Those who work in Italy today earn, in real terms, less than they did in 1990. It is not a sensation, and it does not depend only on the inflation of recent years. It is a fact certified by the OECD, confirmed by Istat and reiterated by the Bank of Italy: Italian wages have been stagnant for over thirty years, in a country where in the meantime the cost of living has never stopped rising. The history of this stagnation is divided into two distinct moments: a long freeze and a recent sharp worsening.
This situation has a single root: an economic system that has failed to translate growth into wage increases. And furthermore, Italy does not have a safety net that almost all of Europe takes for granted: the legal minimum wage, a threshold set by law below which no employer can go. 22 of the 27 countries of the European Union have introduced it. Italy is among the five exceptions, and unlike Denmark, Sweden and Austria, which compensate with historically very strong collective bargaining systems, our alternative model shows cracks that are increasingly difficult to ignore.
Thirty years of stagnant salaries in Italy: a problem that comes from afar
Italian wage stagnation is not a recent phenomenon. According to OECD data, gross pay per employee (i.e. before taxes and social contributions paid by the worker), if evaluated in real terms, i.e. net of inflation, today stand at the same levels as in the early nineties. Over the same period of time, the average of OECD countries recorded an increase of 32.5%.
The reasons are structural. Over time, the Italian economy has transformed into a system with little innovation, small businesses with little inclination to invest in technology, and a low-productivity service sector that weighs heavily on the aggregate data. Less productivity means less room for raises: companies can’t pay workers more who don’t produce more. But the relationship between productivity and wages in Italy remained unbalanced even when productivity was growing: the share of income going to workers was progressively reduced compared to that going to profits.
The turning point dates back to the 1990s, when entry into the euro and the end of the escalator – the mechanism that automatically linked wages to inflation – changed the rules of the game. In France, Germany and Spain those changes have been absorbed with active wage support policies and more responsive contractual systems. In Italy, no. From that moment on, wages remained essentially stagnant, and the country has never found an alternative model capable of restarting them.
The dark two years: when inflation wiped out decades of bargaining
The surge in inflation, fueled by the energy crisis and the post-pandemic shock, eroded purchasing power at a speed that the Italian contractual system was not equipped to absorb. In two years, inflation has eaten up what workers had laboriously achieved over the course of a decade.
Istat’s 2025 Annual Report certifies that between 2019 and 2024 real wages lost 10.5% of their value. At the peak of the crisis, in 2022, the loss had reached 15%. These are numbers that are unprecedented in the modern era: in five years, an Italian worker found himself with a nominally higher paycheck but able to buy significantly less.
Since 2024 something has started to move. The decline in inflation and the renewals of some important collective agreements have allowed a partial recovery. But the OECD, in its Employment Outlook 2025, is clear: at the beginning of 2025, Italian real wages were still 7.5% lower than in 2021, the worst result among all the large economies of the organisation. The road to return to pre-crisis levels is still long, and according to forecasts real wage growth will remain limited in the coming years.
How much do Italians earn compared to other Europeans
The European comparison makes the situation even clearer. According to Eurostat data, in 2023 the average monthly gross salary in Italy was around 2,800 euros, compared to an EU average of over 3,400 euros. From 2018 to today, Italian wages have grown less than half compared to the European average.
There is a paradox that is particularly striking: work in Italy costs a lot to companies, but brings little to the workers. The tax wedge (the difference between how much a company spends on an employee and how much that employee receives in their paycheck) is among the highest in Europe in Italy: almost 47% of the overall cost of labor ends up in taxes and contributions, compared to an OECD average of 35%. The result is that the average net salary of an Italian worker is in 23rd place out of 38 OECD countries, surpassed not only by France, Germany and Spain, but also by Poland and Turkey.
The Spanish case is worth reporting. For decades, Spain was the country with which Italy competed in a sort of wage race to the bottom. Today that race is over: in 2024 Spain surpassed Italy in terms of average annual salary, partly thanks to the introduction and progressive increase of a legal minimum wage which has almost doubled since 2019.
Minimum wage in Italy: what it is and why there is no law yet
The legal minimum wage is a salary threshold set by law below which no employer can go, regardless of the sector or type of contract applied. It is not a new or left-wing idea: 22 of the 27 countries of the European Union have introduced it, including Germany, France, Spain and Poland.
In Italy it has been talked about for decades, but every attempt to translate it into law has failed. The first serious attempt dates back to Matteo Renzi’s Jobs Act in 2014, which however remained a dead letter on the point. In 2019, M5S parliamentarian Nunzia Catalfo presented a proposal with a threshold of 9 euros gross per hour, the same figure that would become the reference for all subsequent attempts. With the Draghi government we had come closer: the Minister of Labor Andrea Orlando was working on a solution that would have extended the contractual minimums of the most representative unions to all workers, so as not to override collective bargaining but to integrate it with a legal guarantee. The fall of the government stopped everything.
In 2023 the oppositions — PD, M5S, Greens and Left, with the exception of Italia Viva — filed a new unitary proposal, again at 9 euros an hour. The majority first suspended it, then completely rewrote it in the commission, emptying it of any reference to a minimum threshold and transforming it into a generic delegation to the government. The Meloni government’s position on this point has always been clear: a legal minimum wage is not necessary, because collective bargaining already guarantees adequate coverage. The result is law 144 of 2025: a text that does not set any amount, but tasks the government with identifying the most applied collective agreement for each sector and making it binding as a minimum reference. The implementing decrees were expected by April 2026 but it does not appear that they have been approved.
Collective bargaining: why the contractual system is no longer enough
In Italy there is no legal minimum wage: wage protection relies entirely on collective bargaining, a system with a long history that today shows deep cracks. National contracts last on average three years and do not provide automatic mechanisms for updating to inflation, unlike Belgium and France, where the standard duration is shorter and there is often automatic indexation. When prices exploded in 2022, millions of workers found themselves locked into agreements signed years earlier, without any safety net.
To complicate the picture, according to the CNEL, in Italy there are almost a thousand collective agreements in the private sector alone. A proliferation that has paved the way for so-called pirate contracts, agreements signed by acronyms of dubious representativeness which offer wages up to 20-30% lower than the contracts of the major unions. However, the ADAPT Bulletin has moved the problem deeper: the issue is not how often contracts are renewed, but how they are constructed. Tabular minimums anchored to past inflation and without margin to redistribute productivity gains guarantee workers not to lose ground, but not to gain it.
The Court of Cassation, with two twin sentences in 2023, recognized that judges can disapply a collective agreement when the remuneration it provides does not guarantee a dignified existence, as required by article 36 of the Constitution. A signal that the system, in certain cases, is no longer able to do the job it was designed for, and that the issue of the legal minimum wage, in Italy, is no longer just a political issue but a response to evidence that is difficult to ignore.
