The government certifies €120bn in spending. The Court of Auditors measures just 6% of public-works value as fully closed and tested. Two metrics, two very different pictures of the Plan.
June 30, 2026 marked the official deadline set by Law 50/2026 for the physical completion of PNRR-funded works — Italy's €194.4 billion programme, the largest among Next Generation EU's roughly €750 billion in recipient countries. Administrations have until August 31 to finalise documentation on the ReGiS platform, with the final payment request due in Brussels by September 30 and disbursements expected by year-end. On paper, the formal countdown has ended. But the available figures tell markedly different stories depending on which metric is used.
The government, through Minister Foti, cited roughly €120 billion certified as of April 30, plus €24 billion reallocated to Cassa Depositi e Prestiti-managed financial instruments — facilities requiring only activation by the deadline, with actual completion extending to 2029. This is certified spending, not completed works — a distinction that tends to blur in public communication but is critical to assessing the Plan's real physical progress.
The Court of Auditors' semi-annual report, published in late May, offers a more granular and less optimistic picture. As of April, only 11 of 159 European milestones due for H1 2026 had been met. On public works specifically, the Court certifies 36.7% of financed projects as concluded — but the more telling figure concerns economic value: only about 6% of total allocated public-works investment corresponds to sites fully closed and verified. This gap between project count and value indicates that what got finished were mostly small interventions or works already underway before being absorbed into the Plan, while larger network infrastructure — Southern high-speed rail, port modernisation, urban regeneration — will inevitably extend beyond the formal deadline.
Openpolis's analysis of European Commission data identifies 60 measures with genuinely hard June 30 deadlines, worth €96.4 billion across 45,506 local projects, of which €60.4 billion is EU-funded; payments stood at just 49% near the deadline. The most exposed works include metropolitan rail nodes (€6.5bn), school buildings (€4.9bn) and high-speed lines toward Northern Europe (€4.6bn) — sectors directly intersecting public real estate and its renovation.
The macroeconomic impact remains similarly open to interpretation. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the PNRR's cumulative growth effect at around 1.8 GDP points — roughly €40 billion over four and a half years — a meaningful but more modest result than the optimistic 2021 projections, and one that depends on macroeconomic models whose multiplier assumptions carry their own uncertainty.
Taken together, the picture is neither the clear success suggested by certified-spending figures nor the failure implied by the harsher completion-rate data. It is a Plan that has delivered concrete, measurable results on digitalisation and procedural reform, while carrying structural delays precisely in the more complex physical infrastructure that most directly affects the quality of public real estate and the country's capacity to turn exceptional investment into lasting transformation.