Finance and taxation, Tourism, culture, leisure
The financing of culture in France relies primarily on households, and local authorities are the primary public financiers, ahead of the State, according to the latest “Key figures for culture and communication”, published by the Ministry of Culture on June 16. In 2024, households spent 21.75 billion euros on final consumption of cultural goods and services (books, press, audiovisual, cultural outings, etc.) and 28.97 billion euros on related goods and services (computers, telephones, televisions, game consoles, etc.), i.e. a total of 67.6 billion, up 2% year-on-year.
On the State side, the budget of the Ministry of Culture was 4.6 billion euros in 2025, divided into different programs: “heritage” (27%), “artistic creation” (23%), “transmission of knowledge and democratization of culture” (16%), “media, books and cultural industries” (16%) and “support for the policies of the Ministry of Culture” (19%), which includes in particular the remuneration of ministry agents (9,157 full-time equivalents).
At the same time, still in 2025, 5 billion euros from other ministries were devoted to cultural spending, including 3.1 billion euros for the Ministry of National Education alone, mainly for the salaries of art teachers in primary and secondary education, and 653 million euros for the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, including the financing of more than 140 university libraries, including payroll. We also note the credits from the general decentralization grant for libraries, from the Ministry of Territorial Cohesion, for nearly 95 million euros. In total, state cultural spending amounted to 9.6 billion euros in 2025.
The municipal block very far ahead
For their part, local authorities spent at least 10.7 billion euros on culture, or 1.1 billion more than the State. At least, because two biases must be taken into account to make a comparison. On the one hand, the last known figures for communities date back to 2023, a year during which the State devoted 9.8 billion euros to culture. On the other hand, the consolidated cultural expenditure of the “Key Figures of Culture” for communities only concerns, in addition to departments and regions, municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants – which excludes 90% of French municipalities – and EPCIs comprising at least one municipality with more than 3,500 inhabitants – which excludes at least 10% of the approximately 1,250 EPCIs in France. In other words, the financing of culture by the local bloc is not only poorly known but largely underestimated. For 2021, the Observatory of Cultural Policies (OPC) had, for example, estimated the cultural expenditure of municipalities with less than 3,500 inhabitants at 420 million euros.
This clarified, of the 10.7 billion euros devoted by communities to culture in 2023, almost 81% was precisely carried by the municipal bloc. If municipalities (with more than 3,500 inhabitants) largely dominate, with 6.3 billion in expenditure, their contribution has fallen by 8% over the last ten years (6.8 billion in 2014). Conversely, cultural spending by EPCIs increased from 2 billion in 2014 to 2.4 billion in 2023 (+20%), making it the only stratum of communities to have increased its cultural spending. Indeed, the departments, which accounted for 11% of the cultural expenditure of the communities in 2023 (1.2 billion euros), recorded a drop of 23% since 2014, and the regions (7% of the expenditure of the communities for 791 million euros in 2023) declined by 11% over the same period.
Expenditure largely focused on operations
Still on the subject of cultural spending by communities, the “Key figures for culture” specify that out of 10.7 billion euros in 2023, 8.5 billion (79%) were devoted to operations and 2.2 billion to investment (21%). In addition, 37% went to the conservation and dissemination of heritage (museums, archives, libraries, etc.), 28% to artistic expression and cultural activities (live performance, visual arts, artistic education, etc.), 23% to cultural action (mediation, artistic and cultural education, cohesion social and territorial, etc.) and, finally, 12% to other types of interventions.
These figures are also supplemented by those published the same day and from the report of the Court of Auditors devoted to the major heritage projects of the Ministry of Culture. According to this document, “the contribution of local authorities to the State’s major cultural projects amounts to 60 million euros for the period 2015-2025 in the form of subsidies, advantageous transfers of land or project management”. But here again, the support of local authorities for the State’s major heritage projects “remains relatively unknown”. What if the Ministry of Culture set itself the next major task of knowing the cultural expenditure of communities?
