TaxCompass Insights & Research
Short pieces on Italian tax where the number is ours — measured from primary documents or produced by our own engine. Every figure is sourced and every dataset is downloadable, so you can disagree with the work properly.
€1,500
Two Italian laws price the same foreign account and they do not use the same base. The tax falls on the wrapper: €34.20 a year on a current account, whatever is in it. The penalty for leaving it off the annual return falls on the money — 3 to 15 per cent of the balance, once per return, whether or not any tax was due on it.
Read the piece€7,800
Nothing is taxed at an Italian professional firm constituted as a società semplice: article 5 of the TUIR hands the profit to the partners share by share, and each pays progressive IRPEF on what lands in their name. The Agenzia ruled on 23 September that the partners who do the work may now fix those shares after the year has closed — the partner who only put money in still cannot.
€50,000
Getting an Italian VAT number is free and takes a form. Losing one is priced: the order that cancels it carries €3,000, imposed with the order itself, and the statute puts it out of reach of the reduction the rest of the penalty code allows. Then it closes the door — no further partita IVA, as a sole trader, as a freelancer, or as the director of a company set up afterwards, without a surety bond of at least €50,000 running three years. Of the ten things that can happen to a partita IVA, that bond is the only one that reaches five figures, and it follows the one event the holder does not choose.
€1,160
A marketplace pays a freelancer the money left after its cut. Italian law recognises two ways of papering that, and they put a different number in the revenue box of the same tax return. Under ordinary rules the choice is worth nothing, because article 54 of the income tax act taxes compensi minus spese and the two readings net out. Under the regime forfetario, whose coefficient replaces real costs and whose only deduction is compulsory contributions, the same €36,000 in the bank leaves €1,160 less one way than the other.
€6,263
The regime forfetario is something the previous year qualifies you for, and one qualification is a ceiling on what you spent on other people: €20,000 gross. One euro over and the next year is ordinary IRPEF, at the same billing, with the same person employed. For a professional at the €85,000 ceiling that costs €6,263. Below €59,943 of billing it costs nothing — by then the flat rate had already stopped paying.
€180.33
The exemption for cultural visits is written for services that go with a visit, and an answer published on 1 September reads that literally: where no entrance ticket is sold, nothing is being visited, so the guide's fee is an ordinary taxable service. The reduced-rate table has nothing that reaches a guided outing, which leaves 22% — and a rate the participant cannot reclaim.
€124.01
Article 116 of L. 388/2000 drops the 5.5-point maggiorazione for a contribution paid within a hundred and twenty days, in one sum, before INPS has asked. What it leaves is the reference rate, which INPS set at 2.65% on 11 September — so the four months our own table printed as a dash cost €124.01 on the bill it costed, and a full year costs €1,160.09 rather than €782.88.
€4,798
A law of 1989 required the income limits in the tax code to be topped up by decree every year prices rose more than 2%, and seven decrees did it. The last took effect in 1998. The limit has not moved since, the article around it has been amended four times, and on ISTAT's own coefficients it has given up €1,957.58 of what it could buy.
€8,311
Letter d) of the flat-rate regime's exclusion list bars anyone who controls a company doing work traceable back to their own. The Agenzia reads that as one deducted invoice into the same ATECO section — no threshold, no share of turnover — where the neighbouring exclusion, about billing a former employer, needs more than half the year's receipts.
€2,779
The regime forfetario exempts its taxpayers from charging VAT “per le operazioni nazionali” — for domestic operations. Sell a course, an app or a subscription to consumers in another member state, and past €10,000 a year the tax belongs to their country, at their country's rate, with nothing to deduct against it. Since January 2025 an exemption can be carried across the border, under a Union-wide ceiling lower than most people planning around €85,000 expect.
€100,000
Article 24-bis lets someone who moves their tax residence to Italy pay a fixed sum instead of income tax on everything they earn abroad. Both increases since 2017 were written to reach only people arriving after them, so the price is set by the year you land and then stays there — for up to fifteen years, which makes a 2026 arrival €1.5 million dearer than a 2025 one.
€1,732.50
Article 54-bis.1 of the VAT act, whose operating rules the Agenzia delle entrate published on 28 August, lets the office liquidate a year nobody declared from the electronic invoices, receipts and payments it already holds. On €4,950 of tax that bill is €10,890, or €6,930 if it is answered inside sixty days — against €8,662.50 for the taxpayer who files the return themselves, because ravvedimento does not reach a return more than ninety days late.
€1,428
INPS charges the Gestione separata contribution on business income only up to €122,295 for 2026. Below that line an extra euro is taken twice, at 26.07% and then at the income-tax rate on what survives; above it, once. The heaviest rate a freelancer on this scheme meets sits in the middle of the scale, not at the top of it.
