French savings top €6.5 trillion as household wealth keeps growing in 2025, but returns remain too low
France’s household financial wealth reached a new record in 2025, according to the Banque de France, climbing to 6,590.5 billion euros at the end of the year from 6,415.3 billion euros a year earlier. The increase of 175.2 billion euros highlights the continued strength of household savings in a country where the savings rate remained high at 18% of disposable income, well above the eurozone average of 14.9%. Over the past decade, French financial wealth has risen by 48%, and it is now nearly twice France’s public debt and 2.7 times the market capitalization of the CAC 40. Economic analyst Philippe Crevel said the growth was driven not only by financial market gains but also by strong fresh savings flows, with 128.4 billion euros of the 2025 increase coming directly from new financial saving.
The data show that French households continued to favor safety and liquidity in their saving choices. Life insurance in euro-denominated funds remained the most popular investment, with outstanding assets of 1,570.6 billion euros, up 47 billion euros in one year. By contrast, remunerated bank deposits posted a net outflow of 1.4 billion euros, mainly because regulated savings accounts such as the Livret A, LDDS and LEP lost appeal after interest rates fell as inflation eased. The total balance on these regulated accounts declined by 8.2 billion euros to 947.5 billion euros. Some savers shifted toward higher-yielding products, including life insurance in unit-linked funds, which gained 25.6 billion euros, and listed shares, which rose by 2.6 billion euros. Even so, French households remained heavily invested in low-risk assets: debt-like products totaled 3,911.4 billion euros, compared with 2,576 billion euros in equity-type assets.
The French tendency to save heavily while holding relatively little high-return wealth has revived debate about whether private savings are being directed toward productive investment. President Emmanuel Macron previously criticized what he called a misallocation of European savings, arguing that too much private capital leaves the continent instead of funding growth at home. But a new study by Rexecode suggests the issue is less about a lack of saving and more about the composition of household portfolios. The institute says French households do save a lot, but their financial wealth remains limited compared with countries such as the United States, Sweden and Denmark relative to disposable income. It estimates that if French household wealth were scaled to those benchmarks, it would be nearly twice as large as it is today.
Rexecode also notes that the financial saving rate in France, at 9.8%, is comparable to that of the United States and has even been higher in recent years. The difference lies in asset allocation: only 19% of French household financial wealth is held in equities, a proportion that weighs on long-term returns. The result is a portfolio structure dominated by deposits and insurance products, with wealth concentrated more among older households than in most of the eurozone. The institute says this pattern reflects not just risk preferences, which are close to the international average, but also taxation, regulation, financial education and the way financial products are marketed.
