Over 80% of the Italian municipalities declared in financial difficulty in the last five years are concentrated in three regions, all in Southern Italy: Campania, Calabria and Sicily.
Municipalities in financial difficulty
The data, updated to 31 December 2025, emerged from the report to Parliament of the Court of Auditors on Municipalities in a crisis situation: “The critical aspect – explain the accounting judges – is the strong territorial concentration: Sicily, Calabria and Campania account for 63.6% of the crisis procedures activated overall and 80.4% of the declared failures”.
As specified in the report, the percentages of Municipalities that have experienced at least one procedure are also very high in the three regions: “In Calabria they are 54%, in Sicily 41% and in Campania 39%. In the most affected territories, the crises cannot be traced back only to the management of the single entity, but reflect economic, social, organizational and institutional factors that affect the entire multilevel system, with a strong heterogeneity of regional interventions, including financial support, technical assistance, prevention funds and autonomous systems of monitoring”.
The rebalancing procedures
Another worrying fact concerns the few rebalancing procedures brought to conclusion: “Among the particularly relevant critical aspects, the first concerns the limited effectiveness of the procedures. In fact, only 16.1% of the rebalancing initiated was formally concluded, while 35.2% resulted in failure. Of the 23 failures declared in 2025, 14 were preceded by an unsuccessful rebalancing”.
“A further element of structural criticality – we read again in the document – concerns the duration of the procedures, with only 17.1% of the failures concluded, since 2007, within the foreseen five-year period and 99 of the 227 failures still active that have overcome it. This is of particular attention, as the continuation of crisis situations can affect the actual ability of the entities to reach a stable financial balance”.
Overall, the municipal sector remains “solid”, as underlined in the conclusions of the report: “The 485 active procedures concern 484 entities, equal to 6.1% of Italian municipalities. The full-blown crises involve, however, approximately 6.5 million inhabitants and a passive mass estimated at 6.2 billion euros. Furthermore, since the introduction of the current instruments, 1,448 procedures have been activated: 818 disruptions and 630 rebalancing, referring to 1,033 Municipalities”.