The bill on the bill stops in the House equal leavedesigned to extend the paternity leave until five monthsmaking it largely obligatory and fully paid, and at the same time strengthening the economic protections linked to maternity. The Budget Commission expressed negative opinion after the State General Accounting Office deemed 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 – 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, set to rise to 637 million per year from 2035. According to the Accounting Office, however, this estimate was incomplete because it did not take into account self-employed women. Even higher i item two costsdedicated to equal leave: 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 expenditurebut 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 a equal leave for the father, bringing the duration of the current paternity leave from ten days to five monthslargely mandatory 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-transferablewith ten days to be used immediately after birth together with the mother and the remaining period can 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 stated objective was twofold: redistribute the care load within families e reduce the negative effects of motherhood on women’s careers, in a country that 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. The maternity leave it is a period of compulsory abstention of five monthsmodulable before and after childbirth, with an indemnity equal to80 percent of the salarypaid by INPS and advanced by the employer.
The compulsory paternity leaveas we wrote, is limited to ten daysnot necessarily consecutive, paid to 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 leave, there is also the parental leavean optional tool that can be used by both parents up to the child’s twelve years of age, within a total limit of eleven months. Historically paid at 30 percentparental leave has been strengthened in recent years: first the 2023 budget law and then that of 2024 raised the allowance to80 percent of the salary for two monthsto 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 services, in 2024, 171,713 female employees in the private sector began to receive maternity benefitsdecreasing by 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, mandatory paternity leave has reached 2024 just under 182 thousand fathersequal 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 beneficiariesagainst 124 thousand men. Not only that: women on average benefited from 53 daysmore than double that of 22 days of men.
As stated in the report, the reforms that increased the parental leave allowance have actually increased the number of fathers taking it, but they 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.
