Hiring a cleaner or a live-in carer in Italy: notification, contributions, extra month, holidays and termination

Laura lives in Bologna, and from Monday a carer will look after her mother for 25 hours a week at an agreed monthly wage of €900. At 11 pm on Sunday she realises she has not told INPS yet. She has one hour left: the notice is due by midnight on the day before the job starts, even when that day is a Sunday.

When a household becomes an employer

A family that brings in a cleaner, a nanny or a carer for an elderly parent is not buying a service from a supplier. It is hiring an employee. The individual who pays becomes a domestic employer, with duties towards the worker and towards INPS, the social security institute, that do not shrink with the hours.

INPS puts it plainly on its page about hiring: the notice of a new employment relationship must be filed by the employer. The worker does not file it, an agency only files it as an appointed intermediary acting for the family, and a verbal agreement between the parties, however clear, never replaces it.

The contract comes before the notice. INPS reminds families that, once the necessary documents have been gathered, the parties agree the terms and sign a written contract. Working hours, duties, pay and contractual minimums follow the national collective agreement for domestic work, which INPS only publishes as a PDF and which this course does not quote in figures.

The hiring notice: the day before, even on a public holiday

Since 29 January 2009 a hiring has had to be notified to INPS by midnight on the day before the relationship begins, and INPS specifies that the rule applies even when that day is a public holiday. If work starts on a Monday, the deadline falls at midnight on Sunday, not on Monday morning.

One notice takes effect towards several public bodies at once. INPS lists the local employment services, the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Health, INAIL, the workplace accident insurer, and the prefecture. The family therefore does not repeat the formality anywhere else; what matters is that the notice sent to INPS is complete and on time.

Since 1 April 2011 the notice can only be sent electronically. INPS names four channels: the online Domestic Work Drawer on its website, the INPS Mobile app, the Contact Center, and the intermediaries accredited with the Institute, who submit the notice through their own electronic services.

• Also for the probation period
• Also when the work is occasional or irregular
• Also when the worker is already insured through another family
• Also when the worker is insured for a different activity
• Also when the worker is a foreign national or receives a pension

The list above repeats the cases that the INPS page names explicitly, and in none of them does the obligation disappear. This is where many families go wrong, convinced that a few hours a week, or a helper who already works for other households, spares them the notice.

A mistake can be undone, but only briefly. A hiring notice can be cancelled within five days of the start date it gives; once that window has passed, the only option left is to report the end of the relationship. If the carer never turns up on the first day, act straight away.

Two limits concern relatives. The online procedure does not accept a relationship between spouses, except where the employing spouse is disabled and receives the attendance allowance. Between relatives up to the third degree, including in-laws, the notice is put on hold until the local INPS office has checked the employer's statement.

Contributions: four deadlines a year, one pagoPA notice

Contributions for domestic work are not paid every month. The INPS page on payments describes a payment that the employer is required to make every three months, for each active relationship. The payment windows are fixed and apply to every family, whatever the worker's hours happen to be.

When the last day falls on a Sunday or a public holiday, the payment moves to the next working day. INPS warns that it charges financial penalties on late or missing payments, without stating their amount on that page. That alone is a good reason not to leave the payment until the last possible day.

The payment tool is the pagoPA notice, the standard Italian public payment slip. INPS sends it with a notice code, the amount, the due date and payment instructions; the family can also generate and print it from the INPS Payments Portal, where receipts for earlier payments remain available.

You can pay online by card or bank account, at banks, post offices and other providers in the pagoPA network, through CBILL at banks that offer it, or with the IO and INPS Mobile apps. To retrieve the amount for the quarter, the employer's tax code and the code of the employment relationship are enough.

The amount suggested is based on the data given when the worker was hired or in later change notices. Before confirming, the procedure lets you change the hours, weeks and hourly pay, and it recalculates the total. If the hours have changed, the employer updates these items and obtains a new notice with the right amounts.

How much do the contributions cost? The 2026 rates and hourly amounts do not appear on any readable INPS web page, and this course does not write them down from memory. INPS provides an online simulator that calculates the contributions due from the details of the relationship, and that is where a family should look up the figure.

Extra month and holidays: two calculations a family can do itself

A domestic worker's thirteenth-month payment is one twelfth of the annual wage and is paid by December. Someone who worked for only part of the year receives the share matching the months worked. It also builds up during sickness, workplace injury and maternity leave, within the job-protection period and for the part not paid by other bodies.

When the worker works for several families, each employer pays its own share of the extra month, based on the hourly wage it pays. There is no main employer who settles for everybody: each family is answerable for the relationship it notified to INPS, and only for that one.

Paid holiday amounts to 26 days a year for each year of service with the same family, excluding Sundays and midweek public holidays, whatever the working hours. It is normally taken between June and September unless the parties agree otherwise. Each day is paid at one twenty-sixth of the monthly wage, including any board and lodging allowance.

With hourly pay you need one more step: turning a day of holiday into hours. INPS takes the weekly hours, multiplies them by 4.333, the average number of weeks in a month, and divides the result by 26. What you get is the number of hours to pay for each day of holiday.

Two more rules complete the picture. A worker with less than a year of service who has passed probation accrues one twelfth of the holiday for each month worked, and a fraction of at least 15 days counts as a full month. Holiday cannot be granted during a dismissal notice period, or during sickness or injury.

When the job ends: notice, reporting and severance pay

The relationship can end because the worker resigns or because the family dismisses the worker. Either way the other party is entitled to notice, and its length depends on the weekly hours and on the length of service with the same employer. The INPS page on resignation and dismissal sets out three situations.

When the worker resigns, the periods in the table are halved. Notice that is not given has a price. A family that dismisses without notice owes an allowance equal to the pay for the missing period; a worker who resigns without notice has the same amount withheld from the final settlement.

The end of the relationship is reported to INPS within five days of the event, like any other change, through the same electronic channels used for hiring. If the relationship ends because the employer has died, the report goes through the Contact Center, and the caller needs their own login details, the employer's tax code and the relationship code.

When the job ends, a domestic worker is always entitled to severance pay, the TFR, even for occasional work, and even when the relationship ends during a probation period longer than 15 days. The base includes the monthly wage, the extra month and, for a worker who eats and sleeps in the home, the board and lodging allowance.

Severance pay can also be paid out every year, if one party asks and the other agrees. After eight years of service the worker is entitled to an advance of 70 per cent of the severance pay built up so far, which a family should keep in mind when planning its budget for a long-standing carer.

When the family voucher booklet is enough

Not every bit of help at home calls for a hiring. For occasional work a private individual can use the Libretto famiglia, the family voucher booklet, and INPS states that the hiring notice is then not needed. It is reserved for small domestic jobs, including gardening, cleaning and maintenance, home care, and extra private tutoring.

In a household, the cap that bites first is almost always the €2,500 limit towards the same person. A cleaner who comes every week on a regular basis soon goes over it, and at that point the right route is once again a proper hiring, notified to INPS the day before the work starts.

The booklet is a named, prepaid booklet: the family buys the vouchers in advance and uses them to pay for the work, each voucher covering no more than one hour. Both the payer and the worker must register on the INPS platform, through the online service, the Contact Center, or a welfare office or intermediary holding a proxy.