Pensions from 2027: the cut is the same for everyone, life expectancy is not

23 October 2026, 18:25

On 16 October the Ministry of Labour, together with the Ministry of Economy, signed a decree that almost nobody has read. From 1 January 2027 the conversion coefficients change: the percentages that turn the contributions paid over a working life into a pension. With the same payments and the same age, the pension falls. A pension calculated entirely on payments that this year, at 67, is worth €1,500 gross a month will be worth €25 less next year. Every month, for ever.

No vote is needed. It is provided for by Law 335 of 1995, which requires the coefficients to be revised «on the basis of demographic surveys»: today the revision comes every two years, with a punctuality other offices can only dream of. The reasoning is this: if Italians live longer, the pension is paid for more years, and each instalment has to be smaller. The sums add up. They add up on the average.

But whose life is longer? The table that comes with the decree is meticulous. The probabilities of death are broken down by age and by sex, and there is even the average age gap between husband and wife, which is used for survivors' pensions, the ones that pass to the spouse after death. The job done for forty years is not there. The bricklayer and the company director, at the same age, get the same coefficient.

One difference ISTAT (Italy's national statistics institute) has measured: the one by level of education. In the tables published in 2016, based on 2012 deaths, a 67-year-old man with a degree had on average 1.8 more years of life ahead of him than one who had stopped at lower secondary school at most. In 2018 Carlo Lallo and Michele Raitano, economists who studied the archives of INPS (Italy's social security agency), wrote that Italian rules, by calculating pensions on average life expectancy, turn the system into a «regressive» redistribution, from those who live less to those who live longer. It is solidarity, but in reverse.

The sum missing from the decree is simple. With the same pension of €1,500 gross a month, thirteenth payment included, that gap of 1.8 years is worth about €35,000: that is how much less someone who stopped at lower secondary school collects than a graduate, on the same payments. That money does not vanish: it stays in the common pot and pays for the extra years of those who live longer.

So every two years the cut arrives the same for everyone, because everyone, on average, lives longer. Someone who has spent a lifetime on building sites sees the pension reduced as if they were going to live as long as the average. That average, however, is pushed up by the extra years of those who spent their lives in an office.

So the question, for the Ministry of Labour: if the table has room for the age gap between husband and wife, why is there none for the years of life that separate those who worked on building sites from those who sat behind a desk?

Before the coefficient, all Italians are equal. Before ISTAT, they are not.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Avvenire on 22 October 2026.