Italy Work Visa Quotas for Tourism: 18,551 Seasonal Permits, a 'One in Two' Hiring Claim and No Count of Vacancies

The quota law: 497,550 entries over three years, 88,000 seasonal places in 2026

The Ministry of Labour announced the 2026 to 2028 programme on 16 October 2025, after the decree appeared in the Gazzetta Ufficiale (identifier 25A05656); the ministry's page dates it 15 October, the publication date, while note 423 and the Prefettura di Cosenza's circular give the signature date, 2 October 2025. The ministry gives the three-year total as 497,550 people from outside the EU: 164,850 in 2026, 165,850 in 2027 and 166,850 in 2028. The Prefettura di Cosenza's circular reproduces article 5 of the decree, which splits each year into non-seasonal employment (76,200 a year), self-employment (650 a year) and seasonal work (88,000 in 2026, 89,000 in 2027, 90,000 in 2028). The three lines add up to the ministry's totals for each year.

Tourism has no separate total for seasonal work in that article. Seasonal farming and seasonal tourism share the 88,000. A summary of article 7 by Confcommercio Ascom Bologna lists three carve-outs inside it for 2026: 12,600 places for nationals of countries whose migration cooperation agreements enter into force during 2026 to 2028, 5,000 multi-year permits for workers who came for seasonal work in the previous five years, and a reserve of 13,000 for tourism applications filed through the most representative national employer organisations, rising to 14,000 in 2027 and 15,000 in 2028. Seasonal places are open only to nationals of the countries listed in the decree; the US and the UK are not among them. The decree defines tourism services as ATECO groups 55 (accommodation), 56 (food and drink service) and 79 (travel agencies and tour operators). We could not open the decree's text in the Gazzetta Ufficiale itself, so these sub-quotas are as summarised by the Prefettura and Ascom Bologna.

Non-seasonal places are open to hotels and restaurants too. The same summary lists accommodation, food services and tourism services among the sectors that can use the 76,200 non-seasonal places, without a separate number for any sector. So the honest answer to how many work permits Italy offers its tourism industry is that the law fixes a seasonal pool shared with agriculture, a tourism reserve within it, and a non-seasonal pool shared with every other sector. No single line in the decree is the tourism quota.

How the 2026 tourism quotas were handed out

The decree caps the national pool. The Ministry of Labour then splits it by territory. Its note no. 423 of 9 February 2026 attributed 15,075 quotas for seasonal subordinate work in tourism, the same day applications opened at 9:00 on the online portal (the click day). According to FiscoeTasse's summary of the note, the 15,075 were made up of 4,875 for nationals of agreement countries, 5,000 for applications filed by national employer organisations, 4,700 for applications from private employers and 500 for multi-year permits. The four parts add up to 15,075. The ministry's own page says quotas not split by territory stay at its disposal and are assigned after 50 days on the basis of the applications received.

That second step happened on 28 April 2026. Note no. 1434 attributed a further 3,476 tourism quotas, and note no. 1433 a further 5,389 for farming, on the basis of applications from the national employer organisations (ministry news item of 6 May 2026). Adding the two tourism notes gives 18,551 quotas allocated for seasonal tourism work by the end of April. That sum is ours: the ministry does not publish a running total, and its news list shows no further tourism allocation for 2026 after 28 April.

Three things are missing from the public record. First, the number of applications filed on the 9 February click day for tourism: neither the ministry nor the Interior Ministry pages we opened give it. Second, how many of the 18,551 quotas became work authorisations (nulla osta), visas and signed contracts. Third, which provinces received the most, which sits in a technical annex we did not obtain. The 15,075 figure, widely reported in February as the 2026 tourism quota, was only the first allocation of the year.

The shortage claim: 'one in two' from a federation release that gives no method

The figure most often repeated is Fipe's. Its report on the restaurant sector, presented on 9 April 2026, says one business in two reports difficulty finding staff. The press release does not say how many businesses were asked, how, or when. On 21 April ANSA reported 'the alarm raised by Fipe' as 51% of restaurateurs struggling to find front-of-house staff, with searches for a cook taking up to five months. Avvenire repeated it on 6 May as front-of-house and kitchen staff. None of the three gives a sample or method, so the 51% is a figure from an association, not a measured rate.

It is also a recurring line. In February 2024 Fipe's research centre, working from Excelsior data, said 'almost one company in two' still reported difficulty finding staff, as reported by Il Sole 24 Ore. A share near one in two in both 2024 and 2026 may reflect a real and stable problem, or a survey question that produces a similar answer every year. Without the questionnaire it is not possible to tell.

The same Fipe release reports that dependent employment in the sector fell by more than 114,000 in 2025, or 10.3%, while ANSA, citing the report, puts dependent workers at over one million in 2025. Those two figures do not reconcile as reported. A fall of 114,000 that equals 10.3% implies a 2024 base of about 1.107 million and a 2025 level of about 993,000, below one million (our arithmetic). Either the base, the percentage or the 'over one million' covers something different. We could not obtain the full report to check, so we report the figures as Fipe's and do not use them in our own comparisons.

