One euro over €85,000 costs a professional €18,141

Everyone knows the forfettario ends at €85,000. Almost nobody publishes what the far side looks like, so we computed it: the size of the drop, and how much extra revenue it takes to climb back to where you were.

By Jan Wangrat · 25 July 2026

Every guide to Italy’s flat-rate regime tells you the ceiling: €85,000 of revenue a year, and above it the forfettario is gone.1 Almost none of them tell you what the other side looks like — which is odd, because that is the part you would want to plan around.

So we ran it. The numbers below come from the same deterministic engine behind our public calculators: 2026 rates, INPS Gestione Separata at 26.07%, IRPEF plus regional and municipal surcharges on the far side, no real business costs assumed.345

€18,141

That is what a professional on the 78% coefficient loses, in a single year, by being on the wrong side of the line. At €85,000 of revenue they keep €60,363 after tax and contributions. Under ordinary IRPEF, the same €85,000 leaves €42,222. The regime is worth more than a fifth of the take-home it protects.2

The second number is the one nobody quotes. To get back to €60,363 of net income under ordinary rules, that professional has to bill €129,820 — €44,820 more revenue, a 53% increase, for exactly the same money in their pocket. Everything between is a dead zone: more work, more risk, more clients, no gain.

The cliff is not the same height for everyone

The forfettario taxes a fixed share of revenue, set by your activity’s ATECO group — 40% to 86%, depending on what you do.1 A lower coefficient means a smaller taxable base, which means the regime is worth more to you, which means losing it hurts more. The cliff is steepest for the people the regime treats best.

You do not fall off it the same day

The chart is a clean vertical drop, and the law is gentler than that about timing. Bill between €85,000 and €100,000 and you keep the regime for the year you are in and lose it from the next one. Pass €100,000 and it ends immediately, with VAT obligations from the moment you cross.1

So read the drop as the year after, not the invoice itself — which is worse for planning, not better. The decision that costs you €18,141 is one you make in November and pay for the following December, by which time you cannot unmake it.

People already behave as if they know this

There is good evidence that the threshold moves real behaviour. Using Italian administrative data on solo self-employed, Francesco Alosa measured the distribution of turnover around the regime’s earlier €65,000 cut-off and found excess mass just below it of roughly 337% of the counterfactual frequency — an unusually large bunching response.6 Estimated turnover elasticities were 0.071 for professionals and 0.058 for business intermediaries, and lower compliance costs explained under half of the response. The rest was the tax.

In other words: thousands of Italian freelancers already stop just short of the line every year. Our number puts a price on what they are avoiding.

What we assumed, and where it bends

Three assumptions do most of the work here. We assume no deductible business costs — under ordinary rules real costs come off the taxable base, so a consultant with heavy expenses faces a shallower cliff and an earlier break-even. We use the standard 15% substitute rate rather than the 5% startup rate, which would make the drop larger. And we use Gestione Separata contributions; a professional in a cassa or an artisan in Gestione Artigiani has a different contribution profile.3

None of that moves the shape. A regime that ends at a fixed revenue number, rather than tapering, necessarily produces a discontinuity — and the size of that discontinuity is a fact about the rules, not an opinion about them. It is also, for anyone billing in the seventies, the single most consequential number in Italian freelance tax, and it is not published anywhere we could find. So here it is, with the workings.