Domestic work: over half the sector is in the informal economy (56.6 per cent). Households are being squeezed by rising service costs (+20 per cent)

Domestic employment is set to rise over the three-year period 2023–2025 (+7.6 per cent), driven in part by an irregular employment rate that has reached 56.6 per cent, whilst households are grappling with rates that have risen by 20 per cent over the past decade. This is the picture painted by the new chapter of the 2026 Family (Net) Work Report, published by Assindatcolf (the National Association of Domestic Employers). The report, presented in Rome on Thursday 5 November, was compiled by the Fondazione Studi Consulenti del Lavoro.

According to the survey, between 2023 and 2025 employment in the sector rose by 7.6 per cent, taking the number of jobs from 1,381,000 in 2023 to 1,486,000 in 2025 (+7.6 per cent), with particularly marked growth in the last year (+4 per cent). At the same time, the rate of irregular employment has also begun to rise again, having fallen significantly following the regularisations of 2020–2021. In 2024, this stood at 56.6 per cent, confirming the difficulty of eradicating a phenomenon that represents a structural feature of the domestic labour market and which, given its scale, has implications far beyond the sector’s boundaries: domestic work alone accounts for 33.7 per cent of irregular salaried employment in Italy. In the theoretical scenario of a complete formalisation of the domestic informal sector, the rate of irregular salaried employment in the country would fall from 13.2 per cent to 8.6 per cent.

The survey carried out in July 2026 as part of the Family (Net) Work project, based on a sample of over 4,000 households that use the services of domestic workers, shows that, over the three-year period 2024–2026, 41.6 per cent reported an increase in their need for domestic and care services, whilst a much higher proportion – 71.7 per cent – reported a rise in costs. The pressure is particularly acute amongst households employing carers, where 67.3 per cent of respondents reported an increase in needs and 86 per cent reported a rise in expenditure.

The trend in prices for home care services is also putting a strain on household budgets; these prices have risen by 20 per cent between 2015 and 2025, with the increase concentrated mainly in the last three years. It is therefore not surprising that 65.4 per cent of households employing one or more carers report spending over €1,500 a month, and 28.9 per cent more than €2,000. The growing gap between needs and available resources is forcing families to make increasingly complex choices, particularly as not all services can be reduced or replaced to the same extent.

Over the three-year period under review, 56.6 per cent of the households surveyed reported that one or more members had increased the time spent caring for others or managing the home; 24.9 per cent had made greater use of their family and informal support networks. Furthermore, in 22.1% of cases, at least one member had altered their working arrangements to cope with domestic and care responsibilities. For many households, this results in an increasingly difficult balancing act between work and care responsibilities, even when domestic help is employed.