€3,243.67
Ninety days after the deadline a return stops being late and starts being omitted. The tenth-of-the-minimum discount that made it a €25 matter is written for the ninety days and no further, and what replaces it is three quarters of the year's tax — with the years the Agenzia has to come back rising from four to seven on the same day.
€2,001
Comma 64 of the flat rate's own statute takes one thing off its base: the contributions the law obliges you to pay. Every other relief Italian income tax offers a person — the pension deduction of article 10, the 22% credits of article 15 — comes off a reddito complessivo and an imposta lorda that a flat-rate-only taxpayer does not have.
€13,000
Lettera b) of comma 57 lets a freelancer resident elsewhere in the EU or the EEA use the regime forfetario, on condition that at least 75% of their total income arises in Italy. Rearranged, the condition says they may earn abroad at most a third of what they earn in Italy — and the euro that ends the regime is one a client in their own country pays them.
€11,035
A self-employed professional in Italy may add 4% of gross fees to the invoice, and the client has to pay it. On €50,000 of billing that is €2,000 against a Gestione separata contribution of €13,035. The percentage was written against a contribution of 10%, when it covered two fifths of the bill. The contribution is 26.07% today, and the comma granting the 4% has come through thirty-nine versions of its own article without a word changing.
€163.31
Seventeen re-determinations in nine months, ten of them in decreti-legge and seven in ministerial decrees, two of which fixed the rate for the gap between one decreto-legge and the next. Measured against the 672,90 euro per thousand litres the year starts from, the whole run of reductions comes to €163.31 for a van burning 2,000 litres. The rate is 572,90 from 18 to 25 September, then 622,90 to 5 October.
€3,173
The flat tax on €10,000 of retail turnover is nothing: the contribution due is larger than the €4,000 the statute presumes the shop made, and comma 64 deducts it until the taxable base is gone. What is left is a bill that does not move with takings. Against the identical contribution rates applied to the income the law itself presumes, the minimum costs that shop €3,173 a year — and the worse the year, the more it takes.
€3,048
Italian residence is decided for a whole tax period rather than from the day you arrive: article 2 of the TUIR asks where a person was for the greater part of it, which in 2026 makes 2 July the last date that counts. Arrive after it and the regime forfetario is closed for the rest of the year — €20,000 billed between landing and 31 December carries €3,828.04 of income tax instead of €780.00. The EU exception written for exactly this case turns out to be unreachable by anyone who needs it.
500
To move to Italy and open a business, a non-EU founder needs a self-employment permit, and it comes out of an annual quota. The 2026–2028 decree sets that quota at 650 a year — 0.39% of the 164,850 work entries Italy programmes. The slice a founder can use is a single pool of 500, shared with professionals, company directors and artists; the plain-entrepreneur lane inside it asks for €500,000 of your own capital and three new jobs.
€17,100
IVAFE, Italy's tax on assets held abroad, charges a foreign bank account a fixed €34.20 whatever its size, and foreign investments 0.2% of their value every year. The wrapper sets the bill, not the balance — and the two cost the same only at €17,100, above which the account is the cheaper wrapper without limit.
€22,723
Comma 54 of the regime's statute tests last year's receipts, so failing it can only close the regime from next January. The second sentence of comma 71, added on 1 January 2023, tests this year's — and above €100,000 the flat tax is withdrawn back to the previous 1 January, with VAT owed from the invoice that crossed the line.
€220
Article 7-ter of the VAT act puts a service bought from a non-resident supplier inside Italy, article 17 makes the buyer the person who owes the tax, and the last sentence of comma 58 refuses them the deduction every other business gets. Commi 58 to 60 of the regime's own statute keep nine provisions of VAT law and six duties for a taxpayer they describe as exonerated.
€2,090
Work done without a partita IVA is a reddito diverso, taxed on top of everything else the person earns. The 20% the client keeps back is a payment on account. For someone with €35,000 of employment income, a €6,000 fee costs €3,369.60 in tax and contributions — the withholding covers about a third of it, and the rest falls due when the return is filed.
€1,621
The flat tax's start-up discount is granted for the tax year the activity began in and the four after it, so it always expires on a 31 December and never on an anniversary. For a professional billing €50,000 a year, the last date on which opening still earns more than the discounted year it uses up is 4 December. After that, waiting for January is worth money — €1,621 by the 20th.
€1,314
Every ordinary-regime figure published here has used one number for the regional and municipal surcharges on IRPEF: 2.23% of taxable income. The Agenzia delle Entrate publishes both real tables — 21 regional scales and a rate for each of 7,896 comuni — and applied to a professional billing €50,000 they run from €24.17 in the province of Bolzano to €1,337.80 in Salerno. The flat-rate regime pays neither surcharge, so all of that variation is variation in what the flat tax is worth.
