A van is €163.31 up on 2026's diesel tax cuts

A 60-litre tank of diesel released for consumption in Italy on 19 September carries €7.32 less tax than the same tank would at the standing rate, because a decreto-legge — a decree the government may enact with immediate effect, which parliament then has sixty days to confirm — was published on 17 September and set the excise on diesel at 572,90 euro per thousand litres from the 18th to the 25th. The same article already sets the next step: 622,90 from 26 September to 5 October, after which the standing rate returns unless a further instrument arrives.20

Those two lines are the sixteenth and seventeenth re-determinations of the year, made by the fifteenth act to do it. Across the whole run, measured against the rate 2026 starts from, a van burning 2,000 litres a year is €163.31 better off than if the standing rate had simply held.22

The rate the year starts from

Excise on fuel is a fixed amount per thousand litres, listed in Allegato I to the 1995 excise code, and it is charged long before a driver sees it: the tax becomes due when fuel is released for consumption, not when it is sold at a forecourt.34

For 2026 the figure is 672,90 euro per thousand litres, and it is not printed in the annex itself. It sits in article 3 of the 2025 decree that set out to close the gap between petrol and diesel over five years, which the 2026 budget rewrote: instead of another one-and-a-half-cent step, the remaining distance was covered in a single move of 4,05 cents a litre, and petrol and diesel were restated at the same 672,90. Diesel therefore entered 2026 four cents dearer than it left 2025, and every reduction below is a discount from the raised figure.125

Seventeen re-determinations

Two kinds of instrument move the rate. One is the decreto-legge, which the government issues when it wants the price of fuel to fall this week. The other is an interministerial decree that a 2007 statute requires whenever a rise in the euro price of crude oil brings in more VAT than the budget forecast: the surplus is handed back by cutting excise, and each decree recites the calculation in its preamble.1618

Between them they produced seventeen re-determinations in the first nine months of 2026 — ten written into decreti-legge and seven into ministerial decrees, across fifteen acts, because two of the decreti-legge carry two apiece. Windows run from two days to twenty-seven, and the longest gap between one instrument being published and the next was thirty days.

Reading only the instrument that governs each day, the rate a buyer faced changed seven times. It fell to 472,90 on 19 March and held there for sixty-five days, rose to 572,90 on 23 May and to 622,90 on 7 June, returned to the full 672,90 on 4 July for twenty-four days, sat at 532,90 for the fifty-two days from 28 July to 17 September, and then rose again — to 572,90 on 18 September, and to 622,90 from 26 September. Of the 278 days to 5 October, 177 carry a reduced rate and 101 the standing one.22

Seven instruments, fifty-two days

A single figure, 532,90, held from 28 July to 17 September, and it took seven instruments to keep it there. A ministerial decree covered 28 and 29 July; a decreto-legge published the same day took over on the 30th and ran to 6 August; a second decreto-legge carried it to the 24th; a ministerial decree signed on 20 August covered exactly two days, the 25th and the 26th; a third decreto-legge picked it up on the 27th and ran to 5 September; a second ministerial decree took the five days to 10 September; and a fourth decreto-legge carried the last seven, to the 17th.13141516171819

The 48-hour decree is worth pausing on. Its preamble does the ordinary arithmetic the statute asks for, on July crude prices and July VAT receipts, and the conditions were met. The window it then chose is exactly the gap between the day one decreto-legge expired and the day the next one began, so a mechanism for handing back an unforecast VAT surplus also kept a number from moving for two days. The decree of 4 September does the same job with August’s figures across a five-day gap, which makes the pattern a habit rather than an incident.1618

What ended the run was not an expiry but a decision. The decreto-legge of 17 September raises the rate twice in one article — to 572,90 for eight days, then to 622,90 for ten — so for the first time since March the schedule is written a fortnight ahead instead of a few days. It is still a schedule that runs out: 5 October is the last day any instrument now covers.20

Thirty days with two answers

On thirty days of 2026 two instruments in force named different figures for the same product on the same day. For 19 to 24 March the ministerial decree published that week said 622,90 while the decreto-legge published the day before said 472,90. For 8 April to 1 May the decree of 2 April said 587,90 and article 8-bis of another decreto-legge — inserted when parliament converted it on 22 May, three weeks after the window had closed — said 472,90 for those same days.689

The series above resolves those days to the legislative figure, on the ordinary ground that a decreto-legge has the force of law and a ministerial decree does not. That is a reading, not a certainty, so the published dataset carries the other one in its own column: taking the ministerial figure wherever a decree was in force lowers the van’s total from €163.31 to €138.85.22

What it comes to

The reduction in force on 19 September is 100,00 euro per thousand litres. Value-added tax is charged on a price that already contains the excise, so at the standard 22% the reduction reaches a buyer as €0.12 a litre — €7.32 on a 60-litre tank, €122.00 on a thousand litres. From 26 September it halves to 50,00, which is €3.66 a tank. The deepest window of the year, the 472,90 that ran from March to late May, was worth €0.24 a litre on the same basis.212022

Aggregating the whole year needs a profile, and the one used here is a small delivery van covering 25,000 km at 8 litres per 100 km — 2,000 litres a year, burned evenly. Against the standing rate, the 2026 reductions come to €163.31 for that van by 5 October. The arithmetic is linear in the litres, so a business burning three times as much multiplies by three.

Against last year’s rate rather than this year’s, the same van is €88.05 up, because the 4,05-cent rise that opened the year costs it €75.27 over the same 278 days. Both figures are in the dataset, day by day, and which of them answers the question depends on whether the reader is asking what the discounts are worth or what the year is worth.122

One thing changes who keeps it. A business on the ordinary regime deducts its fuel and recovers part of the VAT, so a lower pump price is partly a smaller deduction; a business on the flat tax deducts nothing at all, which is the same reason its real costs never reduce its tax bill. For the flat-rate courier the pump price is the whole of the story.

What this does not show

It does not show a pump price. Excise is due when fuel leaves a tax warehouse, so a window’s rate reaches a forecourt behind whatever stock was released at the previous one, and what a retailer does with the difference is a commercial decision no statute governs. Nothing here measures how much of any reduction arrived, or when.4

Nor is the census a claim about the whole of fuel taxation. It counts only the rate on gasolio usato come carburante — diesel used as a road fuel, the line the acts above all name — and only for 2026. Petrol, LPG and natural gas move on their own schedules in several of the same acts, agricultural diesel is expressly excluded from the January rise, and the reduced rate for biodiesel and HVO is a separate line that some of these instruments also moved.1

The last window now enacted ends on 5 October. Whether an eighteenth instrument follows it is not something this dataset can say; what it can say is that the fifteen acts behind the first seventeen were published on fifteen separate dates, and no instrument waited more than thirty days for the next one. This page was last re-derived against the decrees on 19 September 2026, and the figures above are the ones in force on that date.23