Your colleague at lunch hands the cashier a small green card, taps it, and walks out with a sandwich, a yoghurt, a bottle of water, and an apple, all paid for. You ask what that was. They say "c'est la carte tickets resto, t'en as pas?". You do, somewhere, in an envelope from your onboarding pack. You assumed they were for emergencies. They are not.
Tickets restaurant, often just titres resto or TR, are the simplest employee benefit in France. Your employer puts money into them every working day. You spend that money on food. The state subsidises the system through tax breaks. Almost every French employee has them. Most Indian arrivals leave half of theirs unused.
Here is how to actually use them.
What you have
Your employer issues you a TR for every working day. A standard TR is worth somewhere between 8 and 13 euros. The employer covers between 50 and 60 percent of the face value. You pay the rest, usually deducted from your payslip. The employer share is exempt from social charges and income tax up to a ceiling per ticket (7.32 euros for 2026), which is why French companies prefer this to giving you a higher salary.
You will receive them as a physical card from one of three issuers, Swile, Edenred, or Pluxee, formerly Sodexo. Each issuer has a phone app that shows your balance, where to spend, and the merchants in your area. The paper booklets are being phased out and you should not bother asking for them.
Twenty working days a month at 10 euros gives you 200 euros loaded into the card each month. Over a year, that is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 euros that exists to be spent on food.
Where you can actually spend them
The default assumption from new arrivals is that TR only work in restaurants where you sit and eat. They do, but the system is much wider than that.
Restaurants, brasseries, sandwich shops, salad bars, food trucks parked legally at lunchtime. Most of them take TR.
Supermarkets and grocery stores. Carrefour, Monoprix, Franprix, Picard, Naturalia, all the big chains accept TR. You can use them on prepared salads, sandwiches, fruit, yoghurt, ready meals, frozen dinners, eggs, bread. Since 2022 the rules have been relaxed to cover any produit alimentaire, including fresh produce that you cook at home. The relaxation has been renewed each year and runs through 31 December 2026 (service-public.gouv.fr fiche F21059).
Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo. The big delivery apps accept TR at checkout if you switch the payment method to your TR card.
What you cannot use them on. Alcohol on its own at a bar (a glass of wine with a meal in a restaurant is fine, ordering only a beer at a bar is not). Pet food. Cleaning products. Anything that is not food. You cannot tip with TR.
The daily cap, the meal rule, and the dates
The legal maximum is 25 euros of TR spend per day, raised from 19 in 2022 and held at 25 since. This is enough to cover almost any sensible lunch and a small grocery shop afterwards.
Each TR is meant to cover one meal. In practice, supermarkets and grocery merchants do not enforce this hard, but smaller restaurants might.
TR you receive for a given year are valid until the end of February of the following year. The expired ones are usually swapped automatically by your card issuer for the new year's load, but if you have paper TR sitting in a drawer from two summers ago, you have probably lost the value. Check the issuer app once a quarter. Some issuers run a one month "marché" window in January and February where you can use expired tickets to top up a new card. Check yours.
What the Indians get wrong
The biggest mistake is hoarding TR for emergencies. There are no emergencies. Use them as your default payment method for any food you buy on a working day.
The second mistake is using your normal debit card at the supermarket out of habit. Reach for the TR card first. You are paying yourself with money your employer has already given you.
The third mistake is forgetting to use the apps. Swile, Edenred and Pluxee all have apps that map nearby merchants and tell you exactly what you can buy with your balance. If you do not have the app installed, install it tonight.
Honest take
Tickets restaurant are the lowest effort, highest value workplace benefit you will receive in France. Two minutes to set up the app, then they become invisible. The newcomers who use them properly buy almost all their groceries with them and treat their actual salary as if it were entirely for rent, transport, and discretionary spending.
Do that for a year. The 2,500 euros you would have spent at Monoprix is now in your savings account.