Country data · Eurostat 2024
The gender pay gap in Italy
4.6%
Women in Italy earn 4.6% less per hour than men on average. That is the unadjusted gender pay gap in gross hourly earnings for 2024, as measured by Eurostat.
That is narrower than the EU average of 11.1%.
Italy ranks 5 of 20 member states in the table below, counted from the smallest gap to the widest.
Source: Eurostat, unadjusted gender pay gap, 2024.
Unadjusted means the figure compares all women to all men across the whole economy, without controlling for role, sector or hours worked. It is a measure of the overall opportunity gap, not of two people doing an identical job.
How Italy compares
Unadjusted gap in average gross hourly earnings, 2024. A negative number means women earn more per hour than men on average in that country.
- Luxembourg-0.8%
- Belgium1.1%
- Malta3.5%
- Romania4.5%
- Italy4.6%
- Slovenia6.2%
- Poland7.8%
- Spain8.7%
- Ireland9.6%
- Sweden10.9%
- EU average11.1%
- Netherlands12.9%
- France13.1%
- Denmark13.4%
- Finland15.4%
- Czechia15.6%
- Hungary15.9%
- Germany16.3%
- Austria17.6%
- Latvia18.3%
- Estonia18.8%
What this means when you negotiate
A national average does not tell you what you personally are worth, and it is not an argument to bring into the room. What it does tell you is that the starting offer you receive is more likely to sit below the market rate than above it — so treating the first number as a draft rather than a decision is the reasonable default. The gap also runs far wider in some sectors than the national figure suggests, which is why a sector benchmark beats a country average every time.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive had to be written into national law across the EU by 7 June 2026, so you may now have a legal right to ask what colleagues in comparable roles are paid.
How to negotiate salary under the EU Pay Transparency Directive