Non-EU work, out of quota carers for the disabled and the elderly

While the opinions of the competent parliamentary commissions are awaited for the final approval of the Dpcm with the 2026-2028 programming of the entry of foreign workers into Italy, a new decree law Flussi will land on the table of the Council of Ministers today.

With the measure, the mechanism of pre-filled applications, which had been envisaged for 2025 by Decree Law 145/2024, becomes structural, with a maximum of three nulla osta requests for subordinate work for each employer (and no limit, however, for applications transmitted through employers' organisations). An innovation dear to the Executive, wanted to anticipate the control phase and flush out fraud and abuse.

For admissions for 2026 (quantified in the preliminary Dpcm approved at the end of June at 164,850 and destined to rise to 165,850 for 2027 and 166,850 for 2028, divided between 230,550 non-seasonal employees and self-employed workers and 267,000 seasonal workers), the will of the Executive is to complete the regulatory framework by mid-September, with the final green light also to the Dpcm preliminarily examined at the end of June, in order to be able to start from 1 October with the pre-filling of applications on the Ali portal of the Ministry of the Interior. Although government sources believe it is possible to postpone it by a few days. The first scheduled click day, barring changes, should be on 12 January for agricultural seasonal workers.

The same decree sanctions the structural nature of out-of-quota admissions for caregivers and assistants to the elderly and severely disabled, without numerical limits. Here again, what was experimented this year thanks to decree 145/2024 is confirmed, eliminating the 10,000-entry ceiling.

Finalised between Palazzo Chigi, the Ministry of Labour and the Viminale, the text thus aims to consolidate the main innovations introduced last year by the government. The macro objective is the one reiterated by Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano during his hearing in Parliament on 29 July: to gradually reform the quota system and enhance non-quota admissions in order to arrive, in the future, at overcoming the click day in favour of a booking system open all year round that allows to match real needs with availability, as both employers' organisations and the Regions are calling for, most recently in the opinion on the Prime Minister's Decree dated 30 July.