Your subcontractors' compliance certificate, every six months

A site manager brings in a plumber as a subcontractor for a renovation job, a contract worth €18,000 excluding tax. The compliance certificate requested at signing is in order. Six months later the job is still running, and nobody has thought about that paper again: it quietly expired that day, even though the subcontractor is still fully compliant on their own side.

To stay covered, the certificate has to be obtained at signing, renewed every six months until the job ends, and checked for authenticity on the URSSAF website each time. The rest of this article explains why this requirement exists, exactly what to ask for, and how not to lose track of it when several subcontractors work across several sites at once.

Why this piece of paper exists#

This is a French rule, not specific to construction, but it weighs heavily there because subcontracting is the norm rather than the exception. Article L8222-1 of the French labour code requires anyone signing a contract worth at least €5,000 excluding tax to check that their counterparty is compliant, at signing and then periodically until the contract ends. That threshold applies to the whole job, not invoice by invoice: a subcontractor paid in instalments on a long-running site stays within scope once the total crosses that amount.

What changes if this check is skipped is the joint liability set out in article L8222-2. If the subcontractor is found guilty of undeclared work, the general contractor who never verified them becomes jointly liable for their social contributions, penalties, and even wages owed to undeclared staff. The general contractor also loses its own contribution exemptions.

A law passed on 25 June 2026 extends this duty to second-tier subcontractors, the ones a project owner accepts without having a direct contract with them. It is due to take effect no later than 25 December 2026, with the exact list of documents still to be set by decree.

What to ask for, and how often#

Three things are enough to stay covered, provided each one follows its own rhythm.

The third point is the one most often skipped, and it is the one that matters legally. Receiving the document is not enough: only a traced authenticity check triggers the presumption that protects the general contractor. A convincing fake, received but never checked, protects nobody.

Why it slips from the second subcontractor onward#

One subcontractor, one signing date, one paper filed away: alone, that is easy to remember. The problem starts with the second one, and gets worse with the third.

Take a mid-sized general construction firm, a hypothesis to show the calculation. It works with twelve active subcontractors over the year, spread across five overlapping sites. Since each certificate lasts six months, that means twenty-four renewal deadlines to track over the year, each falling on a different date depending on when each contract was signed.

None of these deadlines shows up on the site schedule. It sits in an administrative folder, with no alert, and it only comes back to mind if someone thinks to check, or if an URSSAF audit asks for it first.

A three-step method#

1. One line per subcontractor and per contract, with the signing date and the expiry date calculated six months out.
2. An alert fifteen days before the deadline, sent to one named person, not to a shared inbox nobody watches.
3. A dated authenticity check, kept with the rest of the subcontractor's file instead of just received by email and forgotten.

The second point is the one that changes everything. A deadline with nobody assigned to it is a deadline that gets discovered late, on the day of an audit or a reassessment at the subcontractor's.

What changes with an application built for the business#

Each subcontractor is attached to the sites they work on, with their contract date and their latest certificate. The renewal date calculates itself six months out, and comes up in the daily list fifteen days before it falls due, like any matter that needs a decision.

Compliance certificates sit alongside signed sign-off reports and the rest of a site's documents, found in one place rather than in a separate binder nobody opens between two contracts. The same principle applies to tracking a job's margin: information that lives next to the job rather than in a separate file gets found, and gets kept up to date. See the tracking and margin module.

What not to do#

Do not settle for the PDF a subcontractor emails over. Without an authenticity check on the URSSAF website, the certificate does not count as a verification under the law, even if it looks entirely genuine. And do not reserve this vigilance for large contracts: the threshold applies to the whole contract, not to each invoice taken on its own.

Compliance certificates: the key takeaways#

A subcontractor's compliance certificate is not an optional formality. Obtained at signing and renewed every six months until the job ends, with a traced authenticity check each time, it protects the general contractor against a joint liability that can far exceed the value of the subcontracted work.

With a single subcontractor on one site, memory is enough. With five sites and twelve subcontractors, it no longer works without a place where every deadline is visible before it is missed. The move to make tonight: list, for each active subcontractor, the date of the last certificate received, and count six months forward from there.