There is a moment every placement coordinator knows. A Tuesday in November, mid-morning. An apprentice appears at the office door, or a company stops answering, and the sentence lands: the contract is broken.

The instinct is to treat it as a failure. The data describes a workload category. 22% of apprenticeship contracts started in France in 2024 were broken within their first nine months (DARES, Séries longues, February 2026). Over a full contract, the rate reaches 33% for the 2022 cohort. And roughly one in five of all new apprenticeship contracts signed in 2024 followed a rupture (DARES Résultats n° 3, January 2026). Re-placement is a fifth of the national flow. It appears on no dashboard, and most CFAs handle it as an improvisation.

This post is the operational playbook for that improvisation: what the law actually gives you, which clocks are running, and how to have the second employer ready before the six months burn down.

The rupture usually arrives with zero notice

French law gives the CFA almost no early warning. Look at the routes a contract can break through, and what notice each one carries.

Two details make November the fire-drill month. Most contracts start in September (DARES notes this explicitly), and DARES places the strongest rupture peak in the first three months of execution. The 45 days of the probationary period count only days worked in the company, so with a normal alternance rhythm they stretch across two to three calendar months. A contract signed in early September reaches the end of its probationary window somewhere in November. That is a scenario, not a statistic; no source publishes ruptures by calendar month. But it is the scenario your team lives through every autumn.

What the law gives you: six months, financed

Three texts define the re-placement window, and they are more favorable than most teams assume.

Article L6231-2 of the Code du travail makes it a mission of every CFA to let apprentices whose contract broke continue their training for six months while accompanying them in the search for a new employer, in liaison with the public employment service. That applies whatever the cause of the rupture. Article L6222-18-2 adds the mechanics: the CFA takes the necessary steps for the theoretical training to continue, and the apprentice keeps the status of stagiaire de la formation professionnelle. Careful with the verbs: the CFA "contributes to" finding a new employer. The law asks for the search, and lets you decide how strong your search machinery is.

The status is granted by default. The ministry's fiche pratique states it is accorded for up to six months unless the ex-apprentice refuses it in writing. Nobody has to opt in. They only have to stay.

And the financing follows. Since the June 2025 reform (article R6332-25 of the Code du travail, rewritten by décret 2025-585, applicable to contracts concluded from 1 July 2025), the OPCO maintains its payments to the CFA, prorated on the days actually run, until a new contract is signed or the six months expire. The text says "maintient", present tense. The proration is the financial argument for speed: every week without a new contract is training you deliver on a shrinking envelope.

One caveat worth carrying: some OPCO pages add that the financing cannot run past the date of the final exam. That cap is OPCO-page language, and we did not find it in the legal text. Treat it as their operational doctrine, and plan around it anyway.

The fact that should reorganize your process

One finding justifies building a standing process rather than an ad-hoc scramble.

Among apprentices who broke a contract and had not found a new one, 81% declared they left their CFA immediately after the rupture, even though they could stay six months without a contract (DARES Analyses n° 63, October 2024, on the 2018 entry cohort).

Four out of five walked out of the building on day one of a six-month right.

Once they walk, the odds turn. In 2021, 43% of broken contracts were followed by a return to apprenticeship within six months, most often in the same program (DARES, Séries longues). Read the other way: 57% were followed by nothing. The first 72 hours, while the student is still standing in your corridor, are the most decisive hours of the whole re-placement.

Worth saying plainly to the student and to your own team: a rupture is usually about the job, and a second contract fixes it. 65% of apprentices who broke a contract mid-apprenticeship attributed it at least partly to a problem with the employer or the position, and among those who then signed with a new employer the share rises to 81% (DARES Analyses n° 63; these are self-declared motives on a specific cohort, so keep the framing modest). The same study measured the before and after: 15% were dissatisfied with the working atmosphere before the rupture, 6% after changing employer. The second placement is a genuinely better outcome, and the data lets you say so.

