HIV testing in France reached 9.0 million lab tests in 2025, up 7% from 2024, and an estimated 4,983 people learned they had HIV, Santé publique France said Thursday, Nov. 5, in its annual HIV bulletin. “The year 2025 shows concrete progress: 9 million HIV tests performed and an 18% drop in HIV diagnoses, the momentum is there,” Dr. Etienne Pot, the national public health agency’s director general, said in a statement (Gayety translated the agency’s French).
Diagnoses fell from 5,318 in 2023, a drop the bulletin calls significant. “This number is also significantly lower than the one estimated in 2018, before the Covid-19 pandemic (5,309 diagnoses),” it says.
Measured against 2023, the drop is about 6%, by Gayety’s math, and the release gives no baseline for Pot’s 18%. “Between 2012 and 2025, the number of HIV diagnoses fell by 18%,” the full bulletin says.
New infections, a separate estimate, have stopped falling. “HIV incidence in France has been stable since 2023,” the bulletin says, putting new infections at 3,464 in 2025, or 50 per million people, not counting people infected before they moved to France.
The national diagnosis rate was 72 per million people, and “French Guiana had a much higher rate than all other French regions,” the bulletin says. The highest rates after that were in Mayotte, Guadeloupe, Martinique and ÃŽle-de-France, the Paris region.
HIV Testing in France Without a Prescription: 2.3 Million Tests
A quarter of last year’s tests, 2.3 million, were done “without a prescription and without paying upfront,” the agency said. They ran through a lab program called Mon test IST. Its predecessor, VIHTest, ran “from 2022 to August 2024, then expanded to four other STIs under the name Mon test IST,” according to the bulletin.
Between September 2024 and September 2025, tests without a prescription rose among people under 50, and from September 2025 they rose in every age group, it says. “Early diagnoses have increased by 26% since 2020,” the agency said, and late diagnoses have tended to fall since 2023.
Still, “39% of HIV infections were discovered at a late stage in 2025,” the bulletin says, and it estimates 613 people were diagnosed with AIDS. The agency estimates 8,463 people were living with HIV without knowing it at the end of 2025, and it says 40% of them are men who have sex with men.
“Public bodies, health professionals, associations and citizens, our common goal is clear: eradicate HIV,” Pot said.
HIV Diagnoses Among Men Who Have Sex With Men Plateau
Sex between men accounted for 42% of last year’s diagnoses, about 2,106 people, while heterosexual sex accounted for 53%. “The number of diagnoses among MSM has been stable since 2022, whether they were born in France or abroad,” the bulletin says, using the French abbreviation HSH for men who have sex with men.
Among MSM born in France, “this represents a break from the decline observed before 2022,” it says.
Diagnoses among people born abroad fell 11% from 2023, after rising 37% from 2020 to 2023, the agency said. Half of the foreign-born people diagnosed in 2025 got HIV after arriving in France, the bulletin estimates, and “this proportion was 61% among MSM.”
Timing differs by birthplace too. Early diagnoses ran at “54% among MSM born in France and 34% among those born abroad,” according to the bulletin. “Trans people infected through sex accounted for 2% of diagnoses,” it says.
PrEP in France: Nearly 60,000 Users, Apretude Reimbursed, Lenacapavir Pending
The bulletin doesn’t report PrEP use. Nearly 60,000 people in France use PrEP, ANRS, France’s public research agency for HIV and other infectious diseases, said this year, and “Nearly 20% of users discontinue PrEP within six months of starting it.”
France’s health ministry authorized the marketing of Apretude, ViiV Healthcare’s cabotegravir shot given every two months, on Feb. 26, and it has been available, fully reimbursed, since March 2, ANRS said. Gilles Pialoux, vice president of the French AIDS society SFLS, warned that this “therapeutic innovation must be accompanied by organisational innovation, a reduction in social health inequalities and humility in the face of the complexity of care pathways,” ANRS reported in English.
Gilead’s twice-yearly lenacapavir, sold in the U.S. as Yeztugo, was available in France only inside a clinical trial as of September, the HIV charity Sidaction reported. “We have to wait for the HAS to rule on the conditions of its reimbursement,” Solenn Bazin, an advocacy officer at the HIV group AIDES, said in Sidaction’s report, referring to France’s national health authority (Gayety’s translation).
France’s December HIV Campaign Says Undetectable Means Untransmittable
Throughout December, the month of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the agency will run a campaign called “Vivre avec le VIH, c’est d’abord vivre,” or “Living with HIV is, first of all, living.” Its core message is that “a person with HIV on effective treatment, with an undetectable viral load, does not transmit the virus,” the agency said. In the U.S., 44% of people disagreed with that fact in GLAAD’s 2026 HIV stigma survey, Gayety reported in August.
“We can only end AIDS if people know their status,” Dr. Pamela Rendi-Wagner, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said in November 2025. The ECDC and the WHO’s European office reported then that 48% of HIV diagnoses in the European Union and European Economic Area in 2024 were late.
