Excellent news: various measures have been approved that facilitate early exit from work even for those without children.
You will be able to access early retirement even if you have no children. The long-awaited news has finally arrived. Let’s see everything in detail. Balancing work and family is almost never easy. It’s not easy especially for a woman.
Despite gender equality and the sharing of tasks within a couple, very often the majority of domestic work and child care falls on the woman. This is why the various governments that have followed one another over the years have always implemented early retirement measures that give a small advantage to women.
In fact, not only the female worker, in many cases, is also a mother and takes care of her children. But more and more frequently, as the retirement age increases, there are working grandmothers who, when they can, help their children in managing their grandchildren. To date, in Italy there are various measures designed specifically to encourage the early exit of women from work. And some measures target all women, not just those with children.
Early retirement for women: all the solutions
If you are a woman, you can access your pension a few years earlier than required by the Fornero law. Let’s look at all the possibilities for retiring early.
The first solution that benefits women compared to men is the ordinary early pension. This measure does not have any age requirement but only takes into account the contributions paid. In practice, with the ordinary early pension, you can leave your job at any age as long as you are paid at least 41 years and 10 months of contributions. Men, however, must have completed at least 42 years and 10 months of contributions.
The second size designed specifically for women is the Women’s Option, born in 2004 under the second government of Silvio Berlusconi. Until 2022, the women’s option was aimed at all workers and did not distinguish between women with children and women without children. From 2023 the rules have changed.
Only caregivers, disabled people with a disability of 74% or more, the unemployed or employees of companies in crisis can benefit from this measure. The contribution requirement is 35 years for all while the chronological age to be able to access the early pension with the Woman Option it is 61 years for women without children, 60 years for women with only one child and 59 years for women with at least two children.
The contributory early pension also benefits women with children. Both men and women can follow this path as long as they have started paying contributions since 1996. With the contributory early pension you can retire at 64 with 20 years of contributions but certain minimum thresholds must be reached. To exploit this measure, in practice, you must have accrued a social security allowance equal to or greater than:
- 3 times the amount of the social allowance for men and women without children;
- 2.8 times the amount of the social allowance for workers with a child;
- 2.6 times the amount of the Social Allowance for working mothers of two or more children.
