The average salary in Italy is
€2,760 a month.
Payslips show less: the year splits into 13.

Italy has a payslip problem, and it catches almost every foreigner who moves here. The salary in your contract is an annual gross figure. The salary that arrives in your bank account each month is that figure divided by 13, or in some sectors by 14, not by 12. Nobody tells you this at the offer stage, and it is the difference between budgeting correctly and being short by roughly €200 every ordinary month.

This guide runs the arithmetic properly. It uses the freshest full-year figure Italy has, explains why three different official averages are circulating and which one to trust, sets out the CCNL pay floors that stand in for a minimum wage, and connects all of it to the €35,500 salary bar that decides whether a job can sponsor you at all. Every monthly number on this page states the divisor that produced it.

Over 7 years, we’ve helped more than 5,000 professionals find jobs abroad. Want to know what salary is realistic for your profile in Italy, and whether it clears the visa bar? Find your career consultant.

What Is the Average Salary in Italy Per Month? (2026)

The average salary in Italy is €33,148 a year gross, according to the OECD’s average annual wages series for 2024 in nominal terms. That is the most recent full-year reading available for the country.

What that means per month depends entirely on how many instalments your contract uses:

All three describe the same annual salary. None of them is wrong. But if you plan your rent around €2,762 and your contract runs on 13 instalments, you will be about €212 short in every ordinary month, and then receive a lump sum before Christmas that you had already spent in your head.

What counts as a good salary in Italy? Anything clearly above €33,148 a year puts you ahead of the national average. In Milan, where rents are highest, comfortable single living generally starts closer to €38,000 to €40,000 a year. In the south, €30,000 goes considerably further.

One thing to keep in perspective. Italian pay has not kept up with prices. The OECD found that Italian real wages in early 2025 were 7.5% below their early-2021 level, the sharpest fall recorded across the OECD. Nominal salaries have risen, but purchasing power has not recovered, and that is the background to every figure on this page.

If the numbers work for you, the next step is practical: the European work-visa salary thresholds show what an offer must pay before a permit is possible, and salaries in Spain covers a neighbouring market with the same multi-instalment trap, paid across 14 rather than 13.

Italian Salaries at a Glance: The Essentials

• Average gross salary: €33,148/year, which is €2,762 ÷12 or €2,550 ÷13 (OECD average annual wages, 2024 nominal)
• Pay frequency: 13 instalments is the near-universal private-sector standard; commerce, tourism and food CCNLs typically pay 14
• ISTAT full-time average: €37,302/year, but that is the 2022 reference year published in 2025, and it counts only full-time full-year employees
• Average hourly pay: about €16.3, with men at €16.8 and women at €15.9 (ISTAT, reference year 2022)
• Hourly spread: the lowest-paid 10% earn €8.8/hour or less, the top 10% more than €26.6/hour (ISTAT, 2022)
• By contract category: dirigenti €106,606, quadri €56,746, impiegati €33,358, operai €27,266 (ISTAT, 2022)
• Take-home on the average: roughly €1,800 to €1,950 a month, single worker, spread over 12 payments
• Minimum wage: none. Italy is one of five EU states without one, and around 990 CCNLs at CNEL set sector floors instead
• Gender gap: ISTAT puts men at €39,982 against €33,807 for women on the same 2022 basis
• EU Blue Card threshold: €35,500 gross a year since July 2025, indexed so it moves (last checked August 2026)
• Real wages: 7.5% below early 2021 in early 2025, the steepest drop in the OECD

A note on how to read all of this. Italy publishes salary statistics on several different bases, and the gaps between them are large enough to change a relocation decision. The section below sets out which number measures what, because the mislabelling is the single most common error on Italian salary pages.

The 13th-Month Trap: Why Payslips Show Less

This is the most useful thing to understand about Italian pay, and it is where nearly every English-language salary page goes wrong.

Italian salaries are agreed and written as an annual gross figure, the retribuzione annua lorda or RAL. That figure is then paid out across 13 instalments rather than 12. The extra payment is the tredicesima, and it lands in December, typically before Christmas. It is not a bonus in the discretionary sense. It is part of your contractual salary, established by the tradition that D.P.R. 1070/1960 codified and now written into essentially every private-sector national collective agreement.

