Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale (INPS), the National Institute for Social Security – Italy’s main public entity and authority of the country’s public retirement system, has come under fire after being accused by the General Confederation of Labour (CGIL), the country’s largest union, of unilaterally increasing retirement requirements.
According to Ezio Cigna, head of the pension policy department at GCIL, INPS has changed the criteria to calculate pensions for those opting to retire early, which will need 43 years and 1 month of contributions from 2027 to retire, and 43 years and 3 months from 2029.
The retirement age for those not opting to retire early will increase to 67 years and 3 months in 2027, and to 67 years and 5 months in 2029, Cigna added.
“We are deeply concerned for the recent, unilateral changes of the pension requirements made by INPS, without any official communication from the ministries and in a total absence of transparency,” said CGIL’s Lara Ghiglione.
Ghiglione added that the changes made by INPS, if confirmed, can’t be found in official documents.
The only reference on the matter is the 25th Report of the State General Accounting Department for 2024, which did not mention a retirement age increase for 2027, and an increase of only one month for 2029, she noted.
CGIL’s secretary general Maurizio Landini went so far as to demand a review of the mechanism to calculate pensions and access retirement.
“We cannot continue to increase the retirement age for everyone based on life expectancy regardless [of whether employees had] heavy jobs,” Landini said in an interview with La Republic newspaper.
Francesco Maria Chelli, the president of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), said during a hearing on the budget for the period 2025-2029 that increasing life expectancy in the medium term leads to a significant increase, under current legislation, of the retirement age.
Retirement age would increase from the current 67 years old to 67 years and 3 months from 2027, to 67 years and 6 months from 2029, and to 67 years and 9 months from 2031, to reach 69 years and 6 months from 2051, Chelli added during the hearing.
Meanwhile, the budget law for 2025, approved by Parliament in December, has extended for one year the so-called Quota 103, allowing people to retire at 62 years old and with 41 years of contributions, giving the possibility to add first and second pillar contributions to calculate minimum pension requirements.
CGIL’s allegations have caused a fuss, with INPS rushing to deny the application of new requirements to start receiving pensions. INPS guarantees that “certifications [for pensions] will be drawn up based on the tables currently published,” it said in a note.
But Alberto Bagnai, president of the parliamentary committee overseeing the activities of social welfare institutions, said the committee would consider auditing INPS on the matter, particularly to shed light on INPS using software to calculate future pensions of retirees.
INPS temporarily suspended the service to calculate pensions, officially “for maintenance”, following CGIL’s complaint.
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