Leave Italy after five years and €50,837 of INPS does not come with you

A consultant who moved to Milan, took a partita IVA and bills €50,000 a year on the flat tax pays €10,167.30 a year into the INPS Gestione Separata. Five years of that is €50,836.50. On the day they close the partita IVA and fly home, none of it goes with them, and there is no form to ask for it back.1214

That is not an oversight or a hard case. Italy had a repayment route, wrote it into the immigration act in 1998, and took it out again four years later. What replaced it is a pension — one payable decades later, and only sometimes joinable to the record a person builds after they leave.

The way out closed in 2002

The original text of article 22 of the immigration act gave a departing non-EU worker a choice. Where no international convention governed the matter, they “hanno facoltà di richiedere […] la liquidazione dei contributi che risultino versati in loro favore presso forme di previdenza obbligatoria maggiorati del 5 per cento annuo” — the contributions back, with 5% a year added.1

Article 18 of the law of 30 July 2002 replaced article 22 in its entirety. The new comma 13 keeps what the old one kept — the worker “conserva i diritti previdenziali e di sicurezza sociale maturati”, and can enjoy them whether or not Italy has an agreement with their country — and adds that the enjoyment comes at pension age, “anche in deroga al requisito contributivo minimo” of the 1995 pension reform. The repayment sentence is not reproduced anywhere in the substituted article.234

So the money stays in the Italian system. What changed in 2002 was not how much a foreigner pays but what the payment is: a portable saving became a claim on a pension office, and a five-year stay is now priced at whatever that claim turns out to be worth.

What it becomes instead

It becomes an old-age pension computed on the contributions themselves, and INPS runs a service for exactly this person: trattamenti pensionistici ai lavoratori stranieri rimpatriati, with the claim going to its Perugia office or to the Italian consulate where the applicant now lives. Its own page says that foreign workers whose contributions start after 1 January 1996 can draw the pension at the ordinary retirement age “anche se non hanno maturato 20 anni di contributi”, and that the age moves with life expectancy.6

That age is 67 today. It becomes 67 years and one month in 2027 and 67 years and three months in 2028, under the life-expectancy adjustment INPS applied in March 2026. For anyone not covered by the repatriation rule, the general provision of the 2011 pension reform applies instead: twenty years of contributions at the ordinary age, or, at seventy in the statute and later once the same adjustment is applied, “un’anzianità contributiva minima effettiva di cinque anni” with no minimum-amount test attached.75

What that pension is worth per month is a number this piece does not print. Converting accumulated contributions into an annual pension needs the coefficiente di trasformazione — the divisor set by decree that turns the pot into an annuity, and that falls as life expectancy rises. The table INPS publishes on its own page is the one in force from 1 January 2021, on a page that also says the coefficients are revised every three years. Rather than annuitise five years of somebody else’s money at a rate we could not confirm is the current one, the arithmetic here stops at what goes in.

Where the years can join up

Inside the EU, the EEA and Switzerland this problem does not exist. Regulation 883/2004 obliges each member state to take into account “periods of insurance, employment, self-employment or residence completed under the legislation of any other Member State”, and its article 7 stops any of them from making payment conditional on living there. A Spanish founder’s Italian years are simply part of the record.11

Outside it, everything depends on a bilateral agreement, and INPS lists twenty-one of them, covering twenty-five states. Reading each agreement’s campo di applicazione for the two things that matter to someone self-employed — does it totalise insurance periods at all, and does its Italian scope reach the gestioni speciali of artisans, traders and farmers — leaves seventeen agreements, covering twenty-one states, where an artisan’s Italian years can be added to a home record. The first version of that reading misclassified eleven of the twenty-one, because it took the sentence “non è prevista la totalizzazione multipla” — about adding a third country’s periods, which most of these agreements decline to do — for an absence of totalisation altogether. Every classification in the table below is checked against a hand reading of all twenty-one pages.8

One more agreement is narrower than it looks in a way that matters to a different reader: the convention with the Holy See names the special schemes of the self-employed but not the Gestione Separata, so a professional’s years sit outside it. And the list itself moves — the accord with Moldova in force since 1 September 2025 replaced one that carried no totalisation at all, and the accord with Albania has been in force only since July 2025.815

For a founder from anywhere not on that list — and most of the world is not on it — the Italian years stand alone. They are not lost, and they are not added to anything either.

What five years costs

How much is standing in Italy on the day of departure depends on the scheme and on the reductions taken, not on how long the person expects to stay. The contribution is the same whether it is year one of ten or the last year before leaving.

The artisan rows are the floor rather than the typical case: both are the contribution due on the statutory minimum income, which is what a shop pays when it earns that or less. What those contributions buy in months of pension record, and what the 35% reduction costs in credit, is priced in an earlier piece.13

What this does not settle

Two questions in the repatriation rule are open on the face of the documents. Article 22 is the immigration act’s article on subordinate employment and speaks of il lavoratore extracomunitario; INPS’s service page describes it for foreign workers who paid contributions in Italy. Neither says whether a person whose Italian record came entirely from a partita IVA is inside it, and this run found nothing that does. And the statute waives il requisito contributivo minimo of article 1, comma 20 of the 1995 reform, which is the five-year rule, while INPS’s own summary of the same provision describes the waiver as covering the twenty-year requirement. What a three-year Italian record produces is stated in neither.394

The rest of the arithmetic is narrower than it looks. Every figure is at 2026 parameters held constant, so a real five-year stay pays more in cash than the table shows: the minimum income is revalued each year. The census reads INPS’s schede rather than the treaty texts behind them, which is the right source for what INPS will do with an application and not a substitute for the conventions themselves. And nothing here converts contributions into a monthly pension, for the reason given above.