Some sectors go further and pay a fourteenth instalment, the quattordicesima, usually in June or July. This is standard in commerce, tourism and food, and it exists wherever the relevant CCNL provides for it.

So the same €33,148 average produces three different monthly figures:

• €33,148 ÷ 12 = €2,762. The arithmetic month. Correct only if your contract explicitly spreads the extras across all twelve months.
• €33,148 ÷ 13 = €2,550. What an ordinary payslip shows in the standard case, and also what the December tredicesima is worth.
• €33,148 ÷ 14 = €2,368. What an ordinary payslip shows where a quattordicesima also applies.

The spread between the top and bottom of that list is €394 a month, with no change whatsoever in annual pay.

The question to ask before you sign. Ask how many mensilità the salary is paid over: 12, 13 or 14. Then convert every offer back to the annual RAL before comparing it with anything. An offer quoted as a monthly figure without its divisor is not a number you can compare.

One Country, Several Averages: Which Number to Trust

Ask what Italians earn and you get at least three defensible answers. All of them are sourced. They measure different populations in different years, and the difference between the highest and the lowest is over €4,000 a year.

We headline the OECD figure because it is the most recent full-year reading and because it counts everybody, not just the full-time full-year population. Part-time work is a real feature of the Italian labour market, and an average that excludes it describes a subset of workers rather than the country.

The mislabelling to watch for. Most Italian salary pages publish the ISTAT €37,302 figure under a 2026 headline. That number has a reference year of 2022. It was published in 2025, which is presumably where the confusion starts, but four-year-old data presented as current is how readers end up with expectations that no employer will meet. If a page quotes a figure without naming both the source and the reference year, treat the number as decorative.

Salaries by Sector and Role

Two things move an Italian salary more than anything else: the contract category you are hired into, and the sector you work in.

Category first. Italian employment law sorts every employee into one of four legal categories, and your CCNL grade sits inside one of them. The gaps are enormous.

Those are ISTAT figures for reference year 2022, published in 2025, with workforce shares from the same survey. Read them together and the picture is clear: 94.4% of Italian employees are impiegati or operai, and the headline-grabbing dirigenti average describes barely one worker in a hundred.

Sector second. The figures below are gross annual RAL from the JobPricing Salary Outlook 2024, published via Randstad. This is recruiter-guide data rather than national statistics, so treat it as an indication of relative position between sectors rather than a precise measurement.

The hourly picture from ISTAT tells the same story from a different angle. Average hourly pay for 2022 was about €16.3, but finance paid €25.9 an hour against €10.9 in hospitality. That is a ratio of roughly two and a half to one for the same hour of work.

What this means for a job search. If you need to clear a visa threshold, sector selection does more work than city selection. Banking, engineering, pharmaceuticals and telecoms already sit at or near the €35,500 Blue Card bar on average. Hospitality and agriculture do not get you there, whatever the vacancy count looks like.

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Is There a Minimum Wage in Italy? The CCNL System

No. Italy has no statutory minimum wage in 2026, and it is not an outlier for it. Five EU member states have none: Italy, Denmark, Austria, Finland and Sweden. All five leave the job to collective bargaining.

What Italy has instead is the CCNL system. A contratto collettivo nazionale di lavoro is a national agreement between employer associations and unions covering a whole sector. Around 990 of them are filed at CNEL, the national council for economics and labour. Each one sets a minimo contrattuale, a legal pay floor, for every grade in that sector. The CCNL covering your job is the one that binds your employer.

The Commercio level 4 floor works out at roughly €24,990 a year across 14 mensilità, which is the standard in that sector. The metalworkers’ floor is paid over 13.

The number you should never trust. A figure of €1,292.46 circulates widely as “the Italian minimum wage”. It is not a wage. It is a pay component used in specific administrative calculations, and publishing it as a national minimum is simply wrong. Italy has no such number to publish.

