France — European Commission clears EUR 225 million scheme to compensate rail-freight T2 pension contributions

Mechanism

France's rail sector inherited a legacy pension architecture from incumbent operator SNCF: the "T2" surcharge funds supplementary statutory-pension benefits for SNCF-origin railway employees. Since 1 January 2020, SNCF statutory employees who move to a competing rail-freight operator keep their accrued pension rights, but their new (private-sector) employer must pay the employer's share of the T2 contribution — a cost non-statutory hires do not carry. That asymmetry discouraged private rail-freight operators from hiring ex-SNCF statutory staff, entrenching SNCF's incumbency even in the liberalised freight segment.

The notified scheme reimburses eligible rail-freight companies (including firms performing maintenance and railway-safety tasks) for the T2 contribution on statutory employees who were already on their books as of 1 January 2025, for a ten-year window and a EUR 225 million ceiling. The Commission's compatibility finding rests on Article 107(3)(c) TFEU: correcting a structural market distortion (the legacy pension liability) rather than subsidising general operating costs. GTA logs the measure as a "certainly harmful" red-coded financial-grant intervention, consistent with its blanket classification of state-aid-cleared subsidy schemes.

Downstream implications

• Lowers the marginal cost of hiring statutory ex-SNCF staff for private rail-freight operators

(e.g., Lineas' French operations, VFLI, Régiorail), narrowing SNCF's structural labour-cost advantage/disadvantage asymmetry in the liberalised freight market.

• Sits alongside the EUR 959 million 2023-vintage French rail-freight support scheme and the EU's

wider pattern of rescue/restructuring aid to rail-freight operators (see the Belgium/Lineas rescue-loan action) — evidence of a sector under sustained state-aid support as freight volumes soften across European industrial verticals.

• A ten-year, capped-budget scheme rather than an open-ended subsidy — the EUR 225 million ceiling

and 2034 sunset are the relevant magnitude anchors for downstream tariff/subsidy-weighted aggregation.

Open questions

• Whether the Commission's non-confidential decision text (once published under SA.117491 in the

State aid register) discloses a per-employee or annual reimbursement rate more granular than the aggregate EUR 225 million ceiling.

• Whether competing operators outside France (e.g., cross-border freight into Benelux/Germany) see

a comparable statutory-pension-liability scheme, or whether this remains a France-specific distortion correction.