Employment: fixed-term contracts down compared with pre-Covid levels: -16 per cent
Adapt Report. The number of fixed-term workers has fallen from 3 million in 2019 to 2.5 million in 2025. Their share of the total workforce has fallen from 17 per cent to 13.6 per cent. Young people, women and foreign nationals are most at risk.
Contrary to the general perception, Italia has seen a net reduction in temporary work compared with the pre-pandemic situation. There were around 3 million fixed-term employees in 2019; by 2025, this figure had fallen to 2,517,000: a decrease of around 483,000, representing a fall of 16.1 per cent. What the figures do not reveal, however, is whether the fixed-term contract served as a stepping stone to permanent employment or whether it dragged on for years, condemning the worker to a precarious situation.
A report produced by Adapt, based on data from Eurostat , highlights that the decline over the years has not been linear: in 2020, during the pandemic crisis, the number of people in fixed-term employment had fallen to 2.61 million. It then rose again to exceed 3 million in 2022, before falling over the following three years: 2.94 million in 2023, 2.74 million in 2024 and 2.52 million in 2025 (the lowest figure since 2016). Then, the latest Istat figures from last June showed a recovery in fixed-term contracts, which rose to 2.542 million – 91,000 more than in May, a monthly jump not seen since September 2021 – and 33,000 more than in June 2025. The coming months will tell us whether we are witnessing a ‘structural’ recovery or whether the phenomenon is merely cyclical. In any case, we remain below pre-pandemic levels.
The proportion of fixed-term employees out of the total workforce has also fallen. It stood at 17 per cent in 2019; by 2025, it will have fallen to 13.6 per cent, a reduction of 3.4 percentage points. “The figure suggests that the recent growth in salaried employment,” comments Francesco Seghezzi, president of Adapt, “has not been driven primarily by fixed-term contracts. A substantial proportion of the increase has been in permanent employment contracts.”
Trends amongst young people and by gender
Let’s look at how the use of fixed-term contracts among young people has changed. In 2019, 48.1 per cent of employees aged between 15 and 29 were on a fixed-term contract. By 2025, this figure had fallen to 36.6 per cent. This represents a reduction of 11.5 percentage points; however, when we shift our focus from data on the total number of people in employment to data on recruitment trends, it becomes clear that more than one in three young employees is still employed on a fixed-term contract.
Looking at gender, in 2025 women accounted for just over half of temporary workers: around 1.28 million, compared with 1.24 million men. The gap between men and women remains wide: amongst young women, the proportion in fixed-term employment has fallen from 51.1 per cent to 41.3 per cent. Among young men, it has fallen from 45.9 to 33.2 per cent. Temporary employment therefore continues to affect women more frequently: in 2025, the gap between young female and male workers is more than 8 percentage points (it was just over 5 percentage points in 2019). For the entire 15–64 age group, the proportion of people in employment on fixed-term contracts fell from 16.7 per cent to 12.2 per cent amongst men and from 17.5 per cent to 15.3 per cent amongst women. The reduction in the use of temporary contracts has therefore been more pronounced for men.
