Italy repealed the forfettario and re-enacted it unchanged

Look up the flat-rate regime on Normattiva, Italy’s official database of law in force, and thirty-six consecutive commi come back reading COMMA ABROGATO DAL D.LGS. 19 GIUGNO 2026, N. 117.2 Repealed by a decree of 19 June 2026 — every rule of the regime, from the €85,000 ceiling to the contribution discount, struck through in the same line.

The decree doing the striking is the Testo unico delle imposte sui redditi — a consolidation of Italy’s income-tax legislation into a single act, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale on 3 July 2026 under the reorganisation mandate in the 2023 tax-reform delegation.13 The same act re-enacts the regime twelve articles later, as its Capo XXI. That is what a consolidation does, and it is why the strike-through is not the news it looks like.

What is worth knowing is whether anything changed on the way across. Both texts are public, so the question has an answer rather than an opinion: of the eighteen numbers that decide what a forfettario pays, eighteen carry the same value in the text that replaces them.6

What was actually repealed

Article 376 of the new code lists the provisions it repeals, in a lettered run that reaches qqqq) before it gets to the flat tax: articolo 1, commi da 54 a 89 e 622, della legge 23 dicembre 2014, n. 190. The repeal takes effect dalla data di cui all’articolo 377, and article 377 sets that date once for the whole code: Le disposizioni del presente testo unico si applicano a decorrere dal 1° gennaio 2027.1

Until then the 2014 commi are the law. The reason the database looks alarming is that it is already showing the later version: the article header on that page reads Testo in vigore dal: 1-1-2027, so a reader arriving today sees next year’s text unless they ask for a specific date. Both readings were used here — the 2027 text carries the repeal; the commi below are read at an explicit July 2026 date, while they are still in force.

Where each comma went

Each article of the new chapter prints, under its heading and in brackets, the provisions it reproduces. That makes the concordance a matter of reading rather than of judgement, and it accounts for thirty-four of the thirty-six repealed commi.5

The regime keeps its shape in the move. Access, exclusions, VAT, the taxable base, the paperwork relief, the contribution discount and the exit rules each become an article of their own, in the order the commi already ran. Six commi of VAT cross-references collapse into one article; nine commi of contribution rules collapse into another.

The numbers that decide what you pay

A concordance says the words moved. It does not say the values survived, and the values are the part a reader has money riding on. Nine thresholds, rates and periods run through the chapter, and the profitability coefficient — the share of revenue the regime taxes as though it were profit — is set by a nine-row table annexed to the act.

Each of those eighteen was located on both sides by the wording around it rather than by its position, because the cross-references were all renumbered: where the 2014 commi point at the 1972 VAT decree and the 1986 income-tax code, the new articles point at the 2026 codes that replaced them.21 All eighteen match.

The coefficient table moves from Allegato 4 of the 2014 law to Allegato D of the code, and all nine groups keep both their percentage and the activity codes that reach them: 40% for food manufacture, trade and hospitality, 54% for street trade in non-food goods, 62% for trade intermediaries, 67% for the residual band, 78% for the professions, 86% for construction and real estate. The two annexes are typeset differently — the lines break in other places, and one separating hyphen is missing from the ninth group — so the code lists were compared as the sets of division numbers they name rather than as strings. On that basis they are the same table. Its column is still headed Codici attività ATECO 2007.

The two rules left behind

Two commi are reproduced nowhere: 86 and 87. Both open the same way — taxpayers who, in the tax period running at 31 December 2014, were using one of the schemes the forfettario replaced. Comma 86 moved them into the new regime; comma 87 let them use the 5% start-up rate for whatever remained of their five-year run. A five-year run that began no later than 2014 ended no later than 2019.2

Comma 88 addresses the same population and is kept, as article 242. It lets those taxpayers stay in the old regime di vantaggio for the rest of their five years e comunque fino al compimento del trentacinquesimo anno di età — and until they turn thirty-five. Someone who was in their twenties in 2014 can still be inside that window. The one transitional rule the code carries forward is the one whose clock has not necessarily run out.

One sentence points somewhere else

One rule in the new chapter has no counterpart among the repealed commi. Since April 2025 Italian businesses carry ATECO 2025 activity codes, while the coefficient table names ATECO 2007 ones, and a corrective decree of June 2025 addressed the gap directly: until new coefficients are drawn up on the 2025 classification, the coefficient is found using il codice corrispondente all’attività esercitata under the 2007 one.4 The code folds that decree in as article 235, comma 6.

The 2025 decree says who it is talking to: i soggetti di cui all’articolo 1, comma 54, della legge 23 dicembre 2014, n. 190 — the people who qualify for the regime. Comma 54 is now article 232, which is what article 235 cites in its own first comma. The consolidated sentence instead reads i soggetti di cui all’articolo 276, comma 1.1

Article 276 of the code is headed Disciplina delle divergenze tra i valori contabili e fiscali emerse in sede di cambiamento dei principi contabili, and its first comma lists the cases it covers: first adoption of IAS/IFRS, changes to those standards, a move back to Italian standards, a company outgrowing its reporting bracket. None of them is a person with a partita IVA choosing a flat rate. As printed, the sentence that tells forfettari which classification to read their coefficient on identifies them by a provision about company accounts.

What this does not settle

This compares two texts. It does not describe practice: nothing here is a statement about how the Agenzia delle Entrate will apply the code, or about what happens to a filing that straddles the change of act.

The comparison also stops at the chapter. Plenty of what a forfettario actually experiences sits outside it — the contribution rules the chapter only refers to, VAT, and above all the annual budget law, which has amended these numbers repeatedly and can amend them again for 2027 before the code ever applies them. A consolidation freezes the wording, not the policy.

And the concordance rests in part on the source notes the code prints about itself. They are the drafter’s account of provenance; here they were checked against the text on both sides, and the commi they leave out were matched against every new article by word overlap before being called dropped. The full mapping and the parameter comparison are below, so the reading can be disagreed with on the evidence.