The Pa changes its skin: 614,000 hires in the last three years

The demographic hump has begun to thicken the path to retirement for public employees precisely at the stage when the parameters for recruitment have been widened, with the limits gradually disappearing (this year the 25% cut to the state civil service turnover introduced for 2025 alone by the penultimate manoeuvre has also fallen). At the same time, the reform of competitions has drastically reduced the timeframe of the procedures, reducing the average timeframe to four months from the two years that the old rules used to separate the announcement from the recruitment.

There is the intersection of these factors behind the phenomenon photographed by the new Fpa Annual Report, which will be presented today in Rome. And which shows that between 2023 and 2025, 614,000 people entered the workforce of the public administration, with an average age of 39 years that contributed to lowering the figure on the identity card of the typical civil servant by more than three years. Thanks to this rich incoming flow, the public administrations show a staff turnover rate approaching 20 per cent; and that is destined to grow even more in the coming years, as can be seen with a glance at the seniority bands reported in the Treasury's annual statement.
The race, the report points out, sifting through the most up-to-date data on the InPa portal of public competitions, is in full swing in these weeks as well. In the first few days of 2026, 410,000 applications rained in for the 10,000 posts put out to tender by the various PAs, after a 2025 that counted just under 20,000 procedures with which 204,000 jobs were offered.

Numbers like these lend themselves to more than one interpretation. The acceleration in recruitment is undeniable, and has helped the Pa to touch the 3.4 million employee threshold for the first time. However, at the moment, this dynamic represents only a partial recovery of the 'time lost' during the long years of dieting, which have seen the Italian public administration gradually move away from the European averages: so much so that Italy still has just under 5.8 public employees per 100 inhabitants, compared to 7.3 in Germany, 8.3 in France and 8.5 in the United Kingdom. In short, there is still a long way to go; and it must address the structural nodes of attractiveness, especially in local authorities as shown by a non-trivial rate of renouncements by competition winners, and a turnover of skills that the high turnover can help.

Because along with personnel, the priorities on the agenda of administrations are also changing. At the top of the list is, of course, the digital transition, which now grinds out impressive figures but also raises new unknowns. The report analyses the figures of the Pa Digitale 2026 platform, which involves over 23 thousand entities, with 81 thousand active projects, EUR 2.8 billion allocated and EUR 1.6 billion disbursed. The funds have been used to migrate data and tools to the cloud, renew institutional websites, and activate systems such as Spid, PagoPa, the Io app, and now the National Digital Data Platform (Pdnd), which finally makes it possible to really implement the 'once only' principle (the PA does not have to ask citizens for data and documents it already has), as in the Isee simplifications coming with the Pnrr decree (Sole 24 Ore, 16 January).
But the increasingly digital connotation of the public system exposes it to new dangers, such as cyber attacks, which, Fpa points out, find one of their epicentres in Italy. On a yearly basis, attacks have increased by 140%, with 280 incidents in the first half of the year alone, concentrating 26.3% of European cases in our country. And artificial intelligence (Agid counts 120 initiatives in the central PA alone, focused on internal organisation and data management) also raises new challenges, which were also addressed by the contract renewal discussed yesterday at the Aran meeting with the trade unions on the central PA sector. "Now it is crucial to continue with determination on the road of innovation and transformation," reasons Gianni Dominici, Fpa's CEO, "to make the heritage of innovation built with the PNRR an integral part of daily governance.