CAP Payments 2025

In 2025 the CAP disbursed €7.70 billion in Italy to 451,033 beneficiaries across 7,738 municipalities. Sicily receives 11.3% of the funds, followed by Puglia (9.7%) and Emilia-Romagna (9.1%); this distribution does not coincide with the areas of highest livestock concentration. The data shows where public resources for the agricultural sector as a whole were disbursed, not only for livestock farming.

The view opens at the regional level. The selector then moves, in order, to the provincial and municipal levels. Regions and provinces use choropleths, where a darker gold shade corresponds to a higher total amount; municipalities use proportional bubbles at municipal centroids. The five classes are calculated from the national distribution for each level and remain fixed when geographic filters are applied.

Provincial and regional values sum the published municipalities and reconcile with the municipal-view total. Because AGEA applies a confidentiality threshold, municipalities with fewer than 5 beneficiaries are excluded from all three representations. The choropleths show absolute amounts, not euros per hectare, holding or resident, and are therefore also affected by territorial size and agricultural structure.

The figure is aggregated across all agricultural sectors: it does not allow the share of that support going to livestock to be isolated from crops. It should be read as an indicator of the CAP's overall weight in the local agricultural fabric, to be read alongside, not in place of, the CAP & NH₃ Emissions view.

The total of 2025 CAP payments recorded in this view, €7.70 billion, breaks down into three sources: €3.90 billion from the EAGF, €2.14 billion from the European share of the EAFRD, €1.66 billion from national and regional co-financing paired with rural development measures. Dividing the entire amount by the number of taxpayers or residents shows the weight of CAP funds distributed across Italian territory, not their cost borne by Italy: the EAGF and the European component of the EAFRD, €6.04 billion in all, are funded from the Union's common budget, to which all member states contribute.

Italy does contribute to that budget: in 2024 its share stood at around 12.66% of the total. Applying this percentage as a conventional attribution criterion to the European component, and adding it in full to national co-financing — which is Italian public spending in every respect — the share of CAP payments attributable to Italian financing is estimated at about €2.42 billion, 31.5% of the total distributed in Italy.

Relative to the 42,837,963 taxpayers recorded in personal income tax statistics for the 2024 tax year, the average figure is about €56.60; relative to the 58,942,828 residents in Italy as of 31 December 2025, about €41.14. For comparison, improperly attributing the entire amount of CAP payments to Italian financing alone would produce figures nearly three times as high: €179.75 per taxpayer, €130.64 per resident.

These figures are not an individual tax levy nor an official Treasury quantification, but an estimated average share attributable to Italian financing. The EU budget is funded from several own resources — customs duties, VAT, gross national income — that cannot be attributed linearly to the taxpayers of a single state; there is no dedicated CAP tax; and some of the individuals recorded in income tax statistics pay no positive net tax. Nor does the calculation measure Italy's overall net balance with the EU, or how the burden is distributed among individuals, businesses and consumers.

In 2024, FEAGA disbursed about €3.98 billion in Italy to 713,545 beneficiaries with a positive net amount, identified by tax code or VAT number. The distribution of this amount among beneficiaries is far from uniform: the Gini index, which equals 0 under perfect equidistribution and tends toward 1 as payments concentrate on fewer recipients, stands at 0.724 for 2024 — a high level of concentration, comparable to wealth concentration in many advanced economies.

In practical terms, the top 10% of beneficiaries by amount received — where large agro-industrial groups, sizeable cooperatives and above-average-scale farms weigh heavily — alone receive 62.3% of the funds disbursed. The top 1% alone receives 28.4%. At the other end, the bottom 50% of beneficiaries by amount together receive just 7.2% of the total: half of all CAP recipients together receive less than a tenth of what the largest 10% receive on their own.

AGEA's 2024 Annual Report reports a national CAP payment total of €7.83 billion, split between FEAGA (2023-27 programming plus old schemes, €4.02 billion in total) and FEASR (2014-22 old programming plus new 2023-27, €3.81 billion in total). Comparing these official totals with the public beneficiary file used for this analysis, FEAGA reconciles to within under 1% (€3.98 billion versus €4.02 billion official): it can therefore be considered representative of the national beneficiary population.

FEASR, on the other hand, appears in the public file for only €1.75 billion, less than half of the official total of €3.81 billion. The most likely cause, not confirmed by an official methodological note, is that the beneficiary file mainly covers the current 2023-27 programming period, while a substantial share of residual payments from the 2014-22 programming — which in 2024 still accounted for €2.62 billion nationally — does not appear in the same export. AGEA's transparency portal only publishes the last two financial years (2024 and 2025): there is no separate beneficiary file for the old FEASR programming from which to recover the missing figure.

For this reason, the Gini index for FEASR is not calculated in this analysis: a sample covering less than half of actual spending does not allow a reliable measure of payment concentration.

The calculation excludes 940 positions with a negative net amount (adjustments or recoveries from previous years, totaling about €22.5 million): those beneficiaries remain in the national total but do not contribute to the concentration calculation in this version.

The main limitation of the calculation is that beneficiaries are identified by individual tax code or VAT number, not by controlling corporate group: related companies with multiple separate VAT numbers (parent company, subsidiaries, cooperatives belonging to a consortium) appear as separate beneficiaries. Actual concentration of support within large agro-industrial groups is therefore likely higher than what is measured here, not lower.