What a truck driver costs an employer in Italy in 2026

A truck driver on a permanent contract in Italy costs the employer between €25.92 and €35.34 for every hour worked, depending on grade and type of transport. This is not a market estimate. The figures come from Directorial Decree no. 135 of 19 December 2025 issued by the Italian Ministry of Labour, which put into tables the hourly cost of staff covered by the national collective agreement for logistics, freight transport and forwarding (CCNL Logistica, trasporto merci e spedizione), renewed on 6 December 2024.

The figures matter well beyond public tenders. Anyone running drivers in Italy, or buying transport from an Italian carrier, can use them to price an hour of driving before discussing a rate, a new customer or an extra route. Below: the full driver tables for the three upcoming dates, two worked examples item by item, the gap between the table and your own company’s cost, and how to measure the hours that produce nothing.

What the ministry tables are for

The decree implements article 41(13) of the Italian Public Procurement Code (Legislative Decree 36/2023), which requires the Ministry of Labour to set labour costs every year in tables, based on the values agreed in collective bargaining. Contracting authorities and evaluation panels use it to estimate the labour component of a tender and to judge whether a bid actually covers it. Unions read it together with article 42 of the agreement, which protects workers in logistics and transport contracts.

The tables are published for four dates (January 2025, January 2026, January 2027 and June 2027) and five staff families. Four of them concern drivers: continuous duty (39 hours a week), discontinuous duty on domestic transport and discontinuous duty on international transport (47 hours, article 11-bis of the agreement), plus the table for van drivers with a B licence. The decree text, in Italian, is available as a PDF. The trade magazine Uomini e Trasporti republished it on 22 December 2025.

The figure you need, though, rarely matches the table: the allowance you pay and the overtime move it. The driver hour cost calculator starts from the same table, replaces the notional allowance with your real one and, in two minutes, also tells you what the hours that produce nothing are worth in a year.

The grades: the letter is the service, not seniority

Before reading the figures, it helps to know what the grade means. The agreement splits driving staff into three grades: grade 3 for CE licence holders, grade 2 for rigid trucks driven on a C licence, grade 1 for vans on a B licence without a tachograph. The letter shows the type of service. A and D cover work inside production, port or logistics areas and repetitive runs back to base. B and E cover domestic and international haulage with a travel allowance. C and F cover transport that needs certifications such as ADR, ATP or HACCP, and for C also special equipment.

So C3 is not the most senior driver. It is the CE licence holder on work that requires a certification.

The decree tables for drivers

Average hourly cost on a permanent contract, in euros, for the three dates still ahead.

Continuous duty, 39 hours

Discontinuous duty, domestic transport, 47 hours

Discontinuous duty, international transport, 47 hours

Vans, B licence

On a fixed-term contract the table adds regional business tax (IRAP): the domestic C3 rises from €32.69 to €34.17 in January 2026. The columns spread out from one regime to the next for one reason: the grades with travel include a notional allowance that weighs more than any other item. A3 and D2 carry none, which is why their cost does not change from one regime to the next.

From January 2026 to June 2027 the hourly cost of a C3 grows by 3.9 to 4.6%, a G1 by 2.8%. A large share goes through the professional area element, which for C3 rises from €600 a year in January 2026 to €1,800 in June 2027. A fixed-price transport contract signed today that runs past June 2027 without indexation risks working below cost in its final months.

Two worked examples: from pay to cost, item by item

Take the same driver, a C3 on a permanent contract in January 2026, in two regimes: continuous duty at 39 hours and discontinuous domestic duty at 47 hours. The figures are the table’s, in euros a year.

The pay items are base pay, seniority increases, the professional area element and the EDR element; the 47-hour regime adds €93 of night work allowance. The notional allowance is 205 days at €23.80 in the first case and 215 days at €43.16 in the second. It is the item that makes almost all the difference between the two regimes.

Holidays, bank holidays and training do not appear as euro lines: they come in through the denominator. Out of 2,036 theoretical hours the decree removes 408 not worked: 172 of holiday, 101 of bank holidays, 32 of abolished holidays, 36 of contractual hour reduction, 51 of sickness and injury estimated at 2.5%, and 16 of safety training and leave under Legislative Decree 81/2008. The annual cost is divided by the remaining 1,628 hours. For B licence van drivers the hours worked are 1,516, because the table puts absences at 8%.

