Assets in the Italian supplementary pension system reached €262bn at the end of 2025, a 7.7 per cent increase on 2024, figures from Italy’s Pension Funds Supervisory Commission (COVIP) have revealed.

COVIP’s update showed that, at the end of 2025, pension fund assets were invested primarily in debt securities (55.8 per cent), mostly government bonds.

Additionally, 24 per cent were invested in equities and 15.3 per cent in mutual funds.

Domestic investments accounted for 19.3 per cent of total assets, the majority of which consisted of government bonds.

Meanwhile, investments in securities issued by Italian companies remained limited: €5.8bn (2.6 per cent of total assets), of which €3.4bn were in corporate bonds and the remainder in equities.

The report showed that membership in the supplementary pension system also increased in 2025 by 4.8 per cent compared with the previous year.

However, growth rates varied across pension fund types, as contractual pension funds saw a 6.1 per cent growth, open pension funds saw 8.7 per cent, ‘new’ individual pension plans (PIPs) saw 2.9 per cent and pre-existing pension funds saw 0.9 per cent.

Overall, COVIP reported that, as at the end of 2025, there were more than 10 million members of Italian pension funds: 4.4 million in contractual pension funds, 2.2 million in open pension funds, 3.8 million in ‘new’ PIPs, approximately 666,000 in pre-existing pension funds and 272,000 in ‘old’ PIPs.

The participation rate in the supplementary pension system stood at 39.9 per cent of the labour force, falling to 29 per cent when excluding members who made no contributions to their individual accounts during the year.

Among all members, 7.7 million were employees, 1.2 million were self-employed workers and 1.5 million fell into the ‘other’ category.

Meanwhile, in terms of gender, men accounted for 61.2 per cent of total members and gender gaps were particularly pronounced in contractual pension funds, where women represented only 28.3 per cent of participants.

Additionally, contributions to Italian pension funds saw an improvement to €22.4bn in 2025, up 8.6 per cent compared with 2024.

Of these contributions, €18.7bn were allocated to employees’ accounts, €1.9bn were contributions from self-employed workers, and the remaining €1.6bn came from other members.

The report also showed that, at the end of 2025, there were 273 pension funds in total: 33 contractual pension funds, 38 open pension funds, 71 ‘new’ PIPs and 131 pre-existing pension funds (of which 96 were autonomous pension funds).

COVIP explained that the number of pension funds has been steadily declining in recent years, with a decrease of 18 funds in 2025 alone and 446 since 2000, reflecting an ongoing consolidation process that has primarily affected pre-existing funds.

In 2025, returns on pension funds were, on average, 4.8 per cent for contractual funds, 5.7 per cent for open funds and, among ‘new’ PIPs, the returns of unit-linked products were 5.1 per cent, while those of with-profit products were 1.5 per cent.

According to COVIP, equity-oriented investment options outperformed other investment options, delivering returns of 9.6 per cent for open funds, 7.8 per cent for unit-linked ‘new’ PIPs, and 7.7 per cent for contractual funds.

This is a main data update on the 2025 statistical data released about Italy’s supplementary pension funds released earlier this year.

---