these platforms also want to be your pipeline and your sequencing tool. If your business platform already does this, you pay twice and you work in two places.

Our advice remains the same: start with Apec, your network and your own talent pool. A sourcing tool speeds up a job you already master, it does not replace it.

Our advice: do not subscribe to anything before your third assignment. Start with Apec, which is free and remarkably effective for executives, and with your network. You will then know which roles you are really positioning yourself on, and therefore which CV database makes sense. A LinkedIn Recruiter Lite subscription taken out too early means €2,000 of cash tied up before you have a single client.

Realistic sourcing budget: €0 for the first three months, then €200 to €500 per month once your specialism is established.

Item 4: tools, and the standalone ATS trap

A recruitment agency does not have one job, it has three: sourcing, selling, invoicing. Most founders equip the first and improvise the other two. The classic outcome after eight months: an up-to-date ATS, a prospecting file in a spreadsheet, invoices in a word processor, and no visibility on what has been invoiced, collected or is overdue.

It is a real cost, it simply does not appear on any budget line: it is paid in hours, in forgotten follow-ups and in placements invoiced late.

Three items to plan for.

• The business platform. An ATS alone is not enough for an agency: you need candidate tracking, client relationship management, prospecting and placement invoicing in the same tool. That is the principle behind Nicoka CABS, at €130 per month per user, all inclusive: ATS, CRM, sales, invoicing, dashboards, AI assistant and unlimited job multiposting to more than 150 job boards. Allow set-up fees from €500 for one user. The trial is free for 14 days, with no credit card required.
• The website and domain name. €15 to €50 per month for hosting and the domain, €200 to €3,000 as a one-off depending on whether you start from a template or a bespoke design.
• Office software and e-signature. €15 to €40 per month per person.

E-invoicing is no longer optional

This is the point most founders discover too late. The French e-invoicing reform imposes a two-stage timetable.

In practical terms: a compliant invoice is not a PDF sent by email. It is a structured document, in one of the three recognised formats (Factur-X, UBL, CII), sent via an approved platform (plateforme agréée), formerly known as a PDP. Four new mandatory mentions have also been added to invoices since 1 September 2026 (sources: economie.gouv.fr, detailed timetable).

For an agency launching in 2026, this boils down to one simple question to ask every vendor you speak to: is your invoicing tool connected to an approved platform, and at what cost? The answer determines your compliance in 2027, not your comfort. A spreadsheet will not make the deadline.

Realistic tools budget: €150 to €250 per month per consultant, excluding website creation.

Item 5: you

The heaviest item, systematically underestimated, because it does not look like an expense.

The choice of legal status is largely decided here. In a SASU, the president is treated as an employee: contributions represent 65% to 80% of net pay, i.e. a total cost of 1.6 to 1.8 times the net amount paid. In an EURL with a majority manager, the self-employed regime brings this ratio down to around 40 to 45% (source: LegalPlace, charges sociales SASU 2026).

In practical terms, to pay yourself €3,000 net per month:

The €10,000 annual difference does not come for free: the SASU president benefits from the social protection of the general social security scheme, the majority manager from lighter cover. Neither contributes to unemployment insurance. If you open your agency after being made redundant, keeping your unemployment benefits during the launch phase radically changes the cash flow plan: it is the first topic to address with your chartered accountant, even before choosing your legal status.

The item nobody budgets for: cash flow

Here is the calculation that decides whether your agency survives.

And it must be done with the right figures, not with the timescale quoted everywhere.

Your timescale is not your client's

The average 12-week time to hire an executive published by Apec measures the company'sprocess, from opening the position to signing (source: Apec, Pratiques de recrutement de cadres 2026). That is not your clock.

On the agency side, the work is shorter: 3 to 5 weeks to present a shortlist of executives, and only a few days if the profile is already sitting in your talent pool (source: Talent Program). Your sourcing speed is therefore almost never the limiting factor.

What drives your cash flow is the candidate's notice period. Most collective agreements set an executive's notice period at three months, and it runs from signature. If your contract provides for invoicing when the candidate starts, which is standard practice, you wait those three months without invoicing anything, on an assignment you have already completed.

Then the payment term

The legal maximum is 60 days from the invoice date, or 45 days end of month. Reality does not stray far from this at the moment: in the first half of 2026, the average payment delay of French companies fell to 12.3 days, the best level in three years, and 49,7 % of companies pay on time. But the size of the client changes everything: 19.6 days average delay above 1,000 employees, compared with 11.1 days for SMEs with 10 to 49 employees (source: Altares, comportements de paiement, septembre 2026). In other words: your first major account will pay you later than the local SME.