The ANSA piece also gives over 340,000 planned hires in tourism and catering for April to June 2026, up 4.2% on 2025, without naming a source. Money.it, on 16 April, gave over 330,000 for the same quarter, also without a source. Both look like Excelsior-style hiring intentions. Excelsior's own September 2026 national bulletin, which we opened, says firms planned 565,100 hires in the month and 1,528,340 in September to November, and expected difficulty filling 44.1% of them across all sectors. The single occupation with the most planned hires in September was restaurant operators and workers, at 66,790. These are intentions to hire, gathered from more than 99,600 firms in July, not vacancies and not unfilled jobs.

Excelsior does say why firms expect trouble, at least across the whole economy. Of the 44.1% of September hires expected to be hard to fill, the bulletin attributes 26.4 points to a lack of candidates, 13.6 points to candidates without adequate preparation and 4.0 points to other reasons. That split matters for the quota debate. A shortage of applicants is the kind of gap that more work permits could fill. A shortage of trained cooks or experienced front-of-house staff is not solved by numbers alone. The national bulletin we opened did not let us extract the same split for accommodation and food services cleanly, so we do not claim one for the sector.

There is also a timing issue that none of the surveys resolves. A firm that says in July it expects difficulty hiring in September may still hire, later or at a higher wage. Excelsior records the expectation, not the outcome. The association surveys record a perception at one moment. Neither follows the vacancy to the day it is filled or abandoned. That is why the shortage can be both real and impossible to size from these sources.

The only official measure: a vacancy rate that peaks before the season

ISTAT measures vacancies the way the EU requires: a paid post that is open on the last day of the quarter and that the employer is actively trying to fill from outside. Eurostat publishes ISTAT's results by sector in the dataset jvs_q_nace2. For accommodation and food services in Italy it publishes the rate and marks the number of vacancies and of occupied posts as confidential. So an official count of unfilled hotel and restaurant jobs exists inside ISTAT but is not released. What is released is a percentage.

That percentage moves with the season. In 2025, for all firms with employees, the rate for accommodation and food services was 5.0% in the first quarter, 2.4% in the second, 2.0% in the third and 2.1% in the fourth (the last provisional). In 2024 it ran 5.1%, 3.4%, 2.1% and 2.1%. The peak comes at the end of March, when hotels and beach businesses are recruiting for the summer. By the end of September, with the summer season mostly staffed, the rate for the sector was 2.0%, barely above the economy-wide rate of 1.7%.

This is where the most shared comparison goes wrong. ANSA, citing ISTAT, wrote that the sector's vacancy rate was 4.8%, the highest in Italy and nearly three times the national 1.9%. Those two numbers match Eurostat's series for firms with ten or more employees in the first quarter of 2025, unadjusted: 4.8% for accommodation and food services against 1.9% for industry and services. The ratio is 2.5, not nearly three, and it is a single seasonal peak. Averaged over 2025, the sector's rate was 2.9% against 1.8% for all firms with employees, about 1.6 times as high (our arithmetic on Eurostat's quarterly rates).

So the official data support a narrower statement than the headlines. Hotels and restaurants do have a higher vacancy rate than the economy as a whole in every quarter of 2024 and 2025. The gap is widest before the season and small during it. The economy-wide rate has also fallen: ISTAT's preliminary estimate for the second quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted, was 1.5% for industry and services, down 0.1 points. ISTAT's release did not give the hotel and restaurant rate for that quarter, and Eurostat's dataset, last updated on 20 March 2026, stops at the end of 2025.

From quota to worker: the pipeline the decree does not count

A quota is a place in a queue. After the click day an employer's application must become a work authorisation from the Sportello Unico per l'Immigrazione, then a visa from an Italian consulate, then a residence contract signed in Italy and a residence permit. The decree sets the number at the start of that chain. No ministry publishes, in one place, how many people reach the end of it for each year's quotas.

The figures that do circulate come from Ero Straniero, a civil-society campaign, which obtains data from the ministries through civic access requests. Its Dossier flussi 2026, as reported by Il Fatto Quotidiano on 19 February 2026 and Quotidiano Nazionale on 4 June, found 14,349 residence permits for 2025 quotas by December 2025 against 181,450 programmed entries, or 7.9% (Il Fatto describes them as both requested and issued). For 2024, Quotidiano Nazionale reports 24,858 permits requested against 146,850 programmed entries, or 16.9%. We did not open the dossier itself, so these are press-reported figures from an advocacy campaign that relies on official data. They cover all sectors, not tourism alone, and the 2025 figure is partial: the year's procedures were still running.

