Malta’s 2027 Budget strips free public transport and childcare from non-EU workers who have not reached long-term residence, a change the government expects to save €46 million. Third country nationals who have lived in Malta for fewer than five years will lose access to the heavily subsidised public transport network and to childcare, which has been free since 2013.
Matthew Vella argues the measure targets the very workers Malta’s growth model has leaned on. After 13 years of opening the country to mass economic migration, he writes, the same government that built its model on imported labour is now carrying out what he calls a symbolic and real crackdown on it.
The workers affected are not, for the most part, the high-earning EU professionals usually described as expats. With Malta’s median annual income at €18,200, many are care workers, nurses, kitchen staff, hospitality workers, cleaners and delivery drivers.
Vella’s sharper point is about the public sector’s hand in creating that dependency, which he says the Budget leaves untouched. Between 2019 and 2024, full-time public sector employment grew by 12.3% to over 53,000 workers, about 18% of Malta’s full-time workforce and above the EU average of 16%. Counting workers in outsourced quasi-public employment pushes the figure to 27%. By absorbing lower-skilled Maltese workers into patronage employment, he argues, the private sector is left needing foreign labour in hospitality, construction, care and cleaning.
He reads the measures as a response to voter resentment over imported workers, in his words rewarding nativist loyalty while taxing foreign vulnerability. “This is not socialism,” he writes.
On incentives for Maltese workers, Vella points to the same Budget’s treatment of extra hours. Work overtime and you may face a reduced tax rate and no social security. Take a second job and pay 10% tax with no social security. The result, as he puts it: work more, produce less, earn more.
The wider Budget frames this as a push to make the old way of growing more expensive, in the hope that businesses respond by becoming more productive.
