The most your partner may earn and still be your dependant is 5,500,000 lire

You have moved to Italy and your partner has not started earning yet, so Italian tax treats them as your dependant and takes something off your bill for it. Then they pick up a little work — a few months of teaching, a short contract, some freelance invoices. The moment that income passes €2,840.51 in the calendar year, they stop being your dependant. Not gradually: the relief is there at €2,840.51 and gone at €2,840.52, and for a spouse it is worth €690 a year to anyone whose own income is between €15,000 and €40,000.1

€2,840.51 is a strange sum to legislate. It is 5,500,000 lire.

A number that was never converted, only translated

Multiply €2,840.51 by 1,936.27, the rate at which the lira was fixed against the euro, and you get 5,499,994 — 5,500,000 lire, six lire of rounding away. That is not a coincidence anyone has to take on trust. Read article 12 as it stood at the end of 2001, the last full year of the lira, and the sentence is the same sentence with the same sum in it: the detrazioni are due only if the family member has income “non superiore a lire 5.500.000”.21

When the tax code went into euros, this line was not re-decided. It was divided by 1,936.27 and written down to the cent.

Italy used to top these numbers up every year

The interesting part is not that a limit sat still. It is that Italian law said it must not. Article 3 of decree-law 69 of 1989 provided that from 1990, whenever consumer prices in the twelve months to 31 August had risen more than 2%, the extra tax burden that came with no real increase in income had to be “integralmente” neutralised — in full — by adjusting the brackets, the reliefs and the income limits of articles 11, 12 and 13 of the income tax code. A decree of the Prime Minister was to do it by 30 September each year, for the year following.4

It worked, for a while. The limit began at 3 million lire in the code as enacted, went to 4 million before the first tax year was out, and was then raised seven times by decree between 1989 and 1997: 4.2, 4.5, 4.8, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 and finally 5.6 million lire, the last of those with effect from 1 January 1998. The decrees never rewrote the article — they set the operative figure and left the text alone, which is why they survive as notes attached to it rather than in it.32

Then they stop. There is no eighth decree in those notes, and there has been no adjustment in the twenty-eight tax years since. Article 3 is still there: Normattiva’s consolidated text of decree-law 69 carries no repeal on it, though two other articles of the same decree carry one.4

One more thing about that ending. The last decree set 5.6 million lire; the figure that came through into euros is 5.5 million. The limit in force today is 100,000 lire below the last one anybody adjusted for inflation. Nothing in the documents explains the difference, and this piece does not try to.

€4,798.09, and what is actually there

Take the last figure anybody set with inflation in mind — 5,600,000 lire, for the 1998 tax year — and carry it forward on ISTAT’s own coefficients, the ones the institute publishes so that rents and maintenance payments can be revalued and which the Gazzetta Ufficiale prints every month. It comes to €4,798.09 at 2025 prices. The limit is €2,840.51. The difference is €1,957.58, and it is not a euro of anybody’s money: it is reach, the amount of work a dependent family member could once do without costing the household its relief.78

Two things could make that go away, and neither does. The first is that the relief itself might have grown to compensate. It has barely moved either: the decree of May 1995 set the spouse detrazione at 817,552 lire, which is €753.68 at 2025 prices, against €800 today for the lowest incomes and €690 across the band from €15,000 to €40,000 — so above the very bottom of the scale the relief is smaller in real terms than it was thirty-one years ago. The second is that the limit might have been raised in some other form. One branch of it was: children up to the age of twenty-four have had their own limit of €4,000 since 2019. That is the exception that measures the rule. It is a round number, chosen in euros, and even it sits below what 1998 would buy.217

Nor is the article neglected. It was rewritten in 2007, cut back in 2021, and amended again by decrees in December 2025 and August 2026. Every one of those passes left €2,840.51 where it was.1

Twenty-three sums in the code are still lire

Article 12 is not unusual, which is the other half of the answer to why it looks like this. Going through the whole income tax code as it stands and taking every amount written in euros and cents gives twenty-three of them, across ten articles. Nineteen convert from a round lire figure.10

The rule for deciding that is arithmetic rather than judgement. A euro amount written to the cent can only have come from lire figures within about nine and a half lire of it either way — a window nineteen lire wide — so asking whether that window contains a multiple of a thousand lire is a real question with a real answer. About one amount in fifty-two would pass it by chance. Four of the twenty-three fail it, which is roughly what the code should look like if the other nineteen are what they appear to be. Amounts written as whole euros are left out entirely: at that coarseness the test proves nothing, so the count is a floor and not a total.

Two of those rows are the same sum and disagree. A business may write off equipment costing up to €516.46 in the year it buys it, which is a million lire exactly. A professional — the self-employed person the same code deals with a few articles earlier — may write off equipment costing up to €516.40, which is six cents short of that and is not the conversion of any round lire figure. One act, one rule, two ceilings.56

If the earner is on the flat tax

Two things follow for a household where somebody runs a partita IVA on the regime forfettario, and they pull in opposite directions. Flat-taxed income counts towards the €2,840.51 test: comma 75 of the 2014 law says that wherever a rule uses an income condition to decide whether a relief is due, income taxed under the regime counts too. So a partner doing a little freelance work reaches the line on their taxed profit, not on nothing. And in the other direction, the relief is a deduction from IRPEF, so it is worth €690 to someone with IRPEF to set it against and nothing at all to someone whose only income is flat-taxed.91

The €35,000 employment-income bar that keeps people out of the regime altogether is a different line with a different history, and it is priced separately.

What this does not show

It does not show that anybody broke a duty. Article 3 of the 1989 decree turns on a condition and produces a decree, and whether that machinery still runs after arts. 11 to 13 were rewritten twice is a question for someone arguing it, not a question the text settles. Nor was every annual budget law read to see whether one of them suspended the mechanism for a year; what was checked is that Normattiva records no repeal of the article and no decree after September 1997.

The price comparison is one index against one number. FOI net of tobacco is what ISTAT publishes for revaluing monetary amounts, and it measures a household’s shopping, not the earnings of the person the limit is about; a rule of thumb for how far a small income has really moved, not a measurement of it. And the figure in force is carried at 2025 prices, because 2025 is the last complete year ISTAT has published, so every gap here is smaller than the one a reader is living in.8

What it does show is what the sum is. €2,840.51 is not an amount Italy chose for 2026. It is 5,500,000 lire, last touched when the country still had a currency that could count in millions, and left alone through every reform since.