A €50,000 freelancer pays €7,208 of flat tax in year seven, five times year six

A freelancer who opened a partita IVA on Italy’s flat tax and bills €50,000 a year pays €1,442 of substitute tax in their sixth calendar year and €7,208 in their seventh. Nothing about the business changes between the two. The regime carries on after five years; what stops is the 5% start-up rate, and the payment rules move the first full year at 15% onto the year after it.12

What ends after five years

Comma 65 of the 2014 budget law gives a new activity a 5% rate “per il periodo d’imposta in cui l’attività è iniziata e per i quattro successivi”. Those are tax periods, which for a person are calendar years, so a partita IVA opened in any month of 2021 spent its fifth 5% year in 2025 and pays 15% from 2026. The rate it falls back to is the one comma 64 sets for everyone else.13

Comma 71 lists what ends the regime itself: one of the entry conditions of comma 54 ceasing to hold, one of the exclusions of comma 57 applying, or billing above €100,000. The passage of time is not on the list.3 Searching commi 54 to 89 for “quattro successivi”, “quinquennio”, “cinque anni”, “cinque periodi” and an age limit turns up four matches. One is comma 65’s rate. The other three sit in commi 87 and 88, the transitional rules for people coming from the regimes the flat tax replaced: the old regime di vantaggio ran for a “quinquennio agevolato”, a favoured five-year period, and for younger holders “comunque fino al compimento del trentacinquesimo anno di età”. A flat-rate scheme with a five-year life did exist before 2015, and the current regime is not that scheme.3

From 1 January 2027 the regime moves into the consolidated income-tax code, and article 235, comma 2 repeats the five-period rule in the same words. Someone in their sixth year in 2027 or later meets the same arithmetic.4

Year six looks like year five

For a professional the taxable base is 78% of billing, less the Gestione separata contributions paid in the year at 26.07%. On €50,000 that is €39,000, less €10,167.30 of contributions. At 5% the year’s tax is €1,441.64; at 15% it is €4,324.90.352

The flat tax is paid like income tax. During each year the taxpayer pays an advance equal to 100% of the previous year’s tax, and the following June settles the difference.67 So the advances paid during year six are computed on year five’s tax at 5%. The year in which 15% first applies is a year in which the account pays €1,441.64, to the cent what it paid the year before.2

Year seven pays twice

The 15% arrives in the seventh year, in two pieces. The June balance for year six is its real tax less the advances paid against it: €4,324.90 less €1,441.64, or €2,883.27. On top of that comes the advance for year seven, now computed on a 15% year: €4,324.90. Together that is €7,208.17, five times year six.2

Most of it lands on one date. The Agenzia delle Entrate reads the rule on equal instalments as covering the flat tax, so a forfettario splits its advance 50/50 rather than the general 40/60.8 The June payment of year seven is then €5,045.72, against €720.82 the June before; on a 40/60 split it would be €4,613.23. The year’s total is €7,208.17 either way.2

The pension contribution does not move, so total payments to the Agenzia and INPS go from €11,608.93 in year six to €17,375.47 in year seven, and settle at €14,492.20 from year eight. The seventh-year excess over a settled 15% year is €2,883.27, which is year six’s unpaid difference and nothing more. Over any run of years the payments add up to the tax owed. The same lag, at the other end of the five years, is what nearly doubles a new practice’s second-year bill; what the 15% costs a year once settled was priced in an earlier piece.

The ratio is exact, not approximate. Year six pays one unit of the old 5% tax. Year seven pays the new tax twice less that unit, and the new tax is three units, so it pays five. That holds whatever the billing and whatever the profitability share, as long as billing stays level; a growing business pays more in year seven, not less.

The method that spreads it

Nothing obliges the payment to wait. If year six’s advance is computed on the 15% tax expected for year six rather than on year five’s actual tax — the method Italian practice calls previsionale — each of years six, seven and eight pays €4,324.90 and the seventh-year peak disappears.2 On the historical method, which is what the payment rules produce by default, nothing in the year-six bill shows that the rate has changed.6

What this does not settle

The figures assume a professional insured with the Gestione separata, billing the same amount every year, with no deductible costs and 2026 rates throughout. Artisans and traders pay a fixed minimum to a different INPS fund and are not modelled, though the timing of the tax works the same way for them. Where the first instalment of an advance would be €103 or less, the whole advance is paid in November instead; on the 78% share that does not arise from €10,000 of billing upwards.7

Someone who never had the 5%, because their activity continued earlier work, pays 15% from the first year and has no step to meet. And the five periods count from the year the partita IVA was opened, however late in that year; when that matters is set out in a separate piece.1