The bill on equal leave, designed to extend paternity leave up to five months, making it largely compulsory and fully paid, and at the same time strengthening the economic protections linked to maternity, is stuck in the Chamber. The Budget Commission expressed a negative opinion after the State General Accounting Office judged the financial coverage provided by the provision to be “unsuitable”.
The issue is not political but accounting. In detail, for article one of the proposal – the one which increased the maternity allowance up to 80 and 100 percent for some categories – the technical report of the Ministry of Labor estimated a cost of approximately 521 million euros in 2026, destined to rise up to 637 million per year from 2035. According to the Accounting Office, however, this estimate was incomplete because it did not take self-employed workers into account. The costs of article two, dedicated to equal leave, are even higher: 3.18 billion euros in 2026, with spending expected to grow to 3.87 billion per year from 2035.
For the Accounting Office, the problem is not only the amount of expenditure, but also the financial coverage, “judged uncertain and insufficient”, because it is based on future savings and linked to the remodulation of environmentally harmful subsidies.
What the bill envisaged: from 10 days to 5 months
The heart of the bill was the introduction of equal leave for the father, increasing the duration of the current paternity leave from ten days to five months, largely compulsory and fully paid at 100 percent.
In particular, the working father would have been granted the right to be absent from work between the month preceding the presumed date of birth and the following eighteen months. Of these, four months would have been mandatory and non-transferable, with ten days to be used immediately after birth together with the mother and the remaining period could also be used in split form. The measure would also have applied to adoptive fathers, foster fathers and self-employed workers registered with the separate management, with an indemnity calculated on the basis of lost turnover.
The declared objective was twofold: to redistribute the burden of care within families and reduce the negative effects of motherhood on women’s careers, in a country which records one of the lowest female employment rates in Europe.
The difference between maternity, paternity and parental leave
In the current system, the distance between the different instruments remains marked. Maternity leave is a period of compulsory abstention of five months, which can be modulated before and after giving birth, with an allowance equal to 80 percent of the salary, paid by INPS and advanced by the employer.
Mandatory paternity leave, as we have written, is limited to ten days, not necessarily consecutive, paid at 100 percent. Introduced on an experimental basis in 2012 with a duration of just one day, it was progressively extended to the current ten days and made structural with the 2022 budget law.
Alongside compulsory leaves, there is also parental leave, an optional tool that can be used by both parents up to the child’s twelve-year age, within a total limit of eleven months. Historically paid at 30 percent, parental leave has been strengthened in recent years: first the 2023 budget law and then that of 2024 raised the allowance to 80 percent of the salary for two months, to be used by the child’s sixth year of life, but only for employees
The issues for women and why increasing paternity leave would make sense
The data from the latest INPS report shows how, despite the reforms, the burden of care remains heavily unbalanced on women. According to the Statistical Observatory on Family Support Benefits, in 2024, 171,713 female employees in the private sector began receiving maternity benefits, down 2.8 percent compared to the previous year. The decline is even more marked among self-employed and domestic workers, signaling greater fragility precisely in the less protected segments of the labor market.
On the male front, compulsory paternity leave reached just under 182 thousand fathers in 2024, equal to 64.8 percent of potential beneficiaries. A figure that is growing in the long term – from around 20 percent in 2013 to over 64 percent from 2022 – but has now stabilized.
The gap emerges even more clearly when looking at parental leave. In 2024, among private sector employees, there were over 289 thousand women beneficiaries, compared to 124 thousand men. Not only that: women enjoyed an average of 53 days, more than double the 22 days enjoyed by men.
As the report states, reforms that increased parental leave benefits actually increased the number of fathers taking them, but did not substantially change the duration or the gender gap. Mothers continue to concentrate the use of leave in the first years of the child’s life, while fathers use it less and later.
It is in this context that the idea of longer and compulsory paternity leave makes sense. Not as a symbolic measure, but as a structural tool to reduce the employment penalty of mothers. According to the data referred to in the proposed law, being a mother in Italy still too often means leaving the job market or drastically reducing one’s participation. As long as care time remains almost exclusively on the shoulders of women, conciliation policies also risk producing limited effects.
