Italy Is The First Country In The World To Give Workers Paid Leave For Sick Pets
Italy formally became the first country in the world to give workers paid leave to care for a seriously ill pet, with employees now entitled to claim up to three days off per year provided the animal is microchipped and the employee presents a digital veterinary certificate confirming the urgency of the care needed. The policy, which entered into force in early 2026, traces its origins to a single court case in Rome in 2017, in which a librarian at La Sapienza University won paid leave to care for her ailing English setter. Her legal team argued that under Article 727 of the Italian Penal Code, leaving an animal in a state of grave suffering is a criminal offence. If the law forbids abandoning a suffering animal, and that animal is suffering at home while you are legally required to be at work, then the employer is placing the employee in an impossible position between their legal obligations and their employment obligations. The court sided with the librarian. Animal protection organizations saw immediately what that ruling could become, pushed for its incorporation into labor agreements, and spent the better part of a decade making it happen. In March 2026, it became national policy.
Italy has more than 60 million companion animals across a population of roughly 60 million people, and more than half of Italian households live with at least one domestic animal. The country's existing labor protections are among the strongest in Europe, covering mandatory paid leave for a wide range of family care obligations, and advocates of the pet leave policy used precisely that framing: the concept of the multispecies family, extending the legal logic of care leave to include the beings that millions of households already treat as family in every practical sense. The microchip requirement and veterinary certificate requirement are both designed to prevent abuse: this is not a policy that lets someone skip work because a goldfish looks sad. It is a structured mechanism for the specific and genuine situations where a pet requires its owner's presence and that owner would otherwise face a choice between their job and an animal in genuine distress. Animal welfare researchers have consistently found that neglect and abandonment spike at moments of financial and professional crisis, and Italy's policy removes at least part of that pressure at exactly the most vulnerable moment. No other country has yet followed. But the policy advocates say the conversation is now underway in the United Kingdom, Argentina, and several US states, and Italy's example has given all of them a template.
