Declaring your tutoring income to URSSAF in France

Declaring your turnover to URSSAF means reporting, at a fixed interval, the money you actually collected from your lessons, the figure your social-security contributions are calculated on. For a tutor running a micro-entreprise in France, this report comes back every month or every quarter, slow periods included. Missing it costs money and time.

Once you have registered as a self-employed tutor, you move from setup to routine. For URSSAF, France's social-security collection agency, that routine is one instruction: declare what you collected, on time.

What URSSAF expects, and how often

Private tutoring falls under bénéfices non commerciaux (BNC), the category for liberal professions. You report your turnover on the autoentrepreneur.urssaf.fr portal, at the frequency you picked when you registered:

• Monthly: one declaration a month, due near the end of the following month.
• Quarterly: one declaration every three months, on fixed dates, being 30 April, 31 July, 31 October and 31 January.

One detail trips up newcomers: you declare what you were paid, not what you invoiced. A lesson taught in June but paid in July counts for July. When a parent settles late, the amount lands in the declaration for the month the money actually reaches your account.

What you pay on each euro

The rate is a flat percentage of gross turnover, with no deduction for your costs. In 2026, for a BNC service activity under the general scheme, it rose to 25.6% (up from 24.6% in 2025). Tutors attached to the CIPAV fund pay 23.2%. A small vocational-training contribution of about 0.2% sits on top.

If you opted for the versement libératoire, which settles income tax alongside contributions, add 2.2% for a BNC activity, for 27.8% in total. That option depends on an income ceiling, so check your eligibility on service-public.gouv.fr before you assume you qualify.

A worked example: €1,500 collected in a month, at 25.6%, comes to €384 in contributions. Setting aside a quarter of every payment as it arrives keeps the end-of-quarter total from stinging.

The deadlines that matter

Three rules head off most of the trouble.

The first declaration is delayed

You do not declare in your first month. The first due date falls roughly 90 days after you start trading, and it covers the whole stretch since registration. Write the date down: plenty of new registrants forget it and face a bulky first quarter all at once.

A zero month still has to be declared

A month with no students does not excuse you from anything. You still declare €0. A zero declaration generates no contribution, but skipping it entirely is what gets penalised.

Forgetting has a price

Every missed declaration triggers a flat penalty of €60.10 in 2026. Forget twice in a year and you have handed over the value of a lesson and a half for nothing.

Keeping your collected total current all year

The declaration takes five minutes when the number is already sitting there, and a whole evening when you have to rebuild three months of payments from bank statements and messages. The hard part is not the form. It is knowing exactly what came in over the period.

That is where clean tracking pays off. Instead of summing rows in a spreadsheet, you want a monthly total of what you collected, ready to copy across. Kadrella ties every payment to the right student and lesson, which gives you a readable invoicing and payment record at any moment. For tutors still running things by hand, leaving the spreadsheet behind also removes that quarterly scramble.

Key points

• Declare what you collected for the month or quarter on autoentrepreneur.urssaf.fr.
• 2026 BNC rate: 25.6% under the general scheme, 23.2% with CIPAV.
• The first declaration arrives around day 90; note it.
• An empty month is still declared, at €0.
• Each missed declaration costs €60.10.

Keeping your turnover current as you go turns a chore into a formality. The rest, URSSAF works out for you.

Sources

• URSSAF – Self-employed portal
• URSSAF – Changes to self-employed contribution rates
• Service-public – Social contributions for a micro-entrepreneur
• economie.gouv.fr – Social contribution amounts for micro-entreprises