The complete chain

Add it all up, from the day of registration:

1. Finding your first assignment: 1 to 3 months of prospecting.
2. Sourcing and getting the offer signed: 1 to 1.5 months.
3. Waiting for the candidate's notice period: up to 3 months for an executive, zero if they are available.
4. Invoicing when the candidate starts, then collecting payment: 2 to 2.5 months, legal term and average delay included.
5. Clearing the guarantee period if your contract provides for one.

You are at 4 months in the most favourable scenario, and at 9 months in the most common one. This is why we recommend setting aside eight months of fixed costs before starting, pay included. It is this figure, not the cost of the court registry, that determines whether your agency makes it through the year.

Three levers to shorten the chain, and they are all played out in the contract, not in sourcing: invoice on signature of the employment contract rather than when the candidate starts, ask for a deposit with the order on exclusive assignments, and split into three instalments for executive search: on order, on shortlist, on start. An agency that invoices on signature gains three months of cash flow on every executive placement.

Contingency or retained: the choice that weighs most

No expense item weighs as heavily on your first year as the way you get paid. And it is a cash flow decision before it is a commercial one.

The available orders of magnitude, from English-speaking markets for lack of a published French equivalent, put the rate of assignments actually filled at between 10 and 35% on contingency, compared with around 95% on an exclusive basis. Translated into cash flow: on contingency, each placement has to pay for three assignments' worth of work. If you charge 20% like an exclusive agency, you are working for a third of its hourly rate.

The paradox is familiar to anyone who has opened an agency: exclusivity is the right model, and it is the one an unknown newcomer does not get. There are three ways out, from a token deposit to an extended guarantee traded for early invoicing.

The same logic applies to choosing your positioning. Specialising does not raise your fees, rates hold between 16 and 22% in both cases. But specialisation shortens the time to your first assignment and drives down your sourcing cost assignment after assignment, at the price of total exposure to the cycle of your niche.

These two trade-offs deserve more than a sidebar. We have covered them in detail, figures and counter-arguments included, in a dedicated article: Contingency or retained: which business model for your recruitment agency?

Three sample budgets

Assumptions: SASU, outside Paris, an executive specialism, pay of €3,000 net per month from the seventh month.

Scenario A: solo launch, the first 6 months

Scenario B: first full year, solo

Scenario C: 3-person agency, at cruising speed

How many placements to stay afloat?

Agency fees in France are most often between 15% and 25% of the annual gross salary of the position filled, with a concentration around 16 to 22% (sources: Talent Program, Factoriel).

Apply this scale to your budget.

• For an executive on €45,000 gross per year, at 20%, your invoice comes to €9,000 excl. VAT.
• Your structure costs as a solo founder in year 1 are around 15 000 €: two placements cover them.
• Add €32,400 of pay over six months, and you need five to six placements to balance year 1.
• The market benchmark for a consultant at cruising speed is around one placement per month, i.e. nearly €120,000 in annual revenue (source: Superindep).

In other words: the model works, and it works quickly. What gets agencies into trouble is not the level of fees, it is the cash flow gap at the start and the commercial scattering of the first eighteen months.

The five most common budgeting mistakes

1. Subscribing to sourcing tools before you have an assignment. €2,000 of LinkedIn Recruiter tied up on a specialism you will change in the third month.
2. Forgetting the real cost of your pay. A founder who budgets €3,000 net is actually budgeting €5,400 of cash outflow in a SASU.
3. Not setting aside funds for the guarantee period. A termination during the probationary period triggers a credit note or a replacement. If cash flow has already absorbed the invoice, the guarantee becomes a hole.
4. Equipping recruitment but not invoicing. An ATS cannot track what has been invoiced, collected or is overdue. Tracking fees in a spreadsheet is an invisible cost that grows with your business.
5. Aiming too wide. A generalist agency with no network takes twice as long to land its first assignment as an agency specialised in one role and one region.

Key takeaways

Starting a recruitment agency means €400 of formalities, €1,500 of fixed costs over six months, and six months of cash to live on. The first figure is anecdotal. The third decides everything.

On the tools line, stick to one simple principle: a single tool to source, sell and invoice. That is the approach behind Nicoka CABS, the ATS, CRM and invoicing solution designed for recruitment agencies and independent recruiters, developed in France, with data hosted in France. More than 250 customers and 30,000 users in 30 countries work with Nicoka today.

Try CABS for 14 days, with no credit card required. You will see in practice what an agency equipped from day one looks like.

FAQ

Sources and dates of data collection

All amounts were collected on 18 September 2026.