One detail matters for 47-hour drivers: the decree uses the same 1,628 hours for the discontinuous regime. If a driver is on duty 47 hours a week, the cost per hour of presence falls to about €27.13, but it is also the regime in which part of those hours are waiting time by definition.

Pay and cost are not the same figure

A rule of thumb circulates on industry sites: an employee costs the company 1.6 to 2 times their gross pay. The decree tables let you check it, counting the allowance in the cost but not in the pay.

The rule holds for drivers who travel with an allowance and overstates those who work in an area or on short local runs. Using it without looking at the profile can put the cost of a local driver off by as much as a third.

The ministry table is not your company’s cost

The tables are a reference average, built on standard assumptions: a fixed absence rate, a notional allowance, no individual pay supplements and no overtime. They tell you whether a tender bid covers labour, not what you spend. Article 2 of the decree itself warns that real cost moves with contribution relief, company agreements, individual supplements and overtime. Craft businesses use EBNA (€139.80) and San.Arti (€125.00) instead of Ebilog and Sanilog.

Your real cost starts from the right profile’s table and replaces the assumptions with your own numbers: actual travel days, last year’s absences, overtime paid, pay supplements. Annual figures change little, while the cost per hour changes a lot with the hours you put in the denominator. Our public model of the cost of a pharmacy delivery uses €20.70 an hour for a B3, derived from the minimum wage table over 1,778 productive hours. With the decree’s 1,628 hours and no allowance, the same profile costs €26.76. The driver is also the heaviest item in the fleet cost per kilometre, which goes wrong when that item comes in with an inherited figure.

Unproductive hours: how to measure them

Everything so far is set by the contract: no company decides contributions or holidays. But the decree divides the cost by hours worked, not by hours that produce. The 1,628 hours of a driver also contain waiting at loading and unloading, empty returns to the depot, and time lost on a route that is too long while a colleague finishes early. They are paid at full cost.

The sum is quick. One hour a week per driver, over the roughly 42 weeks actually worked, is worth about €1,360 a year for a domestic C3; across a fleet of 35 drivers it is almost €48,000. It is an assumption, but that is the scale.

Each of the three causes can be measured with data you already have:

• for waiting at loading and unloading you need arrival time and end of operation, from vehicle GPS or proof of delivery. Italian hire-and-reward carriers have had since 20 July 2025 an allowance of 90 minutes for each operation, and beyond it article 6-bis of Legislative Decree 286/2005 grants them €100 per hour or fraction, owed jointly by shipper and loader. Arrival time is proven with GPS or the smart tachograph. Own-account fleets work instead on the time slots agreed with customers;
• empty returns are the kilometres between the last delivery and the depot, divided by the route’s total kilometres. They shrink when deliveries and pickups share the same route, and when the planner knows where each vehicle ends up;
• unbalanced routes show up when you compare, for two weeks, the end-of-duty time of each route rather than each driver. If some routes always finish on overtime and others early, the problem is how stops are split, and the same driver who works overtime every evening on an overloaded route finishes on time on a balanced one.

You measure routes, not people: a score per driver says nothing about a badly built route.

What to do on Monday

1. Find each driver’s grade and regime on the payslip and take the hourly cost of that profile from the table.
2. Replace the notional allowance with the one actually paid last quarter, and add overtime.
3. For two weeks, record route by route the minutes of waiting, the kilometres of empty return and the end-of-duty time.
4. Multiply the lost hours by the hourly cost: that is the figure to bring to the next routing meeting.
5. If you carry for hire, separate waiting beyond 90 minutes and check which shippers you can claim compensation from.

Hours are half of the sum. The other half is kilometres, and the route savings calculator gives an order of magnitude. Where its percentages come from is explained in the report on the route savings method.

At a time when drivers are scarce, as the article on the driver shortage in Italy shows, a lost hour is not just a cost: it is capacity you do not have and cannot hire. The contract decides the price of an hour. How many of those hours produce is decided by planning, and it is the part that route optimization with OptivoRoute works on.

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