The measure was approved by the Central Committee of Italy’s national road haulage register on 16 April 2026. It sets aside €2 million to support the voluntary exit of single-vehicle haulage operators, with €15,000 available per company.
To qualify, the business must operate with just one vehicle or one vehicle combination of at least 3.5 tonnes, must have been active for at least five years, and the owner must be at least 45 years old. In return for the money, the company must permanently shut down, cancel its registration, and stay out: the beneficiary is barred for 10 years from returning as an owner or shareholder of a haulage company.
The obvious question is why Italy wants this now.
Part of the answer is the immediate cost pressure: Italian industry reporting published on 20 April 2026 says more than 13,000 of the country’s 67,350 active road haulage firms risk closure by the end of the year because of the diesel shock. The same report says the average diesel price has reached €2.135 per litre, up 30.6% since the start of the year.
The other part is structural: Italian haulage has already been shrinking for years. Reporting published in February shows the number of active Italian road-haulage companies fell by 19,241 between 2015 and 2025, a drop of 22.2%. That points to a market where many smaller operators were already under strain before the latest fuel surge.
There is also a labour-market angle: On 17 April 2026, the Albo launched a sector survey on road haulage bottlenecks, including driver shortages, and asked companies to report operational, regulatory, and infrastructure problems. That suggests the authorities are looking not only at company numbers, but at how the sector functions as a whole.
The programme is small. With €2 million available and €15,000 per company, it could cover only around 133 operators at most. So this will not reshape the whole market on its own, but it is still a revealing signal. When a country starts paying hauliers to leave, it shows how hard it has become for the smallest operators to make the numbers work.
