2027 Budget, magistrates play their trump card: up to 100,000 euros each on the way

The coming New Year’s Eve will be a memorable one for Italy’s 11,000 magistrates. That evening, with the 2027 Budget Law having just been published in the Official Gazette, they will be able to pop open a bottle for special occasions: to celebrate the provision that will, on average, add almost 100,000 euros per person to their pay packets. Those higher up the hierarchy and with greater seniority will receive a little more, whilst others will receive a little less. But no one will be disappointed.

The news is buried in the tables of the Budget Policy Document. As was the case last year, the budget plan sent to Brussels includes a ‘judgement fund’ of 1.9 billion. In the last budget, the main beneficiary was TIM, which emerged victorious from a long-running tax dispute dating back to the late 1990s. This year, it is the turn of the judiciary.
A total of 970 million is earmarked for them, translating into gross costs to the State of over 70,000 euros per person as a one-off back pay and around 20,000 euros per year in salary. The latter are set to be incorporated into future salaries on a permanent basis. The largest sums will go to the 10,638 magistrates who were already in post in 2018; but to varying degrees, the changes affect everyone. And that’s not all: the knock-on effect could spread further. Why is that?

It all stems from the mechanism for calculating remuneration. Judges are classified as ‘staff governed by public law’, and their salaries are reviewed every three years on the basis of the average pay rises received in the meantime by those public-sector employees covered by collective agreements – that is, the vast majority of civil servants.
After a long, uneventful period, a storm has hit the mechanisms used by Istat to adjust the pay of those not covered by collective agreements. This led to a legal battle, which concluded at the Council of State, where the system used up to that point was rejected on multiple grounds. The basis for the calculation, the administrative judges wrote, had excluded allowances that should instead have been included, failed to take into account staff such as those in independent authorities, where pay rises are more substantial, and, by using a weighted average rather than a simple average, emphasised the weight of sectors with a large number of employees but low salaries, such as the education sector and local authorities.

In July 2025, a series of identical rulings by the Council of State struck down the Palazzo Chigi decree setting out the increases for 2018–20. And the same fate befell the measure covering 2021–23. The Government stalled, only to face further rulings from the administrative courts ordering it to comply. The State Legal Service’s long resistance has been overcome. However, the pay rises will also apply to its staff. The decrees adjusting salaries for the years 2018 to 2023 are ready. The Budget Bill will need to allocate the funds.

This brief overview is enough to show that the Government has no choice, because when faced with rulings at two levels, it has no option but to comply. From the Superbonus’s time bomb of a debt to the European rulings on the taxation of foreign subsidiaries, Economy Minister Giorgetti has, after all, been forced throughout this parliamentary term to sign cheques to honour past liabilities. This time, however, politically speaking, the move risks proving even more delicate: because the substantial payment to the judiciary will be triggered by the very same budget that, due to a lack of resources, is foregoing income tax cuts for the middle class and the tax exemption on thirteenth-month bonuses, and is engaged in a frantic battle over decimal points in an attempt to put together relief measures against soaring utility bills.