How Many Employees Does One 24/7 Post Need in Italy?
Holding one position every hour of 2026 in Italy takes 8,766 staffed hours. One full-time employee is genuinely available for about 1,756 of them, so the post needs 4.99 employees, which is 5 whole people.
One ring per person, one year each
Each ring is one employee's year, broken wherever they are on holiday, on leave, or off sick. No single ring closes, which is the whole problem: one person cannot hold a post that never stops.
Stack 5 of them and the picture closes. Trace any line out from the center and it crosses at least one solid arc, so every hour of 2026 has somebody on it. That is the relief factor, drawn rather than asserted.
Where the number comes from
- 1
Staffing one position 168 hours a week comes to 8,766 hours across the year.
- 2
Italy has 261 weekdays in the year, the starting point for one employee.
- 3
Take out 7 public holidays that fall on a weekday, 20 days of statutory paid leave, 5.3 days of average sickness absence, and 3 days of training: 35.3 days lost.
- 4
That leaves 225.7 working days per employee, and at a 38.9-hour week that is 7.78 hours a day, so 1,756 available hours a year.
- 5
8,766 coverage hours divided by 1,756 available hours is a relief factor of 4.99, so the post needs 5 people.
| Weekdays in the year | 261 |
| Public holidays on a weekday | −7 |
| Statutory paid annual leave | −20 |
| Average sickness absence | −5.3 |
| Training and onboarding (assumed) | −3 |
| Working days available | 225.7 |
| At 7.78 hours a day | 1,756 hours |
Paid public holidays are a statutory entitlement in Italy, so they sit on top of annual leave and are deducted separately here.
The training allowance of 3 days is a planning assumption rather than a sourced statistic, and it is deliberately low. Every other figure on this page carries a source. If your operation runs heavy certification cycles, raise it and the relief factor rises with it.
What the usual rule of thumb gets wrong here
The common shortcut is to divide coverage hours by contracted hours and add a quarter for absence. In Italy that gives 5.4 against a derived answer of 4.99, so the shortcut is high by 8.1 percent. A flat buffer travels badly because the things it stands in for, statutory leave and the length of the contracted week, are set nationally.
Nobody ever away. Not a real answer.
The usual shortcut, over by 8.1%.
From Italy's own leave, hours, and absence.
Other coverage shapes
The same availability figure answers any coverage window. Only the hours the post must be staffed change.
| Coverage | Hours a week | Relief factor | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round the clock, every day | 168 | 4.99 | 5 |
| Round the clock, weekdays only | 120 | 3.57 | 4 |
| Two shifts, every day | 112 | 3.33 | 4 |
| Extended day, weekdays only | 60 | 1.78 | 2 |
If your contract is more generous
20 days is the statutory floor in Italy, and most employers sit above it. Every extra week of leave is another week the post has to be covered by somebody else.
| Annual leave | Relief factor | People per post |
|---|---|---|
| 20 daysstatutory floor | 4.99 | 5 |
| 25 days | 5.11 | 6 |
| 28 days | 5.18 | 6 |
| 30 days | 5.22 | 6 |
| 33 days | 5.3 | 6 |
The inputs, and what they do not say
How the leave figure is defined
Italian law states the minimum in WEEKS, not days: four weeks under D.Lgs. 66/2003 art. 10(1). Converted here to 20 working days on a 5-day week. It EXCLUDES public holidays, which are a separate paid entitlement under Legge 260/1949 and are never absorbed into the four weeks.
Why the contracted week is not the legal maximum
This page divides by a 38.9-hour week, the typical full-time contract in Italy, not by the 40-hour statutory figure. That larger number is a legal ceiling on how much someone may be asked to work, not a description of what a full-time employee is contracted for, and using it as capacity would understate the headcount a post needs.
What these figures cannot be used for
Not a ranking. The sickness figure here comes from a national statistical source, while other countries in this library use the OECD labour force survey. Those systems define absence differently, and self-reported survey figures undercount short spells that administrative records capture. Each number is the best available answer for planning inside its own country, and the gap between any two of them is partly a gap between statistical methods rather than between workforces.
