The files of deceased persons are established by INSEE from information received from the municipalities within the framework of their public service mission; they constitute, as such, an administrative document. They are published in application of the provisions of articles L311-9 and L312-1-1 of the code of relations between the public and the administration, and can be reused under the conditions provided for in Title II of this book.

Each monthly file includes all the deaths of which INSEE was aware over the period; it may contain data relating to a death that occurred previously if the information reached INSEE late. The quarterly files concatenate the three monthly files and the annual file all the files for the last complete year. Compilations over a ten-year period are also available.

Warning: the monthly and nominative files disseminated here include all the deaths received and processed by INSEE during the month.

The town halls have a legal deadline for sending death certificates to Insee of one week. When the transmission is in paper form, an additional period of mailing and entry by the INSEE services must be added. In practice, these legal deadlines can be lengthened for some of the municipalities, as well as in a special situation (public holiday or bridge, and at this time with the exceptional circumstances linked to the confinement situation).

As a result, the file made available for a given month does not include all the deaths that occurred during the month , the information being able to reach INSEE in during the following month (s). Conversely, the file for the month may include deaths that occurred in the past. Thus the August 2020 file includes 8,900 deaths occurring before August 2020; On the other hand, it does not include the 6,000 deaths that took place in August 2020 but received and recorded by INSEE at the beginning of September. These will be available in the September delivery.

The death counts from these monthly nominative files cannot therefore be compared directly to the counts provided in daily death statistics by department made available by INSEE during the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed the latter count the deaths on the day of death and are updated with each new broadcast.

INSEE cannot guarantee that the files of deceased persons are free from omissions or errors ; it can not incur any responsibility for the use made of the information contained in these files. In particular, the information contained in these files may under no circumstances be used for the purpose of certifying the vital status of persons.

The raw data are available at this address: https: // www.insee.fr/fr/information/4190491