Italy's tax cut is worth €440 — nothing under €37,873 of billing

Italy’s 2026 budget cut income tax. The change is one sentence of the budget law: All’articolo 11, comma 1, lettera b), del testo unico delle imposte sui redditi […] le parole: «35 per cento» sono sostituite dalle seguenti: «33 per cento».1 That takes two percentage points off one band, with effect from 1 January 2026.

The band is the middle one, and it did not move. That is what decides who the cut reaches: it applies to taxable income between €28,000 and €50,000, so the most it can be worth to anybody is two points of €22,000 — €440 a year. A professional billing under €37,873 gets none of it, and the whole of it arrives only past €67,632 of billing.6

The one line that changed

Article 11 of the income-tax code sets the rates. Normattiva, the state’s consolidated record of the statute book, serves it by date. At 31 December 2025 it gives fino a 28.000 euro, 23 per cento; oltre 28.000 euro e fino a 50.000 euro, 35 per cento; oltre 50.000 euro, 43 per cento. At 31 December 2026 the same article reads the same except for the middle figure, now 33 per cento.2 The thresholds are identical on both dates. Only the rate inside the band changed.

That matters more than it sounds. A cut delivered as a rate on a fixed band has a ceiling built into it: once your taxable income clears the top of the band, every further euro is taxed at 43% exactly as before, and your saving stops growing. €22,000 of band at two points is €440, and no taxpayer can collect more than that from this change.

Whether that was all that moved

A rate is easy to check and easy to be misled by, because a budget law can hand back with one comma what it gave with another. Six articles of the code decide what a self-employed person’s income tax comes to: where compulsory contributions are deducted, the rates, the credit for earned income, the itemised credits, the cap on those credits, and the rules for computing self-employment income in the first place. Normattiva serves any article as it stood on a given date and stamps each version with the window it is in force for, so each of the six can be read at 31 December 2025 and again at 31 December 2026 and compared.

Two of the six carry a version that begins on 1 January 2026. One is the rate. The other is the cap on tax credits, and it is the subject of the last section.3

What it is worth, by billing

The band is set on taxable income, which a freelancer does not know in July. What they know is what they bill. Article 11 applies its rates to total income al netto degli oneri deducibili — after deductible charges, which for someone self-employed is where the compulsory pension contribution comes off. On INPS’s Gestione Separata that is 26.07% of income, so a professional with no deductible business costs is taxed on 73.93% of what they bill.45

Which puts the two edges of the band at specific, checkable amounts of billing. €28,000 of taxable income is reached at €37,873; below that the 2026 schedule leaves net income unchanged to the cent. €50,000 of taxable income is reached at €67,632, and from there the saving sits at €440 and stops moving. In between it climbs at two cents in the euro: €179 a year at €50,000 of billing, €327 at €60,000.

Those billing figures are the part that shifts with circumstances, and it is worth saying which way. Real deductible costs lower taxable income, so they push both edges further up the billing scale: with costs at a fifth of revenue, the cut starts paying at €47,385 and does not reach €440 until €84,498 of billing. The €440 itself does not move. It is a property of the band, not of anybody’s invoices.

Zero inside the flat-rate regime

For a forfettario the answer is simpler and worth stating plainly: the change is worth €0.00. Running the same comparison inside the flat-rate regime, at every €250 step from €10,000 up to the €85,000 ceiling, the difference in net income is zero at each one. The reason is in the regime’s own founding provision, which taxes its income with un’imposta sostitutiva dell’imposta sul reddito — a substitute tax standing in place of income tax.7 An IRPEF rate has nothing to attach to.

This is not a feature of one activity. The regime taxes a fixed share of billing that varies by trade, from 40% to 86%, and the comparison gives €0.00 at the bottom of that range and at the top as well as at the 78% a consultant carries. It also does not depend on which side of the ceiling the reader expects to be on, since crossing that line moves you onto ordinary rates in a way already priced in an earlier piece.

The same article takes €440 back

The second article to change for 2026 is the cap on tax credits, and it changed by way of comma 4 of the budget — the sentence immediately after the one that cut the rate. It inserts a new provision: Per i contribuenti titolari di un reddito complessivo superiore a 200.000 euro è diminuito di un importo pari a 440 euro l’ammontare della detrazione dall’imposta lorda.8 Above €200,000 of total income, the credit a taxpayer may set against their gross tax falls by €440.

€440 is the figure the rate cut is worth at its maximum, reached by any taxpayer with taxable income over €50,000. So for a taxpayer above €200,000 the two provisions cancel, with one condition attached: the reduction only bites on the credits the new sentence lists — charges deductible at 19% other than medical expenses, donations to political parties, and premiums on catastrophe-risk insurance. A taxpayer who claims less than €440 of those keeps part of the cut. One who claims more than that ends the year where they started.

What this does not show

One profile is priced here: a self-employed professional on the Gestione Separata, with no employees, no income from any other source, and the average regional and municipal surcharges built into the engine. Those surcharges are set locally and vary; nothing above turns on them, because they are identical on both sides of the comparison, but the net-income levels in the dataset would shift a little for a reader in a different comune. Employees and pensioners reach the same rates through different credits and are not covered.

Nor is this an account of the 2026 budget, which runs to hundreds of commi and does plenty that has no bearing on article 11. The claim is narrower and testable: of the six articles of the income-tax code that decide a self-employed person’s liability, two changed for 2026, and what those two changes are worth is in the table above. Contribution rates, surcharges, and anything sitting outside the code were not part of the comparison.

And the reading is a reading of texts and arithmetic, not of practice. It says what the rates in force produce; it is not advice about what to do with a partita IVA, and where a filing straddles the change of schedule the answer is a question for a commercialista rather than for a rate table. Both datasets are below, so the comparison can be re-run and disagreed with on the evidence.