Thousands of employees pay part of their company mutual insurance every month without knowing that this expense can reduce their tax bill.
Company mutual insurance has been part of the landscape for several years. In the private sector, employers must offer complementary collective health insurance to their employees and finance at least part of it. For many, this translates into one more line on the pay slip. However, this line can clearly impact taxable income.
First essential point: not all mutual insurance companies provide the right to the same treatment. Individual supplementary health insurance, taken out freely from a private organization, does not give rise to a deduction in this context. Simply paying a contribution each month is therefore not enough. On the other hand, the logic changes with compulsory collective mutual insurance set up by the employer. It is this contract, governed by the rules applicable to businesses, which can have an effect on the income tax return.
Then you have to distinguish who pays what. The portion financed by the employer does not constitute an amount that the employee can deduct. It follows another tax treatment and can even be included in taxable income. This is often a surprise: some people think that employer participation reduces taxes, when on the contrary it can increase the tax base. This mechanism is legal, but it remains poorly understood because it rarely appears clearly to employees who simply consult their net payable.
What can work in favor of the taxpayer is the salary portion, in other words the fraction of the contribution deducted from the salary. This is the amount actually borne by the employee throughout the year. When it has not been correctly integrated into the pre-filled declaration, box 6DD should then be checked and filled in with the corresponding amount, so that the tax situation accurately reflects the contributions incurred. Let’s take a concrete case: a monthly contribution of 50 euros, 60% of which is covered by the company. There then remains 20 euros payable by the employee each month, or 240 euros over a year. It is this amount that can be included in the calculation depending on the reporting situation. For taxed households, the impact will then depend on the tax bracket and the entire household income.
In many cases, no action is necessary. The amounts are already integrated via payroll and transmitted by the employer to the tax administration. This is the reason why some taxpayers do not see anything in particular when completing their pre-completed return. But automatism is not absolute. A payroll error, a change of employer, an incomplete transmission or a particular situation can miss an amount to be taken into account. Hence the interest in comparing your declaration with your pay slips and carefully checking the box in question.
