French Industrial Doctorate Programme (Cifre)

How does it work?

A Cifre project is both a doctoral training project and a partnership research project, centred on a question of shared interest to three parties:

• A socio-economic actor (company, association, local authority) which has a research question and recruits the Cifre doctoral candidate,
• An academic research laboratory and a thesis supervisor, who provides scientific supervision for the doctoral candidate,
• The doctoral candidate, who carries out the research work in this laboratory and trains in and through research at a recognised doctoral school, with a view to obtaining a doctorate awarded by an accredited French institution.

Benefits

• For doctoral candidates: preparing their thesis within a partnership framework and finding employment quickly. Note that the salary set out in the employment contract — whether an open-ended contract or a 3-year private-law doctoral contract — must be at least equal to the salary paid under the public-law doctoral contract,
• For companies: gaining a high-performing human resource and securing the time devoted to R&D,
• For laboratories and doctoral schools: smoothing PhD holders' career progression after their thesis defence and developing their research transfer and knowledge exploitation activities.

Incentive measures

The Cifre scheme addresses two public policy objectives:

• Encouraging the recruitment of PhD holders across all sectors of society, particularly outside the academic sector,
• Encouraging the development of partnership research between the academic sector and other socio-economic sectors, and developing the transfer of research results to society and their exploitation.

To this end, the State provides support in three ways.

• The State allocates a grant of €42,000 over three years (€14,000 per year) to any socio-economic actor — company, association or local authority — that recruits a doctoral candidate to carry out a doctoral project organised in partnership with an academic laboratory.
• The company's staff costs are eligible for the research tax credit (CIR) under the same criteria as for any researcher working in a company. If the company applies for the CIR for R&D work, the CIR rate is 30% (50% in the overseas departments).
• Lastly, a company collaborating with an approved public laboratory on a Cifre thesis can declare the expenses invoiced by the laboratory under this collaboration for the research collaboration tax credit (CICO). The tax credit on this portion is then equal to 50% of eligible expenses retained for SMEs and 40% for large companies.

This significantly reduces the cost of a Cifre for the employer: if the doctoral candidate receives a gross salary of €27,600 per year (i.e. €2,300 gross per month), the total cost to the employer — including employer's social security contributions and a flat-rate overhead cost of 40% — comes to €55,000 per year. Taking into account the Cifre grant and the CIR (at a rate of 40%), this cost is more than halved, to €24,600 per year.

The (Opens a new window) research planning law supports the scaling-up of the Cifre scheme, with a 50% increase in the number of Cifre theses to reach 2,150 Cifre agreements per year by 2027 (compared with 1,400 in 2017), representing an increase of more than 100 new Cifre agreements per year.