There is an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of Italy’s education system in 2026.
Teaching is one of the professions on which the country depends most heavily, yet Italian teachers continue to earn significantly less than many workers with comparable levels of education. At the same time, the profession is becoming more complicated, more demanding and, in some cases, physically dangerous.
The latest OECD figures provide the clearest picture yet.
The 2026 edition of Education at a Glance, published on September 29, shows that Italian teachers remain well behind several European countries in salary terms. The report also highlights something even more important: when inflation is taken into account, Italian starting salaries have lost ground since 2015.
Then there is the other side of the story — violence in schools.
During 2026, Italy has witnessed several deeply disturbing incidents involving teachers and students, including knife attacks in Bergamo and Rome, a planned attack discovered in Lamezia Terme and violent confrontations involving parents.
The numbers do not show a simple nationwide increase in violence. Official monitoring actually points to a decline in reported cases. But the seriousness of some recent incidents raises a different question: even if attacks are statistically fewer, how safe is the teaching profession becoming?

What Italian teachers actually earn

The first problem with discussions about teacher salaries is that there is no single Italian teacher salary.
Pay depends on the level of education, professional status, years of service, contractual position and additional payments.
Online estimates often place monthly take-home pay somewhere between roughly €1,350 and €2,350, but those figures should be treated as indicative rather than as an official national scale. Net income varies according to taxation, deductions, regional and municipal surcharges and individual circumstances.
The more reliable starting point is the national collective agreement.
Italy’s 2025-2027 education contract was definitively signed on July 1, 2026. It introduced salary increases in stages, with the full contractual framework extending to January 2027.
For early-career primary and pre-primary teachers, the annual contractual salary in 2026 is €23,343.16 before the additional components and the thirteenth payment. By January 2027 it will rise to €23,742.40.
For lower-secondary teachers, the 2026 contractual salary at the first seniority step is €25,267.04, rising to €25,699.16 in 2027.
For a graduate teacher in upper secondary education, the figure is also €25,267.04 in 2026 at the initial step, rising to €25,699.16 in 2027.
At the other end of the career scale, a graduate upper-secondary teacher reaches a contractual salary of €39,281.99 in 2026 and €39,953.75 from January 2027, before other salary components.
The new contract provides an average increase of about €143 gross per month for school teachers at full implementation from January 2027.
That is a real improvement.
But it does not automatically mean that Italian teachers have caught up internationally.

The OECD comparison tells a different story

The most useful international comparison comes from the OECD because it avoids the misleading practice of simply converting one country’s salary into another currency.
The OECD uses purchasing power parity, which takes differences in price levels into account.
For lower-secondary teachers with the most prevalent qualification, the Italian statutory salary after 15 years of experience is about USD 52,613 in purchasing-power-adjusted terms.
The OECD average is approximately USD 66,583.
France is slightly higher at around USD 54,778.
Spain is much higher, at approximately USD 77,440.
Germany reaches about USD 111,804.
Luxembourg is in another league, at roughly USD 150,897.
The United States stands at about USD 78,231.
These are not take-home salaries and they should not be read as literal euro amounts. They are a standardized way of comparing statutory salaries between countries.
The ranking nevertheless makes one fact difficult to ignore: Italy is far from the upper end of the OECD salary scale.

The biggest problem may be at the beginning of the career

One of the most striking findings in the 2026 OECD report concerns starting salaries.
Across OECD countries with comparable data, statutory starting salaries for lower-secondary teachers increased by roughly 20% in real terms between 2015 and 2025.
Italy went in the opposite direction.
Italian starting salaries at this level fell by more than 10% in real terms during the same period.
This means that simply looking at a larger number of euros on a payslip can be misleading.
If prices rise faster than wages, the nominal increase does not necessarily translate into greater purchasing power.
For a young graduate considering teaching as a career, this matters enormously.
A profession can become more expensive to enter, require years of training and competitive recruitment procedures, involve geographical mobility and carry major responsibilities while offering relatively limited financial rewards at the beginning.

Italian teachers also earn less than comparable graduates

The OECD provides another revealing comparison.
Italian pre-primary teachers earn, on average, 36% less than other tertiary-educated workers.
For lower-secondary teachers, the gap is approximately 33%.
This does not mean that every Italian teacher earns exactly one-third less than every other graduate.
It is a statistical comparison between categories of workers.
But it raises a serious policy question.
If education systems need highly qualified professionals, how competitive can the teaching profession remain when alternative careers requiring similar educational qualifications offer stronger earning potential?

Teaching is not just the hours spent in front of students

Another persistent misunderstanding concerns working hours.
Teachers do not simply arrive at school, teach their lessons and leave.
There is preparation, marking, meetings, parent conferences, assessment, lesson planning, administrative work, professional development and the management of students with very different educational and personal needs.
The OECD estimates Italy’s minimum annual teaching time at 752 hours in primary education and 616 hours in lower secondary education.
Those figures are teaching hours, not total working hours.
That distinction matters.
Comparing only classroom hours can create the false impression that teachers work less than other professionals, when a substantial part of their job takes place outside the classroom.

