LEP: Why Millions of Eligible French People Aren’t Taking Advantage of This Savings Account

Will the perennial runner-up finally have its moment? As of February 1st, the interest rate on the Livret A will decrease from 1.7% to 1.5%, as announced by Minister of the Economy Roland Lescure on Thursday, January 15th. This marks its third reduction in just under a year. The return on the Livret d’épargne populaire (LEP), reserved for modest savers, will also decrease to 2.5% on the same date. However, its yield will remain one percentage point higher than the nation’s most popular savings account.

The LEP, which has eligibility requirements based on income, recently benefited from a government adjustment greater than that given to the Livret A. Without this intervention, existing rules would have resulted in a lower return. This led the Governor of the Bank of France, François Villeroy de Galhau, to describe the regulated savings account, capped at €10,000, as a “true product, the most advantageous, for popular savings” during his hearing before the Senate finance committee on Wednesday. Despite this, a significant number of eligible French citizens have not subscribed to the account.

According to the Bank of France’s annual report on regulated savings, an estimated 31 million people were eligible for the LEP in 2024. However, only 38% of them actually hold an account, with a total of 11.9 million LEP accounts recorded in 2024. “I urge French citizens who are eligible, who are below the income thresholds that allow access (…), to contact their bank to open this type of savings account,” Minister of the Economy and Finance Roland Lescure stated in a press release earlier this week.

Created in 1982 “in a context of high inflation and loss of purchasing power,” the Bank of France recalls, this account is intended for the most modest households. To open a LEP, applicants must be fiscally domiciled in France and meet certain income thresholds: these thresholds were €22,823 for a single person, €35,013 for a married couple or civil partners subject to joint taxation, and €47,203 for a married couple or civil partners subject to joint taxation with two dependent children, according to Service-Public.

“Of course, all taxpayers with income below the threshold are eligible, but not all necessarily have the capacity to save enough to fund it,” the organization clarifies. This observation is shared by Philippe Crevel, an economist and director of the Cercle de l’Epargne, contacted by franceinfo. “The most modest people have little savings capacity, and therefore little capacity to open a LEP,” he points out.

This includes French citizens with limited resources, but also those with limited access to financial information. “Lack of awareness plays a big role: many households do not know that they can have a LEP and that it is more interesting than the Livret A. They are therefore content with the second option,” notes the economist. Those with the fewest resources are the most disconnected from traditional channels for accessing information about this account. The Directorate-General of Public Finance (DGFIP) organizes communication campaigns on the LEP targeting the 19.5 million eligible households.

A simplification reform has also increased LEP openings, according to Philippe Crevel. Until 2021, banks had to verify the eligibility of their customers for the LEP each year. However, since then, the bank managing the LEP can directly query the tax administration, the Bank of France explains. The account holder then does not need to provide their tax assessment.

The number of LEPs among banking customers in a financially precarious situation has been steadily increasing since 2018, according to data from the Bank of France. Driven by an increase in its ceiling from €7,700 to €10,000 and a rise in its rate, the threshold of 10 million LEPs was even exceeded in August 2023, according to the Bank of France, which at the time welcomed a “historic breakthrough”. The stated goal was to reach at least 12.5 million accounts by the summer of 2024. A target that appears to have been too ambitious. “Banks and public authorities must continue to increase this rate of ownership within the entire eligible population,” the Governor of the Bank of France judged in the institution’s 2024 annual report.

Could the increasingly low return on the Livret A encourage French citizens to turn to the LEP in the coming months? Nothing is certain, according to Philippe Crevel, for whom the target population is “more sensitive to changes in purchasing power than to interest rate effects.” As evidence, the LEP experienced a decrease of €1.5 billion in the first eleven months of 2025, according to the Cercle de l’Epargne, meaning that French citizens have drawn on their savings to cover their daily expenses. To predict the future, attention must therefore be paid to indicators of household purchasing power.