A relief factor also says nothing about whether a roster is legal or humane. It sets how many people the post needs across a year; it does not check rest periods between shifts, consecutive nights, or weekend distribution. Those constraints decide whether the pattern you build on top of this headcount is one anybody can actually work.
Research notes on Italy
LEAVE, and the Italy-specific trap you flagged. The statutory floor genuinely excludes public holidays, so 20 working days is correct as a legal minimum, but it is a floor almost nobody actually works to. Three things routinely get mixed into "Italian holiday entitlement" and must be kept out of this field: (1) the 12 national public holidays under L. 260/1949 plus the local patron saint day, which are separate; (2) the four "ex-festivita" days that CCNLs grant in lieu of holidays abolished by L. 54/1977, which are permits, not ferie; (3) ROL hours (riduzione orario di lavoro). On top of that, most CCNLs express ferie on a SIX-day computation, so the very common "26 giorni lavorativi" figure is 26/6 = 4.33 weeks, not 26 days off a 5-day week. If a planner sees 26 and treats it as 5-day working days they overstate leave by about a week. Typical real CCNL entitlement lands around 20 to 22 five-day working days, above the 20 floor.
HOURS. 40 is the statutory normal week (art. 3(1)). Do not confuse it with art. 4(2), which is a 48-hour cap on the AVERAGE week including overtime, measured over a reference period of up to 4 months (extendable to 6 or 12 by collective agreement). 48 is not a full-time week and should never populate a staffing model as one. The 38.9 collective figure is Eurostat LFS average usual weekly hours for full-time employees in 2025. It sits below 40 because public sector CCNLs run 36 hours (D.Lgs. 165/2001 and the ARAN-signed CCNLs) and banking and insurance run roughly 37 to 37.5. The dominant private-sector CCNLs in shift-heavy sectors, including commerce, hospitality, manufacturing and most healthcare, still contract 40. If this calculator is aimed at those sectors, 40 is the more accurate contracted week and 38.9 will slightly over-state available hours per head.
SICKNESS. This is the weakest of the four and it is DERIVED, not lifted from a published headline. No Italian or EU body publishes a "sickness days per employee per year" figure for Italy directly. Working: INPS Polo unico di tutela della malattia published quarterly certified sickness days for 2025 as private 33.4 + 25.1 + 22.9 + 28.7 = 110.1 million and public 10.1 + 6.7 + 5.0 + 8.4 = 30.2 million, total 140.3 million. Divided by 18.93 million employees (Eurostat LFS, Italy, age 15-74, 2025) that is 7.41 days per employee. INPS counts CALENDAR days of certificate prognosis, so multiplying by 5/7 converts to working days: 7.41 x 5/7 = 5.29, rounded to 5.3. The same computation on 2024 data (137.8 million days over 18.84 million employees) gives 5.2, so the series is stable.
Why I did not use the headline OECD number. OECD Health Statistics (sickness absences of full-time dependent employees, weeks per year per person) reports Italy at 0.6 weeks for 2025 and 0.9 for 2024, which would be 3.0 and 4.5 working days. That series is EU-LFS self-report and it looks broken for Italy: it sat at 1.0 to 1.1 weeks (5.0 to 5.5 working days) every year from 2018 to 2020, matching the administrative derivation almost exactly, then fell to a level that puts Italy next to Greece at 0.2 and Romania at 0.1, both obvious survey artefacts, while INPS certificate volumes over the same period ROSE (+2.8 percent in H2 2025). A falling survey measure against rising administrative counts is a reporting artefact, not a real halving of sick leave. I used the administrative figure because it is stable, matches Italy's pre-pandemic OECD level, and will not under-provision. If you need a single directly published number rather than a derived one, use OECD 0.6 weeks for 2025, but expect it to under-provision by roughly 40 percent.
