Pensions, after the squeeze on early payouts: only 187,223 payouts in the first three months

Due in part to the waning of the Quota 100 effect and the arrival of Quota 103, now in a 'penalised' version, the race to retire is slowing down significantly, especially in the civil service. In the first three months of 2024, the Inps liquidated 187,223 new pensions, a drop of 16.16% compared to the same period in 2023. And there were 56,660 advance treatments, accounting for about 30% of the total. This is what emerges from the institution's Observatory on the Monitoring of Retirement Flows. The average amount of the new pensions is €1,225, with large fluctuations between the various categories: an average of €888 for old-age cheques and €2,017 for early ones, linked to a higher number of contributions. The 'welfare gender gap' remains marked. Overall, the new benefits paid to women are worth an average of €999 compared to €1,473 for men: 32 per cent less. The Inps data also show that, after the further restrictions introduced by the last budget law, access to the Women's Option collapses: there were only 1,276 retirements while in 2023 as a whole they had reached 11,514.

The Inps reports that the total number of pensions taking effect in 2023 is 819,236, with an average monthly amount at the start of the year of EUR 1,206. There were 187,223 cheques paid with effect from the first quarter of 2024. Specifically, in the first three months of this year, 72,829 old-age pensions, 56,660 early retirement pensions, 8,756 disability pensions, and 48,978 survivors' pensions were paid out.

The monitoring shows that the new pensions paid out between January and March 2024 are 86,031 for private sector employees (average monthly amount of 1,446 euro) and 57,332 for the self-employed as a whole, i.e. direct cultivators, artisans and traders (867 euro on average per month). There were 18,905 benefits paid to civil servants for an average amount of 2,268 euro, mainly due to the weight of early retirement pensions, which absorbed more than half of the benefits paid (10,287 with an average amount of 2,483 euro). In the same period, 9,752 treatments were allocated to parasubordinate workers (EUR 221 per month on average).

The only category of pensions that grew in the first quarter was social allowances (24,955 allowances for an average amount of 497 per month). The category where the largest drop in the number of people entering retirement was recorded was that of civil servants: the number of liquidated treatments dropped from 29,059 to 18,905 (-34.94%) with a slowdown observed for old age and early retirement allowances and above all for invalidity (from 1,192 to 225 pensions) and survivors (from 11,076 to 4,602). For the 10,287 early benefits paid in the civil service (down 16.3% on the same period in 2023) the average age of access to a pension rises to 61.8 years.