France employment: household employers & own-use production
France employment: household employers & own-use production stood at 138.7 thousand persons in 2025, according to INSEE – Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (BDM). It is one of the indicators in the Annual national accounts table (Value · Annual), with a complete series running from 1959 to 2025. The complete series with an interactive chart, free to download.
This indicator in the Annual national accounts table
| Indicator | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total employment (persons) | |||||||||||
| Activities of households: employers, prod. of goods and serv. (own use) | 138.7 | 134.5 | 138.1 | 137.1 | 140.3 | 137.7 | 143 | 146.1 | 149.3 | 152.2 | |
| Mainly market services | 15,876.4 | 15,830.4 | 15,738.7 | 15,508 | 14,965.1 | 14,424.6 | 14,518.4 | 14,351.3 | 14,083.4 | 13,761.7 |
Understanding france employment: household employers & own-use production
Personnel counts reflecting domestic workers hired directly by private households—such as cleaners, cooks, and gardeners—alongside the output of goods and services produced by households for their own consumption, measure non-market household activities. This specific series isolates domestic service providers and subsistence-level household production from commercial employment branches. Only individuals providing direct services to households as employers or engaged in designated own-use production are counted.
Reading these statistics requires recognizing the difficulty of capturing informal domestic labor through standard administrative tax records, leading to reliance on household surveys and specialized estimation models. Annual figures help smooth sampling noise inherent in household-based surveys, providing a stable baseline for multi-year comparisons. Analysts must avoid comparing this household-centric measure with formal business sector employment, as wage structures and legal protections differ substantially.
Frequently asked questions
- What types of workers are counted under household employers?
- Domestic staff such as private cleaners, personal cooks, and private gardeners employed directly by households.
- Does this include goods produced for own use?
- Yes, goods and services produced by households for their own consumption are part of this classification.
- Why are household employment estimates subject to survey sampling noise?
- Informal domestic work relies heavily on household surveys rather than corporate payroll registries for data collection.