An assistant paid €20,001 costs €6,263 the following year

A physiotherapist in Milan bills €85,000 in 2026 and pays a part-time receptionist. The wage bill for the year comes to €20,001.00. Nothing happens in 2026. In 2027, at the same billing and with the same person at the same desk, she keeps €6,263 less.19

The flat-rate regime is not something you elect each year and keep. It is something the previous year qualifies you for, and one of the qualifications is a ceiling on what you spent on other people. The ceiling is €20,000, it is measured gross, and going one euro over it removes the regime for the whole of the year that follows.

The ceiling, and the year it bites

Comma 54 of the flat tax’s statute admits a taxpayer only if, in the previous year, they “hanno sostenuto spese per un ammontare complessivamente non superiore ad euro 20.000 lordi per lavoro accessorio […] per lavoratori dipendenti e per collaboratori” — accessory work, employees and the collaborators of TUIR art. 50, plus profit shares paid to an associato in partecipazione and the family-labour costs of art. 60. It sits in the same list as the €85,000 revenue ceiling, and the text attaches no indexation to either.1

Comma 71 supplies the timing: “Il regime forfetario cessa di avere applicazione a partire dall’anno successivo a quello in cui viene meno taluna delle condizioni di cui al comma 54”. The year you overspend is taxed as normal under the flat rate. The following one is ordinary IRPEF. Drop back under €20,000 and the year after that qualifies again, so the exclusion lasts as long as the wage bill does — one year at a time, renewed annually.2

Two words in that text do most of the work. Lordi reads the ceiling on gross amounts rather than net ones, and complessivamente makes it a total rather than a per-person limit: a €14,000 assistant and a €7,000 collaborator cross it together. Which outlays a particular engagement adds to that total is a question about the contract, and not one this piece answers. It takes the ceiling as read and prices what crossing it does.

What the year after costs

The comparison that matters holds the wage bill fixed. Both columns below carry the same €20,001.00: the physiotherapist employs the same person either way, and the only difference is which regime the year is taxed under. Under the flat rate that €20,001.00 is money spent and never deducted, because the 78% coefficient is the statute’s whole allowance for costs. Under ordinary rules it comes off the income before both the tax and the contributions.39

The contributions barely move — the ordinary side charges them on €1,301.00 less income and saves €339.17. Almost all of the €6,263 is the tax bill nearly doubling, and it does so on an income that is slightly smaller than the one the flat rate taxed. That is the regime change on its own: the same year, the same people employed, a different rule for turning billing into a taxable figure.

It costs nothing at all below €59,943

Run the same pair at every level of billing and the difference changes sign. At €50,000 of billing a €20,001.00 wage bill is 40% of turnover, the flat rate leaves €1,903 less than ordinary rules would, and losing the regime is a gain. The two meet at €59,942.93 of billing, where both leave €22,568. Above that the exclusion starts costing, and it costs most at the ceiling.9

That crossing is not a second finding about the wage bill; it is the same arithmetic that governs any real cost under a presumptive regime, which we measured separately. What is new here is where the statute’s own line falls on it. The law fixes one number, €20,000, for every business; the point at which that number stops being worth defending depends entirely on how much the business bills.

Which activity you registered changes it

Allegato 4 sets a different presumed-profit share for each activity group, and the cheaper the presumption, the more the flat rate is worth and the more its loss costs. At the ceiling the year after runs from €3,736 for a builder on 86% to €18,266 for a food or retail business on 40%. The billing below which there is no cost moves with it, from €68,034.89 down to €33,741.95.59

The third column is the first five years. Comma 65 charges 5% instead of 15% for the opening year and the four after it, which roughly doubles what the regime is worth and therefore what losing it costs: €11,165 for the professional, €20,779 for the retail coefficient. A new business is the one most likely to be taking on its first help and the one with most to lose by doing it.49

What this does not settle

The biggest qualification is the one the table above already carries: every figure here assumes the wage bill is the only real cost. Add rent, software, a car or materials and the ordinary side deducts those too. At €85,000 of billing, other spending of €11,602 — 13.6% of turnover — wipes the €6,263 out entirely, and anything beyond it turns the exclusion into a saving. A business that employs someone usually has premises, so a real case will sit closer to that line than this one does.9

Two more. The contribution scheme is the Gestione separata throughout, which is right for a professional and wrong for an artisan or a trader, whose contributions start from a fixed minimum and would change the low-coefficient rows. And the surcharge is the national stand-in of 2.23% rather than a real address: at the ends of the statutory range the €6,263 becomes €5,782 or €6,791, which moves the number and not the shape.

Nothing here says what counts as a spesa in a particular case — whether a given engagement is a collaboration inside the ceiling or a supply from another business outside it is a question about the contract, and this piece has not answered it. It has priced the consequence of being over the line, not drawn the line.