A freelancer on €50,000 keeps €1,314 less in Salerno than in Bolzano

Income tax in Italy is charged three times on the same euro. The state takes IRPEF; the region where you are registered adds a surcharge on the same base; the comune adds a third.12 The two local layers are set region by region and comune by comune, and the Agenzia delle Entrate republishes both lists every filing season so that payroll and tax software know what to withhold: 21 regional scales, and a rate or a nil return for each of Italy’s 7,896 comuni.56

Ordinary-regime figures published here have always used a single number for the pair: 2.23% of taxable income, a national average sitting in the tax engine behind the public calculators. It was stated in every set of assumptions and never held against those two lists, which is what follows.

The taxpayer measured below is the one the rest of this blog uses: a professional billing €50,000 a year with no deductible business costs, paying Gestione Separata at 26.07%. Contributions come off before the surcharges do, which leaves a base of €36,965.71

The same income, two bills

The dearest address in the country for that person is Salerno. Campania’s scale takes €931.18, the city’s own 1.1% takes €406.62, and the two together come to €1,337.80. The cheapest is any of the 106 comuni in the province of Bolzano that levy nothing at all — the city of Bolzano included — where the provincial rate of 1.23% produces €454.67 and a detrazione of €430.50, which every taxpayer under €90,000 receives, hands almost all of it back. What is left is €24.17.10

Put both through the tax engine and the same €50,000 of invoices leaves €26,683 after tax and contributions in Salerno and €27,997 in a comune of the Bolzano province. The distance between them is €1,314 a year, on identical work, identical income and identical contributions.

A comune may charge one rate on everything or step it by income, but only along the brackets the state itself uses for IRPEF and only in a way that keeps the tax progressive. It may also set a threshold below which nothing is due, and that threshold is a cliff rather than an allowance: cross it and the whole income becomes liable.3

Nine hundred and ninety-nine comuni levy no municipal surcharge on this taxpayer, and eleven charge more than 0.8% — the ceiling the 1998 decree puts on the increase a comune may vote.2 An authority inside a multi-year financial rebalancing plan may set its local taxes at the maximum «anche in deroga ad eventuali limitazioni disposte dalla legislazione vigente» — even in derogation from limits the law otherwise imposes.4 Which of the eleven are in one is not something checked here.

Not one province doing the work

The obvious way for this to be a fact about Bolzano rather than about Italy is that detrazione. It is unusual, and 106 comuni in a single province sit at the bottom of the range because of it.

Set the province aside and the floor rises to €454.67: the 1.23% national default with no municipal surcharge on top, which is what a resident of Abriola in Basilicata pays, along with residents of the six other regions still on that rate and of the comuni within them that levy nothing. Salerno is then €883.13 away rather than €1,313.63. The finding is smaller without Bolzano and it does not go away.

The second way it could be an artifact is the income it was measured at. Recomputing the whole map at every level of billing from €15,000 to €85,000 does the opposite of collapsing the range: both surcharges are progressive, so the distance widens as income rises. At €25,000 of billing it is €565.89; at €85,000, the last euro the flat-rate regime allows, it is €2,467.13. Below roughly €45,000 the Bolzano detrazione swallows the regional charge whole and the floor is zero.

What it does to the flat tax

None of this reaches the forfettario. Comma 64 of the 2015 law makes its 15% an imposta sostitutiva — a substitute — for «l’imposta sui redditi, le addizionali regionali e comunali e l’imposta regionale sulle attività produttive». A flat-tax business in Salerno and one in Bolzano owe the same amount to the euro.9

The €1,314 is therefore not only a distance between two ordinary taxpayers. It is a distance in what the flat-rate regime is worth: it saves the professional in Salerno €1,314 a year more than it saves the identical professional in Bolzano, because in Salerno there is more to be exempt from.

The same variation moves the point at which the regime stops paying. For a professional billing €25,000, the level of real business costs above which ordinary IRPEF leaves more is €6,471 at the national average. At Salerno’s rates it is €6,711.91; in a Bolzano comune, where the surcharges come to nothing at that income, it is €5,790.70.138

The number that was standing in for all of this

The average holds up better than it deserved to. At this base 2.23% comes to €824.32, and the median comune charges €839.82 — which is also, to the cent, what Milan charges. Of the 7,896 comuni, 3,411 fall below the average.

What an average cannot do is stand in for one person. A figure computed at 2.23% describes the country and not the reader, and the width of the error around it is the width of this map: €1,314 at €50,000 of billing, more above that. Every ordinary-regime comparison published here should be read as a national one.

What this does not settle

The regional scales are the ones the Agenzia prints for the 2025 tax year, and the municipal list is the one it prints for the 2025 balance and the 2026 advance — the most recent official aggregates of either. Regions vote by 31 December and comuni deliberate every year, so a 2026 balance can differ from both.5

The map counts comuni and not people. Nearly eight thousand of them are not eight thousand equal populations, which is why the fifteen largest cities are set out separately above. The reliefs printed against several regions for children and disability are also left out: they turn on the household rather than the address. Only the two that reach every taxpayer inside an income band are in these figures — Bolzano’s €430.50 and Umbria’s €150.00. Five comuni set their exemption threshold above €36,965 and so charge this taxpayer no municipal surcharge at all.

Which comune counts is the one whose register you were on at 1 January, so a move takes effect the following year rather than the day the van leaves.5 And none of this is advice about where to live: it is what the two published tables produce when they are applied to one income.