An Italian artisan pays €7.44 a year for cover that isn't a pension

An artisan trading in Italy pays INPS 24% of business income in 2026, and one further amount: €0.62 a month towards maternity cover. Over a year that is €7.44. It is the whole of what the compulsory contribution buys that is not a pension, and it does not move — the same €7.44 whether the workshop bills €20,000 or €200,000.1

A shopkeeper pays a little more: 24.48%, where the extra 0.48% funds an indemnity for closing the business down without having reached retirement, plus the same €7.44. Neither contribution contains anything that pays out for a day of not being able to work.1

A professional buys a different package

Someone invoicing as a self-employed professional falls instead into the Gestione separata, the residual INPS fund created in 1995 for workers with no scheme of their own.2 The 2026 rate for a professional who is not a pensioner and belongs to no other compulsory scheme is 26.07%, and INPS sets it out in three parts: 25% for the pension, 0.72% for what it calls the additional rate, and 0.35% for the ISCRO, an allowance introduced in 2024 for a year in which self-employed income collapses.3

The 0.72% is the interesting one, because the circolare says exactly what it funds: tutela relativa alla maternità, agli assegni per il nucleo familiare, alla degenza ospedaliera, alla malattia e al congedo parentale — maternity, family allowances, hospital stays, illness and parental leave.3 So 1.07% of business income, in total, is what a professional pays for cover that is not a pension, against an artisan’s €7.44.

In money, on the 78% coefficient that professional and technical activities file under, that is €83.46 a year at €10,000 of billing, €417.30 at €50,000 and €709.41 at the flat-tax ceiling of €85,000.

The sage line rises from €83.46 to €709.41 across the billing range the flat-rate regime allows; the dark one, marked at the foot of the chart, is the artisan’s €7.44 and never leaves it. Both exclude the pension contribution, which is much the larger number on either side and buys the same thing on both.

What the package pays back

The two cash benefits inside that package for being unable to work — an illness indemnity and a hospital-stay indemnity — are not percentages of what the claimant earns. They are percentages of one national figure: the year’s contribution ceiling divided by 365. The ceiling for 2026 is €122,295, which makes the daily figure €335.05 for everybody in the fund.3

INPS then applies a percentage set by how many months of contribution were credited in the twelve months before the illness began: 8%, 12% or 16% for illness, and double each of those for a hospital stay.4

Two conditions narrow it further, and both are in the statute rather than in the tables. An illness lasting three days or fewer is excluded outright: the 2007 finance act wrote con esclusione degli eventi morbosi di durata inferiore a quattro giorni into the entitlement.5 Once an episode reaches four days, INPS pays all of them, the first three included.6 And the indemnity is refused altogether if the claimant’s income in the previous calendar year was above 70% of that year’s ceiling.4

A flat payment against a proportional price

The consequence of pricing one side as a percentage of income and the other as a percentage of a national ceiling is that they separate as billing rises. At €50,000 of billing on the 78% coefficient, the flat-rate regime leaves €97.28 of net income for each day of the year; the best illness day the fund pays is €53.61, or 55% of it. At the €85,000 ceiling the same €53.61 covers 32% of a day.

The crossing point sits between €27,500 and €30,000 of billing. Below it the indemnity is worth more per day than the work it replaces; above it the gap widens with every euro invoiced, while the price of the cover rises in step with the same euro.

How the daily figures were checked

INPS publishes the ceiling and the percentages in different documents and leaves the multiplication to the reader, so the rule used here was tested against a year in which the institute did print the result. Circolare 76 of 2007 divided that year’s ceiling of €87,187 by 365 to get €238.87, then applied the percentages then in force to arrive at €9.55, €14.33 and €19.11 a day.6 The same rule reproduces all three to the cent, which is why the 2026 column above can be trusted to the cent as well.

That comparison also shows the benefit has moved. In 2007 the illness percentages were 4%, 6% and 8%; INPS now publishes 8%, 12% and 16%, and the hospital-stay percentages have doubled with them.

What this does not settle

The prices are exact and the schedule is exact. Who can claim against the schedule is not equally clear. The provision that created the daily illness indemnity names lavoratori a progetto e categorie assimilate — project workers and assimilated categories — and INPS’s own instructions describe the claim in terms of a committente, the client who commissioned the work, and require a working relationship still running when the doctor writes the certificate.56 The current INPS page states the audience more broadly, as anyone registered with the Gestione separata who is not a pensioner and not covered by another compulsory scheme.4 Where those two meet for a VAT-registered professional with no continuing client is not something the documents answer, and it is worth asking INPS before counting on the indemnity. The parliament that rewrote the self-employment rules in 2017 deleted two sentences of the same provision and added a separate right — a suspension of contributions during an illness lasting more than sixty days — without touching who the daily indemnity is for.7

Three further limits. The daily figures are gross: the indemnity is paid under tax withholding, and what reaches the bank is less. The artisan and shopkeeper figures are the standard ones — a flat-rate business may apply for a 35% reduction of the contribution, which we have costed against the pension it credits, and the circolare does not say how that reduction lands on the €7.44. And nothing here covers injury at work, which runs through a different institute altogether.