Italy opens consultation on truck licences at 17

Italy's transport ministry has proposed lowering the minimum truck licence age from 18 to 17, as part of a full rewrite of the national Highway Code that went out to public consultation on 2026-08-06. A second measure in the same draft would let a category C licence holder start professional driving before completing the CQC, the Carta di Qualificazione del Conducente that serves as Italy's Driver Certificate of Professional Competence. Comments are open until 2026-09-13.

What the truck licence change at 17 would allow

Category C1 covers vehicles with a maximum authorised mass above 3.5 tonnes and up to 7.5 tonnes. Under the draft, that licence would become available from 17 rather than 18, and the route to the CQC would open a year earlier as well. This does not extend to a full category C licence.

Italy's draft would also let a category C licence holder begin professional driving before completing the CQC, provided they are already enrolled in an initial qualification course and complete it within 12 months. In practice that creates a one-year transitional window in which someone drives commercially while still finishing the qualification the job normally requires.

The ministry links both proposals to recruitment. It has framed the pre-qualification window in particular as a way to bring in drivers from outside the European Union who arrive in Italy holding a licence but no professional qualification.

The consultation forms part of the broader Highway Code overhaul the ministry has been negotiating with trade associations since 2026-07-21 , which also proposes digital licences and registration documents and a cut in the number of main sanction bands from 82 to around 21, according to the draft text seen by Uomini e Trasporti .

The two measures carry very different legal risk

The age change is the safer of the pair. Directive (EU) 2025/2205, which entered into force on 2025-11-25 , creates an EU-wide accompanied driving scheme for 17-year-old car drivers. It also explicitly allows Member States to introduce an equivalent scheme for 17-year-old HGV drivers in categories C1, C1E and C, with mutual recognition between the states that apply it. Those accompanied-driving provisions become applicable three years after entry into force, so Italy is moving early rather than moving alone.

The pre-CQC window is the contested one. Italian reporting notes that current EU rules on the initial qualification of professional drivers contain no equivalent mechanism permitting commercial driving before that qualification is obtained. If the measure survives to a final text, it is the provision most likely to attract legal challenge or be narrowed.

Why Italy is pushing this now

The pressure is structural rather than Italian. IRU's 2025 driver shortage report, published June 2026, puts Europe's shortage rate at 13%, or roughly 502,000 unfilled truck driver positions, and finds that 65% of European operators rank the shortage as their single most pressing concern . Around 660,500 European drivers are expected to retire by 2030.

For carriers running Italian lanes, nothing changes yet. This is a consultation draft, and Italy hopes to take an enabling law to parliament in the autumn.

The practical step now is to model whether a 17-year-old C1 intake would actually fit your Italian domestic work, since a 7.5-tonne ceiling suits regional distribution far better than long-haul. Keep planning 2027 recruitment on the assumption that the CQC stays a precondition, and keep the routine compliance basics current alongside it, including HGV speed limits in Italy .

Carriers looking for steadier Italian volumes while the rules settle can join the Logifie carrier network .

Planning Italian or cross-border volumes into a moving regulatory picture? Get a compliance-aware freight quote and we will price the lane against the rules that apply today.