Magistrates' pay: the State miscalculated it for years, and the bill lands in the budget that cannot find the money for income tax cuts

16 October 2026, 20:19

In the tables of the 2027 budget sent to Brussels, Il Sole 24 Ore found a line: a «rulings fund» worth €1.9 billion. Of this, €970 million is to pay magistrates. According to the newspaper it would go to about eleven thousand people: more than €70,000 gross in arrears for those already in service in 2018 and a salary higher by about €20,000 a year. The National Association of Magistrates disputes the figures: for someone with twenty years of service, it says, the amount is less than a quarter of what the newspaper wrote.

It is not a gift. Magistrates' pay is updated every three years, based on the average rises of other public employees. The State calculated that average on the low side: it left out some allowances, excluded the staff of bodies such as the Antitrust Authority and Consob, who had higher rises, and gave more weight to schools and municipalities, which have many employees, so the average went down. In July 2025 the Council of State struck down the method. The government's lawyers resisted for a long time, and lost.

The sums, the magistrates' association writes, are «due by law» and «the administration failed to pay them for years». So the State paid less than it owed, waited for a judge to tell it so, and now pays everything at once.

In the wrong year, though. For all the tax measures of 2027 the government has set aside €2.16 billion. Extending the 33 per cent income tax rate up to €60,000 of income, the cut promised to the middle class, would cost €2.7 billion. The rulings fund alone is worth almost as much as all the tax measures in the budget. According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, to make room for that spending the Ministry of Economy is giving up the income tax cuts for the middle class and the tax relief on the thirteenth-month salary.

And the bill could grow. The same link to other public employees' rises applies to university professors and the military, and the calculation could be wrong for them too: researchers' unions are already preparing a collective appeal. The magistrates' rises for 2024-2026, meanwhile, remain pending. As long as the calculation stays wrong, the arrears pile up.

The budget bill has yet to reach Parliament, and that is where it will be decided what comes first: the arrears a judge has imposed or the income tax cut the government had promised.

So the question, for the Ministry of Economy: if the judges also side with professors and the military, how much will their arrears cost, and in which budget have they already been provided for?

For the magistrates, the bill was written by a judge. For the middle class, by no one.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Sole 24 Ore on 16 October 2026.