Instead, the cut from 35% to 33% of the Irpef rate for incomes between 28 thousand and 50 thousand euros will be applied to everyone, employees and pensioners, which only sees its effects sterilized over 200 thousand euros of income.
Rewards and productivity
On average, the highest earnings that workers benefiting from a productivity bonus could collect in 2026 and 2027 are worth 64 euros. The average value of the incentive – recognized by virtue of company or territorial contracts – is currently 1,600 euros. The substitute tax would go from 5% applied today to 1% next year. The saving is therefore equivalent to four percentage points of the premium.
The maximum threshold of the subsidized amount, based on the Budget Bill, will rise from 3 thousand to 5 thousand euros. But this second intervention may not be decisive, given the current average amount of the incentive salary. Companies, excluding some cases, would hardly be able to grant workers bonuses of 5 thousand euros per year. The worker’s income threshold, in order to access the productivity bonus, remains set at 80 thousand euros per year. Today, 4.7 million workers benefit from these incentives (data from the Ministry of Labor).
Stagnant productivity
The objective of the highly discounted 1% levy is to support productivity, which remains stagnant, despite the increase in employment, which has reached 24.1 million. As noted by the CNEL in the recent Annual Productivity Report 2025, in the period 1995-2024, the average annual increase in productivity in Italy stood at around 0.2%, compared to the 1.2% recorded in the EU-27 (1% in Germany, 0.8% in France, 0.6% in Spain).
Among the causes highlighted by the Report, there is the fact that employment has increased in sectors with lower average productivity, such as construction, catering, healthcare and assistance. Among other reasons, the gap between Italy and the European average in intangible investments, such as software, research and development, organizational capital. The skills gap among workers also weighs heavily (a higher level of skills is associated with higher labor productivity). «Italy – we read – suffers from a structural delay in the digital skills of the workforce: only 16% of workers have high ICT skills, compared to around 30% in Germany and France; only 15% of graduates are in STEM disciplines, compared to a European average of 26 percent”.