Then came the violence

Salary is only one side of the story.
During 2026, several incidents have placed teacher safety at the center of Italy’s national debate.
In March, a 57-year-old French teacher, Chiara Mocchi, was seriously injured in a knife attack carried out by a 13-year-old student in Trescore Balneario, near Bergamo.
The attack had disturbing elements of preparation and social-media involvement.
In May, a technology teacher in San Vito Lo Capo was injured with a small knife during a lesson by a middle-school student. The episode was reportedly partially recorded on a mobile phone.
In Palermo, a visually impaired teacher was seriously injured after being punched by the father of a student following a dispute concerning what the girl had allegedly told her family about the teacher.
Another Palermo incident in May involved a parent who allegedly confronted a teacher after a reprimand directed at his child and assaulted two school employees who intervened.
Then September brought two particularly alarming cases.
On September 18, a 66-year-old teacher, Isabella Marsilio, was attacked at a middle school in Rome’s Centocelle district by a 13-year-old student.
According to investigators and media reports, the student used pepper spray and knives and attempted to record the attack through social media.
The assault was stopped by another student who intervened and disarmed his classmate.
Only a few days later, on September 23, police in Lamezia Terme stopped a 14-year-old student who allegedly planned to attack his Italian teacher with a knife.
The weapon was reportedly hidden inside the school, while the plan had been discussed through Telegram.
By September 30, the juvenile prosecutor’s office in Catanzaro had ordered that the teenager be taken into care by local social services.
These cases are different, and their causes are not necessarily connected.
But together they illustrate a new layer of risk: the combination of school conflict, social media, family pressure, adolescent distress and access to weapons.

The statistics need to be handled carefully

There is an important correction to the popular narrative that “teacher attacks are constantly increasing”.
Official monitoring by Italy’s Education Ministry does not show a continuous rise.
Reported incidents went from 36 in the 2022-23 school year to 68 in 2023-24, before falling to 51 in 2024-25.
During the first months of the 2025-26 school year, four cases had been reported, compared with 21 during the same period of the previous year.
So the statistical trend was downward.
But that does not mean the problem has disappeared.
A single knife attack can have consequences far greater than its place in an annual statistic suggests.
And the monitoring system itself is relatively recent, meaning that it should not be interpreted as a perfect historical record of every violent episode occurring inside Italian schools.
The composition of the incidents is also revealing.
In the 2023-24 monitoring, teachers were involved in 57 cases, school principals in 11 and administrative or support staff in 7, with some episodes involving more than one category.
In 33 cases, the alleged aggressor was a family member; in 31, it was a student.
That is particularly important because the school-family relationship is becoming a security issue as well as an educational one.

When disagreement becomes intimidation

Parents have every right to question teachers.
They can ask for explanations, challenge procedures, speak with school management and use formal complaint mechanisms.
But there is a fundamental difference between disagreement and intimidation.
A teacher should be able to give a low grade without fearing retaliation.
A teacher should be able to discipline a student without becoming a target.
And a school principal should be able to tell a parent that a rule has been broken without expecting the meeting to turn into a confrontation.
The problem is not that parents care too much about their children.
The problem begins when defending a child is interpreted as a justification for threatening the people responsible for educating them.

Italy has already tightened the rules

Italy has introduced stronger legal protections for school personnel.
Legislation adopted in recent years has increased penalties for violence and threats against teachers and school staff, while subsequent measures introduced additional protections and provisions concerning arrests in certain cases involving injuries to teachers and school leaders.
But law enforcement alone cannot rebuild the authority of a profession.
A school cannot be transformed into a fortress.
Metal detectors can be useful in specific situations. Police intervention can be essential. Criminal penalties can provide deterrence.
But none of these measures can replace prevention, psychological support, family responsibility, classroom management and a culture of respect.

The other side of the story must also be told

A serious discussion about school safety cannot portray teachers as automatically right and students as automatically wrong.
There have also been investigations in 2026 involving teachers and educators accused of mistreating children.
In Lecce, two teachers were investigated over alleged mistreatment and humiliating behavior toward an 11-year-old student with a disability.
In Rome, a nursery educator was suspended after investigators reportedly documented physical and verbal mistreatment of very young children.
These cases are not equivalent to attacks on teachers.
They do, however, underline a fundamental principle: schools must be safe for everyone.
Students need protection from abusive adults.
Teachers need protection from violent students and parents.
Administrative staff need protection.
School leaders need protection.
The same institution has to guarantee all of them.

A profession caught between low pay and high responsibility

This is ultimately why the debate about Italian teacher salaries is bigger than a payslip.
Italy is trying to make teaching more attractive through contractual salary increases.
But the OECD data show that the country still has a substantial gap compared with many international systems, particularly after 15 years of experience.
At the same time, Italy has an ageing teaching workforce. In 2024, 36% of secondary teachers were aged 55 or older, compared with about 25% across countries with available OECD data.
That combination should concern policymakers.
A country needs young, qualified people to enter teaching.
It needs experienced teachers to remain in the profession.
And it needs both groups to feel that their work is respected financially and professionally.

The real question is what kind of school Italy wants

The debate should therefore move beyond the simplistic question of whether teachers earn “too much” or “too little”.
The real question is whether the country is paying enough to attract qualified professionals into a job that carries enormous responsibility.
And whether it is protecting those professionals sufficiently when they enter the classroom.
Teachers should not have to choose between professional authority and personal safety.
They should not have to fear a knife because of a grade.
They should not have to worry about a parent turning a meeting into an act of intimidation.
And they should not be expected to solve alone problems that involve families, social services, mental health, digital platforms and wider social tensions.
Italy has taken some steps on salaries and security.
The OECD data suggest that the salary problem remains unresolved.
The recent incidents suggest that the security problem cannot be dismissed simply because the overall number of reported attacks has fallen.
Education is an investment.
If the people delivering it are underpaid compared with comparable professionals and increasingly exposed to difficult or dangerous situations, the cost will eventually be paid by the entire education system.
The real challenge is therefore not simply to pay teachers more.
It is to make teaching a profession in which qualified people want to enter, experienced people want to stay and every person inside a school — student, teacher, parent or staff member — can feel safe.

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