That gap matters for any reading of the tourism quota. If 18,551 tourism places were allocated in 2026 and conversion were anywhere near the rates reported for 2024 and 2025, the number of seasonal hospitality workers who actually arrived through the decree would be a fraction of the headline. We cannot put a number on it, because the conversion rate for tourism has not been published. What can be said is that the quota is an upper bound on legal seasonal entries for tourism through this channel. It is not an estimate of them.

What is measured, and what is not

Put together, the sources answer different questions. The decree answers how many non-EU workers may enter. The Labour Ministry's notes answer how many of those places went to tourism and where. Excelsior answers how many people firms intend to hire and how hard they expect it to be. ISTAT answers what share of posts were open on one day each quarter. Fipe and other associations answer how many of their members say hiring is hard. None of them answers how many hospitality jobs went unfilled over a season, and none links the shortage to the quotas.

One more widely shared number belongs here. On 16 April 2026 Money.it reported that 'at least 500,000 workers' would be missing for the 2026 tourist season, citing the Excelsior system of Unioncamere and ANPAL, with no report title or date. We found no Excelsior table that gives a count of missing workers. Excelsior publishes planned hires and the share expected to be hard to fill. Half a million is of the same order as the planned tourism hires reported for a single quarter (over 330,000 to 340,000 for April to June 2026, unsourced in the press), which is a different thing from a shortfall. Until a source table is produced, it should not be repeated as an Excelsior estimate.

The gap repeats a pattern this series keeps finding. Italy publishes the rule, here the quota, in detail and on time. It publishes the outcome partly or not at all. The same was true of the national short-term rental code and of the flat tax for new residents, where our flat tax analysis found three different counts and none for the people who moved at the new price. For hospitality labor, the missing outcome is the number of jobs that stayed empty.

What it means for the 2027 season

The 2027 round is already open. A joint circular of 1 October 2026 (no. 7185) set pre-filling of applications on the government portal from 23 October to 7 December 2026, with seasonal farming applications from 12 January 2027 and seasonal tourism from 9 February 2027, as summarised by eDotto. Under the decree the seasonal pool rises to 89,000 and the tourism reserve for employer organisations to 14,000. The territorial split will again come from Labour Ministry notes in the weeks around the click day.

If the pattern of 2026 holds, the first allocation will be followed by a second one based on applications, and neither will say how many applications were filed. The ministry could close most of the gap described here by publishing three numbers each year: applications filed for tourism, work authorisations issued, and residence contracts signed. ISTAT could close the rest by releasing the vacancy count for accommodation and food services, which it already collects.

For readers following the residency side of Italian policy, the work-permit route is separate from citizenship and from the tax regimes. Our citizenship by descent numbers cover the descent route after the 2025 decree, and a planned guide to moving to Italy will cover visas for people relocating. None of those routes is a seasonal work permit, and this article does not describe eligibility for any of them.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers will not see the quota system, and no source measures its effect on opening seasons or service. The official data show the vacancy rate highest at the end of March, before the season opens, and lowest at the end of September. Seasonal permits are designed for short-season work of the kind found in the coastal towns of our Amalfi Coast travel guide or the summer-heavy island traced in our Sardinia tourism statistics. If a specific restaurant or hotel matters to your trip, check its opening dates directly, especially early and late in the season. Nothing in the data shows that service quality fell in 2026 because of staffing; no source measures that.

Tourism businesses and investors should treat the 13,000 tourism reserve and the 18,551 quotas allocated in 2026 as ceilings, not as staff. The reported conversion of quotas into residence permits, 16.9% for 2024 and 7.9% for 2025 to December, across all sectors, means a business that plans its season around foreign seasonal hires carries real timing risk. The all-sector conversion rates suggest the procedure after the click day matters as much as the size of the quota, though no tourism figure exists to confirm it. Anyone underwriting a hotel or restaurant on the assumption that the decree solves staffing would be relying on numbers the government does not publish. The thresholds that would change this assessment are a published conversion rate for tourism, or a vacancy count for the sector.

Journalists and analysts can cite: the decree's 497,550 entries for 2026 to 2028 and 88,000 seasonal places in 2026 (DPCM 2 October 2025, via the Ministry of Labour and the Prefettura di Cosenza); 15,075 tourism quotas on 9 February and 3,476 on 28 April 2026 (Labour Ministry notes 423 and 1434); and the Eurostat vacancy rates for accommodation and food services, always with the quarter and the size class. Do not repeat '500,000 missing workers' as an Excelsior estimate, do not describe the 4.8% vacancy rate as the sector's rate without saying it is the first quarter of 2025 for firms with ten or more employees, and do not call it nearly three times the national average. Fipe's 'one in two' is an association figure whose release gives no method. The running finding this article adds to the series: Italy fixes its work-permit quotas by decree, three years at a time, but does not publish how many hospitality jobs go unfilled or how many quota places become workers.