Retiring at 64 would be nice, but it’s not free. In exchange you have to give up something on your monthly check which for some could make a difference. The pension advance proposal was relaunched by the League in view of the 2027 budget law. From next year, in fact, the requirements for retiring will be adjusted to life expectancy: consequently, the age at which one stops working rises.
What does the League’s proposal on pensions provide?
The idea is to extend the early pension to 64 years also to workers in the mixed system, i.e. to those who have contributions paid before 1 January 1996. Today this possibility is foreseen, with precise requirements, for those who fall entirely into the contributory system.
The scheme illustrated by the Undersecretary of Labour, Claudio Durigon, would instead provide for at least 25 years of contributions, the recalculation of the entire pension with the contributory method and the possibility of using a part of the TFR transforming it into an annuity if the allowance does not reach the required threshold. We will talk about it in view of the next financial maneuver, the last of the Meloni government.
Retirement at 64, who can go there today
Before seeing the simulations it is necessary to distinguish the proposal from the rules already in force. In 2026, the contributory early pension allows those who do not have contributory seniority prior to 1996 to leave work at 64, with at least 20 years of actual contributions. However, there is an economic obstacle: the first installment of the pension must reach at least three times the social allowance.
In 2026 the social allowance is equal to 546.24 euros. The ordinary threshold is therefore 1,638.72 euros gross per month. The INPS provides lower limits for working mothers: 1,529.47 euros with one child and 1,420.22 euros with at least two children. Furthermore, the pension takes effect after a window of three months from the fulfillment of the requirements. Until reaching old age, the amount paid cannot exceed five times the INPS minimum payment.
Pensions 2027 and 2028: age and contributions increase
Meanwhile, one certain fact: from 1 January 2027 the requirements will increase by one month, while in 2028 the overall increase will be three months. For the contributory early pension it means what is summarized in the table.
The age for the old-age pension also rises: 67 years and one month in 2027 and 67 years and three months in 2028. For the ordinary early pension, however, in 2027 42 years and 11 months of contributions will be needed for men and 41 years and 11 months for women, while in 2028 43 years and one month and 42 years and one month respectively. There are specific exclusions from the adjustment for some heavy and wearing categories.
The real obstacle to retiring at 64: the minimum threshold
It is precisely the threshold of 1,638.72 euros that risks making exit at 64 much more difficult than it might seem. The Cgil Social Security Observatory, in an analysis carried out by Ezio Cigna, simulated the contribution allowance obtainable with 25 years of payments and different salaries.
In other words, with 25 years of contributions it would not be enough to simply have reached the age of 64. With a salary of 20 thousand or 30 thousand euros gross, the simulated check would remain very far from the economic requirement. Only in the 50 thousand euro profile would the pension exceed the current threshold. And the salary risks not being enough.
The average Italian salary risks not being enough even after 40 years
The CGIL carried out another simulation taking as a reference 24,486 euros gross, i.e. the average annual salary of private employees indicated in the 2024 INPS data, excluding agriculture and domestic work. The threshold would exclude many taxpayers.
Even after 40 years of contributions, in the profile based on the average salary, the allowance would therefore remain lower than the 1,638.72 euros requested today. According to the union simulations, in profiles with 25 and 30 years of payments it would not even be sufficient to transform all the TFR accrued into an annuity to reach the threshold.
The difficulty may increase further over time. In fact, the legislation establishes that from 2030, for the majority of workers affected by the contributory early pension, the minimum amount will increase from three to 3.2 times the social allowance. The reductions foreseen for working mothers remain unchanged.
In the CGIL projection, assuming a growth of the social allowance of 1% per year, in 2030 the ordinary threshold would reach approximately 1,819 euros per month.
How much you lose by retiring at 64: simulations
Then there is the second problem: how much the entirely contributory recalculation would cost for those who currently belong to the mixed system. To verify this, the CGIL built three profiles of 64-year-old workers with a total of 40 years of contributions, of which nine accrued before 1996 and 31 subsequently.
The table shows the comparison between the pension calculated with the mixed system and that obtained by applying the contributory contribution over the entire career.
The reduction resulting from the recalculation would be permanent: it would not disappear once you reach old age pension age. A paradox also emerges in the first example. With the mixed system, the 35 thousand euro worker would have a pension higher than the minimum threshold, 1,726 euros. However, by accepting the recalculation of contributions, he would drop to 1,543 euros and would no longer have the economic requirements to retire at 64.
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To recover the approximately 95 euros per month missing from the threshold, according to the simulation, he would have to transform approximately 24,360 euros of severance pay into an income. “To retire earlier, a worker would have to accept a lower public pension for life,” Cigna notes in the analysis, criticizing the mechanism. By projecting the reduction of the allowance onto the residual life expectancy used in the simulation, the CGIL estimates a lower cumulative pension in the order of:
- 55 thousand euros in the profile with a salary of 35 thousand euros;
- 79 thousand euros with 50 thousand euros;
- over 110 thousand euros in the case of the 70 thousand euros.
Pension at 64 and severance pay: how it would work
The proposal relaunched by Durigon focuses precisely on severance pay to overcome the problem of the minimum threshold. A portion of the settlement would be transformed into an annuity and added to the pension.
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The undersecretary gave the example of a worker who accrues a pension of 1,300 euros and can obtain another 400 euros per month through severance pay, thus managing to exceed the minimum requirement. Preferential taxation of the annuity and guarantees regarding reversibility have also been proposed.
However, these are aspects yet to be defined. Not all TFR of private employees is deposited in the INPS Treasury Fund and at the moment there is no regulatory framework for the new mechanism, the annuity coefficients, the tax rules and the precise methods to be applied in the event of the pensioner’s death.