On October 28, 2026, the Consiglio dei Ministri (Italy’s Council of Ministers, the cabinet) gave final approval to the draft legislative decree transposing EU Directive 2024/2831 into Italian law. The directive, adopted on October 23, 2024, is aimed at improving working conditions in platform work. According to the government, the text takes into account the opinions of the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (Italy’s data protection authority) and the comments of the relevant parliamentary committees.
The process began on July 23, 2026, when the Council of Ministers gave preliminary approval to the first version of the draft, proposed by Labor Minister Marina Calderone under the enabling law in Article 11 of Law No. 91 of June 13, 2025. Since then the text has passed through the parliamentary committees of the Camera and Senato (the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate) and through the data protection authority, which in September issued a favorable opinion conditional on certain amendments, chiefly to align the new rules with the GDPR.
A wider group than couriers alone
Food-delivery couriers, or riders, are the best-known case. But the directive, and therefore the decree, applies to every digital platform that organizes work performed in Italy, wherever it is legally headquartered. Covered are workers with employee status, the self-employed, and collaborators operating through an app that assigns tasks, hours or pay. Left outside are platforms that merely match supply and demand without organizing the work itself, such as classified ads between private individuals or rental and resale sites.
The most significant change, the subject of years of legal debate, concerns how it is determined whether work done through a platform is in fact an employment relationship. The directive introduces a rebuttable legal presumption: where facts emerge indicating direction and control by the platform, even when exercised through an algorithm, the relationship is presumed to be employment unless proven otherwise. The burden of proof falls on the platform. The European text requires the presumption to be “effective,” meaning that it genuinely facilitates establishing the correct employment status without adding evidentiary burdens on the worker. According to the parliamentary briefing paper prepared for the review of the draft, the mechanism takes up and broadens a presumption already introduced in Italy for couriers. For relationships already underway it will apply only to the period after December 2, 2026, the deadline for transposition. The decree is not retroactive.
The second main area concerns human oversight of algorithmic decisions. The decisions that weigh most heavily on workers, such as restricting, suspending or closing an account or terminating the relationship, may not be left to an automated system alone: an assessment by a person will be required, or at least the possibility of human review. Platforms will also have to ensure human monitoring of the systems that track and evaluate work, with periodic checks carried out together with workers’ representatives. Workers will have the right to know why an automated system took a given decision about them and to ask a person to review it, with set response times.
Compared with the July draft, the version given final approval is reported to contain a new Article 20, which would give collective bargaining a primary role in regulating pay and contractual conditions in platform work and in implementing the rights attached to algorithmic management. This is reported by specialist press outlets that have seen the text emerging from the Council of Ministers; the official wording of the article will be available only upon publication in the Gazzetta Ufficiale (the Official Gazette, where Italian laws are officially published). Tasking unions and platforms with turning general principles into operating rules is consistent with the directive, which refers at several points to social dialogue. In total the decree is said to contain 28 articles, one more than the 27 in the version reviewed by Parliament in recent weeks.
Response times, data and penalties
Some press reconstructions of the draft reviewed by the government in recent days describe fairly detailed safeguards for both workers and platforms. Suspension of an account on fraud or security grounds could not exceed 72 hours. An automated decision would have to be explained in writing to the worker within 15 days, and there would have to be a human contact person to ask for a review, with a response within 14 days. If the decision is found to harm the worker’s rights, the platform would have to correct it within 14 days, failing which it is liable for the damage. In the event of dismissal or termination of the relationship, the burden would in any case fall on the app operator to show that it was not retaliation. The explanation and review deadlines also appear in the parliamentary briefing paper, which makes them among the firmer of the details still to be confirmed.
The decree also provides for periodic data reporting to SIISL, Italy’s information system for social and labor inclusion (Sistema Informativo per l’Inclusione Sociale e Lavorativa). Platforms would have to report every six months, annually for small and medium-sized enterprises, the number of people working for them on a stable basis, hours, average earnings, contractual conditions and any intermediaries. The technical rules will come in a subsequent ministerial decree.
On penalties, the central role would fall to the Ispettorato Nazionale del Lavoro (the National Labor Inspectorate). Reports on the draft mention amounts of up to EUR 30,000 (about USD 32,400 at 1.08), doubled in the most serious cases, for failing to correct a discriminatory automated system. The parliamentary briefing paper indicates different thresholds for specific violations, from the absence of internal communication channels to retaliation against workers. The final amounts will have to be checked against the published text.
What is still missing before December 2
The decree has yet to be published in the Official Gazette, and as of now no publication has been recorded. Only the final text will allow a point-by-point check of the figures and deadlines that have circulated in recent weeks, and show whether, and by how much, the text approved by the Council of Ministers on October 28, 2026 departs from the draft reviewed by Parliament. Time is short. The directive sets December 2, 2026 as the transposition deadline, and from that date the presumption of employment will also begin to apply to relationships already underway. By then, platforms operating in Italy, including those headquartered abroad, will have to bring contracts, algorithmic management systems and internal procedures into line.
The text of the directive is available on EUR-Lex. The first stage of the Italian process, with the enabling law and the preliminary review of July 23, is set out on the Labor Ministry’s dedicated page.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Redazione Lavoro on November 01, 2026 as «Rider e lavoro tramite app, via libera definitivo al decreto che recepisce la direttiva UE: cosa cambia». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
