Domestic workers and carers: 173,000 legally employed workers lost since 2021
The number of home carers recorded by the Institute has fallen from 977,000 to 804,000 over four years. The sharpest decline has been in the southern regions. The lack of financial support for families is a major factor.
Key points
There are 172,780 domestic carers who will be missing from the workforce between 2025 and 2021. Specifically, this amounts to 126,973 domestic workers (-24 per cent) and 45,807 carers (-10 per cent). This ‘shortfall’ therefore mainly affects general domestic workers, rather than carers for the elderly, in a country where care needs are constantly growing, with a quarter of the population aged over 65.
The figures
A comparison between the 804,464 domestic workers recorded by INPS in 2025 (the figures were published on 18 June) with those from 2021 – the year in which the number of workers in the sector reached almost one million – given the need to regularise their status in order to move around during the pandemic – reveals an average decline of 17.7 per cent in the number of legally employed domestic workers. In 13 regions, however, the decline exceeds the average: from -30 per cent in Molise to declines of between 20 and 28 per cent in Calabria, Campania, Basilicata and Sicily.
In Veneto, there are 16,168 fewer domestic workers than four years ago (of whom 4,505 are carers); in Emilia-Romagna, 17,687 fewer (of whom 5,082 are carers); in Lombardy there are 31,608 fewer (of whom just over 2,000 are carers), and in Lazio 18,844 fewer (of whom 2,698 are carers). Where have these jobs gone? The most common response among industry professionals is that they have returned to the black economy, as had already happened in the years following the 2012 amnesty for domestic workers. The 2023–2025 National Plan to Combat Undeclared Work, approved by the Government in 2022 as part of the implementation of the NRRP, estimated that there were 782,000 undeclared workers among home carers, accounting for over a quarter of all estimated undeclared workers in Italia.
Possible causes
“We have lost 173,000 domestic workers in four years,” points out Andrea Zini, president of Assindatcolf, the national association of domestic employers. “There could be two explanations,” he continues, “either households have resorted to undeclared work to cut costs, in the absence of financial support, or care work is being taken on by a family member, mostly a woman. But even in this case we would face a problem, because the pool of women not in paid employment outside the home has remained the only one available to offset the decline in the labour supply caused by demographic trends’.
According to Rosario Rasizza, managing director of Family Care, an employment agency specialising in home care, “the studies we have available indicate that there are one million carers in Italy: 400,000 are legally employed, and all the rest are working off the books. The only way out of this situation is to allow families to claim tax relief on the costs incurred for home carers, as is the case in France’.