The 72-hour drill

What the well-run version looks like, based on the CFAs we work with:

First, keep the student enrolled. The stagiaire status is theirs by default; make sure they know it before they leave the building. The Institut Paris Région study on ruptures quotes CFAs saying "we learn about the rupture from the company" and "by the time we arrive, the young person has already decided." The counter is a standing rule: any rupture triggers a same-week meeting with the placement team, not just the pedagogical one.

Second, close the paperwork fast. The rupture must be recorded in writing and notified to the CFA director and to the deposit body, in practice the OPCO (article R6222-21). No legal deadline is attached to the employer's notification, which is exactly why your own internal clock matters: DARES built its rupture statistics partly on DSN payroll data because employer notifications are incomplete.

Third, open the employer search the same week, from a warm list. This is where most processes fail, because the list gets built after the rupture. Territorial prospecting that starts from zero in November competes with every other CFA's rentrée backlog.

Two arguments your team can use with employers, this year

The 2025 financing reform quietly created a re-placement discount. For programs at Bac+3 and above (levels 6 and 7), employers owe a mandatory 750 euro participation per apprenticeship contract since 1 July 2025. For a new contract signed after a rupture, that participation drops to 200 euros for the new employer (Ministère du Travail, July 2025). For a company hesitating between a fresh hire and your ruptured apprentice, that is a concrete, checkable difference, and almost nobody in the market is saying it out loud.

The second argument is the apprentice themselves: partly trained, already acculturated to the rhythm, available immediately, with a financed training seat already running. A February start on a student who has done five months of first year is a different proposition from a September unknown.

Who to call: the list is the hard part

The six-month clock makes re-placement the sharpest version of a problem every placement team has: knowing who is hiring right now in your territory, at your levels, in your programs' trades.

Some signal exists to prioritize with. DARES found rupture probability measurably higher at employers who entered apprenticeship recently than at those hosting apprentices since 2012-2014. Employer tenure in the system is a real quality signal, worth carrying into your call order (DARES adds its own caution: first-time employers may also accompany more attentively, so use it to sort, never to exclude).

We built Alternel for the list problem. It monitors hiring signals across job boards and public sources for the companies in a school's territory, qualifies them program by program, finds the right contact on the employer side, and runs the outreach so the coordinator arrives at a warm conversation. In re-placement mode, that means the November call list exists before the November rupture does.

The two clocks, side by side

Separate them in your communication to students. The six months protect the year. The one year protects, in specific cases, the eligibility.

A rupture in November does not have to cost the diploma, the cohort statistics, or the relationship with the family who chose your school. It costs them when the six months run out quietly, one week at a time, while the list gets built from scratch.

If your team handles every rupture as a one-off scramble, we can talk about what a standing re-placement process looks like. We start with a look at your territory, no demo required.

Sources

1. Légifrance - Article L6231-2, Code du travail: the CFA's six-month continuation and accompaniment mission.
2. Légifrance - Article L6222-18-2, Code du travail: continuation mechanics and stagiaire status.
3. Légifrance - Article R6332-25, Code du travail: OPCO payment maintenance, prorated, contracts from 1 July 2025.
4. DARES - Séries longues : le contrat d'apprentissage: 22% nine-month rate (2024 cohort), 33% full-duration (2022), return-to-apprenticeship rates.
5. DARES Analyses n° 63 - Quelles causes aux ruptures des contrats d'apprentissage ?: the 81% immediate-departure figure, declared motives, before/after satisfaction.
6. DARES Résultats n° 3 - L'apprentissage en 2024: one contract in five follows a rupture.
7. DARES Analyses n° 43 - Ruptures des contrats d'apprentissage: timing of ruptures, employer-tenure effect.
8. Ministère du Travail - Apprentissage : ce qui change au 1er juillet 2025: 750 euro participation and the 200 euro re-placement rate.
9. Ministère du Travail - Fiche pratique : le contrat d'apprentissage: stagiaire status by default, age derogations, April 2026 Cour de cassation avis.
10. Institut Paris Région - Ruptures des contrats d'apprentissage en Île-de-France: CFA field testimony on late discovery of ruptures.