Does the Livret A protect savings from inflation?

The Livret A rate has been 1.70% since 1 August 2026, the date of its last revision; on average over the year, it paid 2.16% in 2025 and 3.00% in 2024. It is set by decree, according to a formula averaging inflation excluding tobacco over the past six months and a short-term interbank rate, with a floor at half a per cent; the government may depart from it, and has done so several times.

The saver's question is simple: does this rate protect their savings from rising prices? This page answers it year by year, since 1991, by subtracting inflation from the Livret A rate. It gives no investment advice: it measures.

Over the thirty-five years from 1991 to 2025, the Livret A rate was below inflation 8 times. The real rate — Livret rate minus inflation, a France ÉcoScan calculation — averaged +0.7 point a year over the period, but that average hides two eras: +2.2 points in the 1990s, when the Livret paid 4.50% against inflation of 3.3%, and −0.2 point since 2010.

The losing years are concentrated in the recent period: 8 of the 8 losing years fall in 2010 or later. The worst are 2022 and 2023: an average rate of 1.38% against inflation of 5.2% (−3.8 points), then 2.92% against 4.9% (−2.0 points). Cumulatively, 2021-2023 cost −6.9 points of percentage in purchasing power to a deposit left on the Livret.

The real rate turned positive again in 2024 (+1.0 point) and 2025 (+1.3 points), inflation falling faster than the rate was lowered — the reverse of 2022, when the rate was raised more slowly than prices were rising.

What has changed is the formula's lag. It looks at inflation over the past six months, and the rate is only revised in February and August: when prices accelerate, the Livret runs behind; when they decelerate, it stays above for a while. Between 2021 and 2023, prices accelerated faster than two revisions a year could follow, and the government moreover capped the rate in 2023 below what the formula gave.

In the other direction, the rate stayed at 3.00% throughout 2024 despite inflation back at 2.0%; in 2025 it was cut in February and again in August, for an average of 2.16% over the year, more slowly than inflation, which fell back to 0.9%. Savers thus had two positive real years, the second (+1.3 points) being the best since 2009 — a year when an average rate of 1.91% had met inflation of 0.1%, for a real rate of +1.8 points.

The Livret A is not only a savings product: it is the resource of the savings fund, which finances social housing and part of local authorities. A high rate protects the saver but makes those loans dearer; a low rate does the reverse. The 2023 freeze is also explained by that trade-off, which the formula does not settle alone.

The household saving rate — 14.2% of disposable income in 2019, 20.0% in 2020 with the lockdowns, 17.9% in 2024 — did not follow the Livret's real rate: households saved more precisely in the years when the Livret was losing against prices. Precautionary saving answers to uncertainty more than to returns.

The series has three eras. The 1990s, when the Livret paid four and a half per cent against inflation falling below two: the best real years of the period. The 2010s, when the rate steps down to 0.50% while inflation hovers around one: almost nil years, sometimes negative. And 2021-2023, when inflation returns before the rate follows.

The calculation rule has been reformed several times — in 2004, 2008 and 2018 — each time to bring the rate closer to market conditions or to inflation; the half-per-cent floor dates from the 2018 reform.

Since 1 August 2026, the Livret A has paid 1.70%. Over the last closed year, 2025, its average rate of 2.16% against inflation of 0.9% gave a real rate of +1.3 points. The real rate for 2026 is not measured here: it depends on inflation over the whole year, which this page serves only once the year is closed, and it will be negative if price growth in 2026 exceeds the average rate paid over the year.