Where the floor actually bites. ISTAT’s 2022 hourly data shows the lowest-paid 10% of employees earning €8.8 an hour or less. Hospitality averages €10.9 an hour across the whole sector. If you are looking at a role in tourism, catering or agriculture, the CCNL floor is not a theoretical protection, it is roughly what the job pays.

North vs South: The Regional Gap

Italy’s north to south divide is the oldest feature of its labour market and it has not closed. On JobPricing and Randstad data, Lombardy averages around €33,000 a year, while the southern regions of Calabria, Basilicata and Sicily sit under €28,000. The gap is roughly €5,000 to €6,000 a year.

Two qualifications matter before you use that gap to choose a city.

First, cost of living moves in the same direction. Milan is the most expensive place in Italy to rent, by a wide margin. A €33,000 salary in Milan and a €28,000 salary in Bari can leave you with a similar amount of money at the end of the month, and sometimes the southern figure leaves more.

Second, the job market is not symmetric. The north is where the international employers, the manufacturing base and the finance sector are. If you need visa sponsorship, the practical reality is that the roles which clear the salary threshold are heavily concentrated in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto and Piedmont. The southern discount is real, but so is the shortage of sponsoring employers there.

Where to Look for Work: Official Resources

Italian hiring runs through a mix of international platforms and strong domestic boards. Start here.

• LinkedIn Italy: where multinationals, technology firms and English-speaking roles concentrate, especially in Milan
• InfoJobs.it: one of the largest domestic boards, and the default for Italian-language hiring
• Indeed Italy: broad coverage across sectors and seniority levels
• EURES: the EU mobility network, useful for cross-border roles and for employers already used to hiring non-locals

Two practical notes. Most Italian vacancies are written and interviewed in Italian, and outside Milan the English-speaking market thins out quickly. And because sponsorship paperwork sits with the employer rather than with you, it is worth checking whether a company has hired non-EU staff before you invest time in the application.

The Arithmetic: What Actually Lands in Your Account

Two things come off an Italian gross salary: INPS social contributions and IRPEF income tax, plus regional and municipal surcharges that vary by where you live.

On the average salary of €33,148, the shape of the calculation is this:

• INPS employee contributions: 9.19% of gross for most private-sector employees
• IRPEF: a three-band national scale, 23% up to €28,000, 35% from €28,000 to €50,000, and 43% above €50,000
• Regional and municipal surcharges: set locally, and they move the final figure in both directions

Put together, take-home on the average salary comes to roughly €1,900 to €2,100 a month for a single worker with no dependants, spread over 12 payments. Across 13 or 14 instalments the ordinary-month figure is proportionally lower, with the balance arriving in December and, where applicable, in June or July.

Read that as a range, not as a payslip. It is deliberately not given to the cent. Italian net pay depends on your region and municipality, on family status and dependants, on which deductions and tax credits apply to you, and on how your CCNL structures the year. Two people on identical gross salaries in Milan and Bari will not take home the same amount. Anyone publishing a single precise net figure for “the average Italian salary” is guessing on your behalf.

What you can rely on is the shape: expect to keep somewhere in the region of two thirds of gross at this salary level, which is broadly comparable with France and Germany and considerably lighter than Belgium.

Salary and the Visa: The €35,500 Blue Card Bar

This is the part that decides whether a move is possible at all.

For non-EU citizens, the EU Blue Card is the main route into Italy for qualified professionals, and it is salary-gated. The salary test is two-part under d.lgs. 152/2023: pay must match at least the CCNL rate for your role, and never fall below the ISTAT average wage indicator, currently about €35,500 gross a year (ECA Italia; a stale €33,500 still circulates). The figure is indexed to an ISTAT wage indicator, which means it moves. We last checked this threshold in August 2026, and you should verify it again before you rely on it.

Two features of the Italian Blue Card are worth knowing:

• You do not necessarily need a degree. A three-year higher education qualification works, and so does five years of relevant professional experience. That second route is unusual in Europe and it opens the card to experienced people without formal credentials.
• It sits outside the decreto flussi quotas. The Blue Card is not subject to the annual quota system, so there is no click day to survive and no cap to be beaten to.

