Every autumn for years, Italy's hospitality employers have waited for the same ritual: a single flussi decree, covering a single year, announced with little warning and gone again within weeks of its click day opening. This October, something different landed in the Gazzetta Ufficiale. For the first time, Rome signed off on a three year plan, setting entry quotas for 2026, 2027, and 2028 all at once.
The scale is the headline number everyone is citing: 497,550 work entries spread across the three years, split between seasonal roles like agriculture and tourism and the non seasonal positions that keep hotels, restaurants, and care homes staffed year round. What is easy to miss underneath that total is a smaller number that tells a more interesting story about where Italy thinks its hospitality sector is heading.
A Quota That Grows With the Sector
Inside the seasonal allocation, the slice reserved for tourism moves higher every single year: 13,000 entries in 2026, 14,000 in 2027, and 15,000 in 2028, for a three year total of 42,000 seasonal tourism permits. A government writing a quota that climbs year over year is not managing a shrinking problem. It is planning for a sector it expects to keep hiring.
That matters because Italy's own hospitality industry needs seasonal hands just as much as the hotels and restaurants abroad who recruit from it. The flussi system has always run in two directions at once: foreign seasonal workers entering Italy's coastal towns and ski resorts, and Italian hospitality talent moving outward toward kitchens and front desks in the US and beyond. A three year framework gives both sides of that exchange something they rarely get, which is a sense of what next year, and the year after, will actually look like.
What Predictability Actually Buys
None of this removes the competitive scramble of click day itself. Applications still open in tight windows, nulla osta approvals still move on government timelines, and employers still need paperwork filed correctly the first time. What changes is the horizon employers can plan against. A hotel group deciding today how many seasonal roles to budget for 2027 no longer has to guess whether the quota will even exist. It can see the number already written into law.
That is the part of the process we spend most of our time inside at ItalianExperience, helping hotel and restaurant employers understand exactly where their open roles fit inside Italy's quota categories, and walking Italian hospitality candidates through the nulla osta and consulate steps that turn a number in a decree into an actual arrival date. A three year quota is only useful to a business if someone is tracking which window applies to which role, and when.
Data referenced from Erickson Immigration Group and Schengen Visa News.
A decree that plans three years ahead is Italy quietly admitting that hospitality's hiring needs are not a yearly emergency. They are a trend worth building around.