€50,837
Article 22 of the immigration act once let a departing non-EU worker ask for their contributions back with 5% a year added. The law that replaced it in 2002 kept the pension rights instead. What is left on the day someone closes an Italian business and flies home is a claim at 67, and a short list of countries where those years can be added to anything else.
€2,031
Comma 186 of the 2025 budget law halved the contribution for anyone joining the artisan or trader scheme for the first time, provided the business started during 2025. The window was 365 days wide and nothing replaced it. What it was worth turns on how much of the pension year the contribution was already buying.
€31,065
The flat-rate regime bars anyone whose work goes mainly to an employer they have or had in the two preceding tax years. A second provision defers the effect by a year, which turns a two-year lookback into three years outside the regime — and the statute never says what share of billing counts as mainly.
€13,025
The flat-rate regime taxes a share of your billing that your activity code decides, so the same take-home costs a different amount of work in every band. It also means each band has a most it can ever pay: €6,068 a month for a retailer, €4,914 for a builder.
€400
Italy exempts an invoice from stamp duty when VAT is charged on it. A flat-rate invoice never is, so it pays €2 — and the exemption meant to spare small invoices is still written as 150,000 lire, unchanged since August 1992.
€4,925.50
Italy's flat-rate regime is shut to anyone who earned more than €35,000 from a job the year before. The bar looks back at a year already over, it is measured on taxable pay rather than gross, and the €35,000 is not the figure written in the flat-tax law — that still says €30,000.
€259.53
Six sevenths of what a flat-tax professional pays on 30 June is a pension contribution, not tax, and it is late under a different statute. Its surcharge is waived for a hundred and twenty days and then charged for every day since — €259.53, against €47.39 for crossing the ravvedimento line at day 91.
€7.44
The whole non-pension part of an artisan's compulsory contribution is €0.62 a month, and it does not move with the business. A professional in the Gestione separata pays 1.07% of income instead — a price that rises without limit, for benefits that are fixed shares of one national ceiling.
€2,000
Every Italian client who pays a professional certifies the amount to the Agenzia delle Entrate. Declare at least €2,000 less than those certificates add up to and you are selected — rule 10 of twenty-five published on 14 July, and the most forgiving of them.
€24,235
The balance for a first year and the whole advance for the second fall due in the same twelve months, because an advance is 100% of the previous year's tax and a first year has no previous year. On €50,000 of billing that is €24,235 inside the second calendar year, €16,964 of it on 30 June.
€72,338
The reduction is granted by one sentence of the 2015 stability law, which in the same breath sends the crediting of those contributions to a 1995 pension rule: pay less than the contribution on the minimum income and the months are cut in proportion. A shop on the 40% coefficient has to bill €72,338 before the discount is free.
€6,471
The forfettario taxes a fixed share of turnover, so a euro of real cost reduces what you keep and not what you owe. Past a certain level of spending the ordinary regime, which taxes profit, leaves more. For a professional billing €25,000 that level is €6,471 a year; at the €85,000 ceiling it is €31,603. Every net-income figure published here so far assumed those costs were zero.
€21,500
Move to Italy and Italy will tax half your income for five years. Move to Italy and open a shop, a workshop or an online store, and it will tax all of it: the relief rewritten for 2024 dropped the sentence that covered people starting a business. On €100,000 of income that sentence was worth €21,500 a year.
15
A consultant billing €60,000 could not use Italy's flat tax at all until its fifth year. The rules deciding that have been rewritten fourteen times since 2015 — a new version every 185 days on median — and eight of those rewrites moved who is let in, who is shut out, or when the regime stops applying. The one number the regime is named for sits in the half of the text nobody has touched.
€440
The 2026 budget changed one line of the income-tax code: the band from €28,000 to €50,000 fell by two points. Because that band sits in the middle, the cut is worth nothing to a professional billing under €37,873, reaches its full €440 at €67,632, and is worth exactly zero to anyone inside the flat-rate regime. One sentence later, the same article takes €440 back off the biggest earners.
18 of 18
Look up the forfettario on Italy's official law database today and thirty-six commi come back marked COMMA ABROGATO. The decree that strikes them out, published in July, also re-enacts the regime as articles 232 to 243 of a new income-tax code. Both take effect on 1 January 2027.
40%→67%
The flat-tax regime taxes a fixed share of what you bill, and which share you get depends on your activity code. April 2025 renumbered every code in the country. Car repair came out in a band that presumes 67% of the billing is profit where the old one presumed 40% — for identical work — and the statute still names the retired numbering, so which reading governs is unsettled.
27
The European Semester runs on recommendations, and a recommendation has no binding force. Legislating on income tax needs all 27 governments to agree, Italy's included. The only parliament that can end the forfettario is the one that created it.
€18,145
Italy's flat-rate regime stops at €85,000 of revenue. On 2026 rates, the year after you cross is €18,145 lighter, and it takes €44,820 of extra billing to end up where you already were.