Now put the two numbers side by side. The average Italian salary is €33,148. The Blue Card bar is about €35,500. The average job does not qualify, and it misses by about €2,350 a year. This is not a small technicality: it means a search strategy aimed at “an average Italian salary” is aimed below the line that makes the move legal.

The other route, briefly. For roles outside the Blue Card, Italy runs the decreto flussi quota system. The DPCM of 2 October 2025, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on 15 October 2025, opens 497,550 work entries for 2026 to 2028, of which 164,850 fall in 2026, allocated by sector and released through a click-day application process.

The full comparison across European countries is in our guide to work visa and Blue Card salary thresholds in Europe.

Related reading: Work visa & Blue Card salary thresholds in Europe 2026 · Salaries in Spain · Salaries in France

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Key Takeaways

1. The average salary is €33,148 a year gross (OECD, 2024 nominal). That is €2,762 ÷12, €2,550 ÷13 or €2,368 ÷14. Always state the divisor.
2. Thirteen instalments is the private-sector standard, with the tredicesima in December. Commerce, tourism and food usually add a fourteenth in June or July.
3. Italy publishes several defensible averages. The ISTAT €37,302 figure is real but its reference year is 2022, and it counts only full-time full-year employees.
4. Your contract category decides more than your city: dirigenti average €106,606 but are 1.1% of workers, while 94.4% are impiegati or operai.
5. There is no statutory minimum wage. Around 990 CCNLs set the floors, from €2,211.43 a month in engineering down to hourly rates of €7 to €9.
6. The north to south gap is roughly €5,000 to €6,000 a year, but so is the cost-of-living gap, and sponsoring employers cluster in the north.
7. Take-home on the average is roughly €1,800 to €1,950 a month over 12 payments, and it varies by region, municipality and family status.
8. The Blue Card bar of about €35,500 sits above the national average, so an average offer does not qualify. Target sectors that already clear it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the average salary in Italy per month?

The average salary in Italy is €33,148 a year gross, according to the OECD’s 2024 nominal figures. Divided by 12 that is €2,762 a month, but Italy pays across 13 instalments for almost all private-sector employees, so an ordinary payslip shows €2,550. In sectors that also pay a fourteenth instalment the ordinary-month figure is €2,368.

What is a good salary in Italy?

Anything clearly above the national average of €33,148 a year puts you ahead of most employees. In Milan, comfortable single living generally starts nearer €38,000 to €40,000 because of housing costs. Above €35,500 you also clear the EU Blue Card salary threshold, which matters if you need sponsorship.

Is there a minimum wage in Italy?

No. Italy is one of five EU member states without a statutory minimum wage, alongside Denmark, Austria, Finland and Sweden. Around 990 national collective agreements filed at CNEL set legal pay floors by sector instead. The Metalmeccanici floor for level C3 is €2,211.43 a month from 1 June 2026, and Commercio level 4 is about €1,785 a month from 1 November 2025. The €1,292.46 figure often quoted online is a pay component, not a minimum wage.

How much is take-home pay on the average Italian salary?

Roughly €1,800 to €1,950 a month for a single worker on the €33,148 average, spread over 12 payments. Deductions are INPS employee contributions of 9.19% and IRPEF at 23% up to €28,000, 33% up to €50,000 (cut from 35% by the 2026 budget law) and 43% above, plus regional and municipal surcharges that vary by where you live. Treat this as an estimate: your region, family status and CCNL all move the figure.

What salary do you need for an EU Blue Card in Italy?

About €35,500 gross a year at last check (August 2026): the law requires at least your CCNL rate and never less than the ISTAT average wage indicator, indexed to an ISTAT wage indicator, so it changes over time (last checked August 2026). You qualify with a three-year higher education qualification or with five years of relevant professional experience. The Blue Card sits outside the decreto flussi quota system, so there is no click day. Because the threshold is above the €33,148 national average, an average offer does not clear it.

If you’d like a personalised assessment of what you could earn in Italy, whether it clears the visa bar, and help tailoring your CV for Italian recruiters, find your career consultant.