Jobs, accommodation and catering drive recruitment: boom in seasonal contracts

The fixed-term contract continues to be the type preferred by companies to hire in the first half of 2025. But for new activations there is a surprise: seasonal workers outnumber permanent workers. Driving the labour market are accommodation and catering, professional services, construction and trade.

Looking at the data from the Inps labour market observatory, it emerges that recruitment in the first half of the year exceeded 4.2 million, but was down by 2.6% compared to the first half of 2024: the downturn affected all types with the exception of seasonal and intermittent work contracts - the least protected types - which grew. The most common method used by companies to hire in the first half of the year is still fixed-term contracts, which numbered 1.8 million (-2.9%); the novelty is represented by the exploit of seasonal employment contracts, with new activations exceeding 680,000 (+1%) and overtaking new permanent contracts, These were followed by 473,000 new temporary contracts (-4.2%) and 439,000 new hirings with intermittent contracts (+3.6%), and finally, apprenticeship hirings continued to fall to 148,000 (-8.3%).

It must be said, however, that conversions to permanent contracts in the same time frame increased to 465,000 (of these 405,000 are stabilisations of fixed-term contracts, up 5% on 2024). Between recruitments and stabilisations, however, the comparison with the first half of 2024 shows a negative sign, stopping at 4.7 million employment relationships (-1.8%). Terminations also decreased in the first half of 2025: 3.3 million (-2.9% compared to the first half of 2024).

In June, the annualised balance - the difference between the flows of hirings and terminations in the last twelve months - was positive by 352 thousand jobs in the private sector (it was +358 thousand in May). Permanent contracts accounted for more than 92% of this tendential variation with a balance of +325 thousand employment relationships, a positive contribution came from intermittent employment relationships (+29 thousand), seasonal (+15 thousand) and temporary work (+6 thousand), while apprenticeships (-11 thousand) and fixed-term employment relationships (-12 thousand) fell. Looking in more detail at the changes in employment positions by sector, between the first half of 2024 and 2025, accommodation and catering stands out with +68 thousand, followed by the professional tertiary sector (software production, IT consultancy and related activities), which is close to +68 thousand labour relations activated, construction (+59 thousand) and trade (+50 thousand).

In the first six months of 2025, the activations of incentivised labour relations - including both new hirings and contractual changes - grew by +24% compared to the same period of 2024, if we exclude the Decontribuzione Sud measure (no longer valid for new activations occurring from 1 July 2024), otherwise the decrease would be 68.3%. Activations with contributory exemption for the hiring of young people grew (+58.1%) as well as other measures such as the total contributory exemption for the hiring of disadvantaged persons or the incentive for the hiring of the disabled (+7%), while there was a decrease for the women's incentive (-1.6%).