EPSO AD5 2026: 174,922 Applicants by Country — Italy Sends 45%

The application window for the AD5 2026 generalist competition (EPSO/AD/427/26) closed on 10 March 2026 with a record: 174,922 candidates for 1,490 reserve-list places. Here is the official country breakdown — and the one number that changes how you should read the whole competition.

The official numbers, country by country

| Country | Applicants | Share of total | |---|---|---| | 🇮🇹 Italy | 79,450 | 45.4% | | 🇪🇸 Spain | 13,796 | 7.9% | | 🇩🇪 Germany | 11,705 | 6.7% | | 🇫🇷 France | 10,939 | 6.3% | | 🇬🇷 Greece | 10,087 | 5.8% | | Other 22 member states | 48,945 | 28.0% | | Total | 174,922 | 100% |

One country dominates: Italy sent 79,450 candidates — 45.4% of the entire field. That is more than the 22 smallest sending countries combined (48,945), and almost six times second-placed Spain.

Why Italy dominates the field

Italy represents roughly 11% of the EU population but 45% of AD5 applications — an over-representation of about four to one. The reasons are structural: a strong national tradition of public competitions (concorsi), a large yearly output of graduates in law, political science and economics, and an EU starting salary (€6,152 basic per month at AD5) that compares very favourably with entry-level pay in the national market.

None of this is new — Italian over-representation is a constant of EPSO competitions. What is new is the scale.

What 1 place per 117 candidates really means

Divide 174,922 by 1,490 and you get a brutal headline: less than 1% of applicants will make the reserve list. Read as a lottery, that is discouraging. But an EPSO competition is not a lottery, and the raw ratio overstates the real difficulty for a serious candidate:

• A significant share of applicants never sit the tests. Applying is free and takes an evening; preparing does not. No-shows and abandonments thin the field before the first question is asked.
• Most candidates prepare casually or not at all. The reasoning tests punish improvisation: time pressure, unfamiliar formats, and pass thresholds on every section.
• The cut is concentrated in the reasoning tests. Verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning — scheduled from autumn 2026 — eliminate the large majority of the field. Candidates who have practised hundreds of timed questions enter a completely different competition from those who have not.

Your effective competition is not 117 people per place. It is the subset who prepared seriously — and you decide which group you belong to.

If you are Italian, your competition is Italian

A reserve list has no national quotas: in theory you compete with everyone. In practice, with 45% of the field from one country, the statistical reality for an Italian candidate is that the people ahead of and behind you in the ranking will mostly be other Italians — same degrees, same profiles, often the same preparation habits.

That has a practical consequence: generic preparation gives you what everyone else already has. The differential comes from working your weak sections until they stop being weak — most candidates only train their strongest test type, because it feels better.

What to do now, before autumn

The reasoning tests are expected from October–November 2026. That leaves a real but finite preparation window. Three moves:

1. Measure your starting point across all test types. Not just the one you like. A free diagnostic tells you where your points are leaking.
2. Train your weakest section first. The pass thresholds are per section — a brilliant verbal score does not compensate a failed numerical one.
3. Practise under time pressure from day one. The single biggest difference between practice and the real test is the clock. Untimed practice measures knowledge; timed practice builds the skill the exam actually tests.

174,922 people applied. A fraction will prepare seriously. The numbers only look terrifying until you realise which side of that fraction you can choose to be on.