French PERs: The Default Glidepath Management in Question

Most of France's roughly 13 million individual retirement savings plan (PER) holders are in a 'gestion profilée à horizon' (GPH) — target-date management — even if they never chose it. The PACTE law of May 2019 created the PER and made GPH the default for new subscribers. The logic is straightforward: early on, assets are invested more aggressively in equities and unit-linked funds; as retirement approaches, the allocation is automatically shifted toward safer assets.

A 2026 review by Good Value for Money, a firm specialised in insurance and investment product analysis, finds that this apparent comfort masks very uneven results. The report identifies large performance gaps and allocation errors that, in some cases, can significantly reduce a saver's eventual capital.

The issue matters because defaults are sticky. Savers who never touch their options remain in the same GPH profile for years, so differences in fees, fund selection and the speed of de-risking compound over a full working life. The report's message is not that retirement savings are unsafe, but that the default label does not guarantee an average market return.

Behind the Gaps in Default PER Management

Why a 'Default' Label Produces Different Outcomes

The PACTE framework sets a common mechanism, not a common investment result. Providers still choose the underlying funds, asset mix and de-risking schedule. Two PER contracts with the same retirement date can therefore take very different paths, especially when unit-linked costs and rebalancing rules diverge.

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Automatic Security Is Not the Same as Tailored Management

GPH reduces the need for active decisions, but the Good Value for Money findings suggest that some savers may be paying for convenience with lower returns. Allocation errors in a glidepath are slow to notice because the changes happen automatically over many years; by the time an underperforming profile becomes visible, part of the compounding period has already been lost.

The Limits of the Public Findings

The published summary does not provide the size of the performance gap or name the best and worst providers. It does, however, establish the central risk: a saver cannot assume that keeping the default option produces a market-average outcome.

Checks for PER Holders Staying in Default Mode

For the millions of savers currently in a default PER profile, the report points to a small set of specific checks.

  • Verify your current management mode. If you have never changed your PER options, you are almost certainly in GPH, the default imposed by the PACTE law of May 2019.
  • Ask for your contract's actual annual performance and benchmark comparison. The Good Value for Money review found large performance differences even within default GPH, so the gap between your return and the market average is a concrete signal.
  • Check the allocation shifts as your retirement date nears. Automatic 'sécurisation' can hide costly allocation errors; request the glidepath schedule and the fees charged at each rebalancing.
  • Treat a wide underperformance as a reason to compare management modes or providers. Since the default is not calibrated to your personal situation, an unexplained multi-year gap may justify switching to a more suitable option before it further erodes capital.

This is general information, not personalised financial advice.