Uncertainty on 5.3: INPS publishes the quarterly totals as "circa" (approximately) rounded to 0.1 million, and the denominator is total employees including part-timers while the numerator counts their certificates too, so the two are consistent. Realistic band is about 5.0 to 5.6 working days.
Sources
Every figure above except the training allowance was checked against one of these.
Statutory normal weekly working time: 40 hours (art. 3(1), "L'orario normale di lavoro e fissato in 40 ore settimanali"). Separate 48-hour average maximum including overtime at art. 4(2). Minimum paid annual leave: four weeks (art. 10(1), "un periodo annuale di ferie retribuite non inferiore a quattro settimane").
Normattiva (official consolidated Italian law database) - Decreto Legislativo 8 aprile 2003, n. 662003
Full text of D.Lgs. 66/2003 arts. 3, 4 and 10 as published, used to verify the 40-hour normal week, the 48-hour average cap and the four-week leave minimum verbatim.
Original publication of D.Lgs. 66/2003 in the Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 87 of 14 April 2003 (ELI 003G0091).
Statutory annual leave: "a minimum of four weeks of paid leave annually", of which two weeks must be taken consecutively in the accrual year and two may be carried over for 18 months; cannot be replaced by payment except on termination.
Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali (Single Digital Gateway, official English guidance)2026
Average usual weekly hours worked in the main job, full-time EMPLOYEES (wstatus SAL), Italy, total, NACE total: 38.9 hours in 2025 (38.9 also in 2024). Dataset lfsa_ewhun2.
Sickness days Q3 and Q4 2025: Q3 approx. 22.9 million private and 5.0 million public; Q4 approx. 28.7 million private and 8.4 million public. Numerator component for the derived sickness figure.
INPS - Osservatorio statistico "Polo unico di tutela della malattia"2025
Sickness days Q1 and Q2 2025: Q1 approx. 33.4 million private and 10.1 million public; Q2 approx. 25.1 million private and 6.7 million public. Numerator component for the derived sickness figure.
INPS - Osservatorio statistico "Polo unico di tutela della malattia"2025
Employees in Italy, age 15-74, both sexes: 18,927.6 thousand in 2025 (18,842.2 thousand in 2024). Denominator for the derived sickness figure. Dataset lfsa_eegaed.
Cross-check, NOT the figure used: sickness absences of full-time dependent employees, Italy, 0.6 weeks per year per person in 2025, 0.9 in 2024, 1.3 in 2023, 1.0-1.1 in 2018-2020. Dataset DSD_HEALTH_STAT@DF_AWDI, measure WKAB, unit WK_Y_PS, retrieved via the OECD SDMX API.
Common questions
- How many people does one 24/7 position need in Italy?
- 5 people. One position staffed every hour of the year is 8,766 hours, and one full-time employee in Italy is actually available for about 1,756 of them once 35.3 days of holidays, leave, sickness and training come out. That is a relief factor of 4.99, which rounds up to 5 whole people.
- What is a relief factor?
- The number of employees needed to keep one position filled continuously, once the days nobody works are taken out. It is coverage hours divided by the hours one employee is genuinely available. In Italy that is 8,766 divided by 1,756, or 4.99. A factor below the headcount you actually employ means the post runs on overtime.
- Why is a flat 25 percent absence buffer not enough for Italy?
- Because it overshoots here. A raw hours calculation gives 4.32 employees, and adding a flat quarter takes that to 5.4, against a derived answer of 4.99. That is 8.1 percent too high, because the rule of thumb assumes more leave and sickness than Italy actually loses.
- Does the statutory leave minimum reflect what employers actually give in Italy?
- It is a floor, not a norm. This page computes on the statutory minimum of 20 working days because that is the figure the law fixes and a source can be attached to. Most employers sit above it, and the sensitivity table on this page shows what the relief factor becomes at more generous entitlements, so a planner can find their own contract rather than taking the floor as the answer.
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