Andrea Innocenti With the approval of the 2027 budget law, the government has decided to address the delicate mechanism that determines magistrates' salary increases . Following the recent rulings of the Council of State that annulled previous decrees, the new provision focuses on two operational levers, both included in Article 67 of the budget bill.
Until recently, magistrates, state attorneys, and prosecutors were automatically adjusted every three years, based on the average of the increases recorded by the categories of public employees covered by contracts. This model, also called a simple average , assigned equal weight to each category, regardless of the number of employees it comprised. Recent court decisions have highlighted how this approach had generated a massive backlog of nearly €979 million , destined to burden the state coffers.
Article 67: the transition to the weighted average
The most significant innovation is the shift from a simple average to a weighted average . Istat will now have to calculate average increases taking into account the numerical size of each category of contracted public employees. In practice, the largest categories, such as school staff, will have a greater weight in determining the average, while the small elites (such as the managers of Palazzo Chigi) will see their impact diminish.
This choice is justified in the technical report as a way to “avoid misrepresentations of the actual average per capita increase”.
The result is a rebalancing of the calculation base : categories with smaller increases, but with a large number of employees, push the average downward. For magistrates, this translates into a smaller annual increase than previously forecast, limiting the salary jump, which could have exceeded €558 gross per month for top positions.
Exclusion of arrears and financial impact
The second measure envisaged by Article 67 concerns the exclusion of arrears from the calculation of the average. Until now, when contracted categories signed a renewal after years of stagnation, arrears were included in the average, artificially inflating the growth index. By removing these one-off amounts, the government eliminates the risk of double counting that could have inflated future increases for magistrates.
From a budgetary perspective, the measure allows for containing the expected expenditure for judges, preventing the burden of retroactive penalties—which in some cases can reach up to €100.000 per person —from translating into further, higher increases. However, the decision has reignited political debate: some right-wing figures have launched a critical campaign, while the prime minister has threatened not to sign the decree, a move that, while theoretically possible, would still require the intervention of a commissioner to enforce the sentences.
Possible constitutional appeals
The affected groups, particularly magistrates and state lawyers, have already announced their intention to consider appeals to the Constitutional Court , arguing that the unilateral change to the adjustment mechanism violates the principle of autonomy and independence of the judiciary enshrined in the Constitution. The debate between the institutions appears set to continue in the coming months, with the risk of further tensions between the executive and the judiciary.