Mothers' bonus: the budget raises it for those with two children. From those with three and a permanent job it can take up to three thousand euros a year

11 November 2026, 23:03

Throughout 2026, working women with at least three children and a permanent contract do not pay their share of the pension contribution, about nine per cent of gross pay: the State pays it in their place, up to three thousand euros a year, with no income limit. Mothers with two children, and those with three but a fixed-term contract, receive sixty euros a month instead. The budget law for 2027, now before Parliament, abolishes both forms of help and replaces them with a single allowance of one hundred euros a month, to be claimed from INPS, for those who have at least two children and earn no more than forty thousand euros a year from work.

With two children, the help rises from seven hundred and twenty to twelve hundred euros a year. With three and a permanent job, those who now have the full relief go down from three thousand to twelve hundred, eighteen hundred less; those above the forty-thousand threshold are left with nothing, and their pay packet becomes lighter by up to three thousand euros a year. The help grows for the second child and shrinks for the third.

That money does not disappear. From next January the pension share will again be paid by the worker, through a deduction from her pay, and the State will stop paying it for her: the saving goes to the Treasury. The technical report budgets spending of €1.07 billion a year; how many of the one hundred and eighty thousand mothers who now have the relief will lose out, it does not say. The bill for what the State spends is there; the bill for what mothers lose is not. To fund the spending, moreover, the budget gives up another relief for working mothers that had been envisaged from 2027, and so saves about three hundred million a year.

The measure is presented as help against the falling birth rate. In 2025, according to Istat, 355,000 babies were born in Italy and the average number of children per woman fell to 1.14, the lowest ever recorded. It is families with three or more children that raise that average, and it is precisely from the mothers of those families, if they have a stable job and a middle-class salary, that the budget takes away part of the help. Against the fall in births the State spends one billion and seventy million a year, paid by all taxpayers; to the mothers who have had more children, if they work in a stable job, it gives less than before.

If the rule stays as it is, from January 2027 a working woman with three children who earns forty-one thousand euros a year will receive the same allowance as a colleague with no children: none.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Fatto Quotidiano on 10 November 2026.