Pa, for ministries and tax authorities double increases compared to the contract

It is not only contractual renewals that a civil servant's pay packet lives on. Who can also count on specific allowances, career progressions and additional funds for ancillary items. When there are.

The Semi-annual Report on Pay in the Public Sector presented by Aran offers an unprecedented coring in the real life of public salaries. A detailed examination of the 'de facto salaries', i.e. the real sums credited on pay slips, in the Central Functions sector, which includes ministries, tax agencies and non-economic public bodies such as INPS and INAIL, shows that between 2021 and 2023, the last year recorded so far in the General Accounting Office's annual account, the average payroll grew by a robust 13%, i.e. almost double the 7% increase expected on the basis of the effects of the contractual renewal that took place in the period. These numbers 'show that investments in organisation, career and productivity generate real value for public workers', comments Minister for the Public Administration Paolo Zangrillo.
But how do you explain this spread?

The X-ray details the causes. In that three-year period, the 2019/21 contract was renewed and signed definitively on 9 May 2022. That contract brought an average increase of 3.3% on the tabular, the fixed base of remuneration, and another 2.6% in the form of the administration allowance. The contractual holiday allowance for 2022/24 then yielded +2.2%. But the career mechanisms generated a further average increase of 1% and a +3.2% can be read in the boxes on productivity and results.
Numbers like these deserve some explanation. Especially now that the new awakening of inflation threatens to make itself felt on the current renewal tables, for the first time relating to the current three-year period thanks to the acceleration of the last few years.

First of all, that of the Central Functions, especially for ministries (+15.1% average remuneration between 2021 and 2023) and tax agencies (+14.7%, while public bodies stop at +6.5%), is a special case, because the reshaping of the 'administration allowances' has put important extra resources on the table; with 'equalising' interventions, which have therefore acted on the ministries where the allowances were lighter.
The ministerial scenario is special but not unique. Because the arrival of additional sums to the ordinary contractual channels has concerned, for example, the health care, with effects that will begin to be read in depth with the next annual account of the Ragioneria. But there is another consequence to consider.
Two large sectors, those of 'Education and Research' and 'Local Functions', which in total accumulate 1.6 million employees, are largely excluded from this relative liveliness in pay. And that also in the contractual field have travelled so far at a calmer pace.

It is again the Aran Report that draws a summary of average contractual salaries between 2015 and 2025. Here the supremacy of Central Functions (+17.7%) and health is explained by an extra renewal, because the 2022/24 contracts were signed on 27 and 28 October 2025, while Education and Local Functions, both at +13.4%, had to wait for this year's payroll to feel the effects of their agreements. But the fact remains that in the school career dynamics are effectively absent, and in the local functions basic salaries and ancillary funds are more modest. The result is a thickening of the pay variables, in a landscape that appears more dull on the sides of education, municipalities and provinces.
The ten-year comparison also shows that the increase in public payrolls (+14.9% on average) remains below the inflation of the period (+22.6%). The figure is influenced by the fact that renewals were frozen until 2018, so the recovery has intensified in recent years. But now the rise in prices threatens to reshuffle the accounts.