A French org chart for Québec — Bill 96, Law 25, and the 25-employee threshold

On June 1, 2025, Québec's language rules reached a lot of companies that had never dealt with them before. Under Bill 96 (now law), businesses employing 25 to 49 people in Québec must register with the Office québécois de la langue française — a requirement that used to start at 50. Registration kicks off a review of how French is actually used in the workplace, and depending on the result, a formal francization program.

If you run HR or operations at a company that size, you've either done this paperwork already or it's sitting in your queue. This post covers one narrow, practical corner of it: the org chart — why it shows up in a francization analysis at all, and what a natively French org chart tool looks like.

What changed, in plain terms

Once a company employs 25 or more people in Québec over a six-month period, it must register with the OQLF within six months of the end of that period. After registering, it evaluates its own linguistic situation — and if French isn't sufficiently generalized at work, the OQLF can require a francization program. Non-compliance carries real fines, and they scale per day.

The part that surprises people: the analysis isn't just about signage and contracts. It looks at the working environment — including whether the everyday tools your staff use are available to them in French. Intranets, HR systems, the software people stare at all day: if your team relies on them, their language is part of the picture.

Where the org chart fits

An org chart is one of the few internal documents that literally everyone sees — it's on the wall, in the onboarding deck, in the all-hands slides. If it says "Department" and "Reports to" in a Québec workplace, it's a small daily signal that the working language isn't French. Multiply that across every tool, and that's what a linguistic analysis measures.

Most org chart software can't help you here. The mainstream tools — American, and Canadian ones too — ship English-only interfaces, and at best a translated marketing page. Your chart-making tool ends up on the wrong side of your own software inventory.

What "natively French" means in OrgPlease

OrgPlease! was built bilingual from the start — English and Canadian French, written by hand, not machine-translated:

The whole interface works in French — every screen, label, and button, from upload to export.
The chart itself is French — card fields carry your labels (Service, Ville, Nº de poste), and they stay French in the exports: the searchable vector PDF, the native editable PowerPoint, the shareable link.
Share links speak French too — send a live chart to the whole company in French, with sensitive fields (like salary) filtered out server-side. See a live French sample chart — no login needed.
The pricing matches the threshold. Free up to 25 employees; the Starter plan ($19/month) covers up to 50. The 25-to-49 band that just became subject to registration is exactly the band our two smallest tiers serve.

To be precise about the claim: OrgPlease doesn't make anyone compliant with anything — francization is a company-wide assessment that only the OQLF process can settle. What a French org chart tool does is simple: it's one more everyday tool that belongs on the right side of your inventory, instead of one more exception to explain.

The other Québec question: where the data lives (Law 25)

Québec's privacy law (Law 25) makes companies accountable for where personal information goes — and an org chart is personal information: names, work emails, reporting relationships, sometimes salary. When personal data leaves Québec, the law expects you to assess whether it remains adequately protected.

OrgPlease's primary datastore runs in Montréal (AWS Canadian region). Your roster data is stored in Canada, encrypted at rest and in transit, with row-level security scoping every organization's data to its own members — and public share links never expose email addresses at all. That doesn't answer every Law 25 question by itself (no vendor can claim that honestly), but it makes your assessment a much shorter conversation. If your privacy officer wants the details, ask us — we maintain privacy documentation for exactly this purpose.

Bottom line

If your Québec company just crossed — or is about to cross — 25 employees, two laws quietly turned your org chart into a compliance-adjacent artifact: Bill 96 cares what language it speaks, and Law 25 cares where it lives. OrgPlease is, as far as we can tell, the only org chart software that can answer both questions well: natively French, hosted in Montréal, and priced for exactly your size of company.

This post is general information, not legal advice. For your obligations under Bill 96 or Law 25, talk to your legal counsel or consult the OQLF directly.

Try it in French, free. Up to 25 employees, no credit card — and the interface switch is one click. Start your free org chart