The same shop, opened a year later, pays €2,031 more in its first three years

Two people open the same shop in Milan. One starts trading in November 2025, the other in January 2026. Everything else about them matches: the same trade, the same turnover, the same flat tax, the same first registration with INPS. Over their first thirty-six months the second one pays at least €2,031.27 more in pension contributions, and the reason is the date.13

A relief with a date on it

Comma 186 of the 2025 budget law lets anyone registering per la prima volta with the INPS artisan or trader scheme ask for their contribution to be cut in half. The cut runs for thirty-six months. It is available where the business started, or the person first joined the company, “nel periodo compreso tra il 1° gennaio 2025 e il 31 dicembre 2025” — a window 365 days wide, now shut.1

The other reduction has no year attached. Comma 77 of the 2015 stability law cuts the same contribution by 35% for anyone on the flat tax in either scheme, in any year, for as long as they stay in the regime and keep asking for it.2 The two do not stack: comma 186 says its half-price contribution is alternativa to other measures that reduce a rate, so someone who started in 2025 chose one of them and someone who starts now has the 35% and nothing else.1

Nothing replaced it. INPS’s annual statement of what artisans and traders owe for 2026 describes the measure as covering those who enrolled “nel corso dell’anno 2025”, and lists the 35% regime as the only reduction its readers can apply for.3 The 2026 budget law runs to 973 commi and none of them mentions the artisan or trader schemes, or any contribution reduction at all.4

What the date is worth

Everyone insured in either scheme pays a contribution on a minimum income whether or not they earned it — €18,808 for 2026, which at the 24% pension rate is €4,513.92. Room-letting and insurance-agent registrations are the exception the circolare carves out; every other member pays at least that.3

Cut by 35%, the year costs €2,934.05. Cut by half, it costs €2,256.96. The gap is €677.09 a year and €2,031.27 across the thirty-six months, and that is the floor: it is what the two cohorts differ by when the business is earning too little for income to enter the calculation at all. Above the minimum the contribution rises with income and the gap rises with it, reaching €3,672.00 for a shop billing the €85,000 the flat tax allows.

The flat stretch on the left is the minimum income doing its work: up to €47,020 of turnover a shop on the 40% share is paying on €18,808 it did not earn, so both cohorts pay a fixed amount and the gap between them is fixed too. Whatever the income, one ratio holds — 65 against 50, so the later cohort pays 30% more, in both schemes and at every level, because both reductions cut the same contribution.

What the cheaper years do to the pension

A halved contribution is not simply a discount. Both commi send the crediting of what is paid to article 2, comma 29 of the 1995 pension reform: twelve months are credited to someone who has paid at least the contribution computed on the minimum income, and below that the months fall in proportion to the sum paid.51 What that does to the 35% is priced in an earlier piece; the 50% sits further down the same line.

At the minimum, 35% off buys 7.8 months of pension a year and half off buys 6. Over the thirty-six months that is 23.4 months against 18. Divide the €2,031.27 by the 5.4 months between them and the answer is €376.16 a month — exactly a twelfth of the contribution on the minimum income, the monthly figure the circolare prints.3 The later cohort is not being fined. It is buying contribution record at the statutory price, in the three years of a business least able to afford it.

That trade stops at an income. Paying half of the contribution still clears the bar for twelve months once business income reaches €37,616 — the minimum divided by the half actually paid — and from there the reduction costs nothing in pension at all. How much turnover that takes depends on the profitability share the activity carries.

A builder on the 86% share got there at €43,740 of turnover, well inside the regime. A shop on the 40% share would have needed €94,040, and the flat tax stops at €85,000. So the relief was free money for the trades with the highest presumed profit share and a trade-off for the ones with the lowest — the reverse of what a relief aimed at new businesses might be expected to do.

Month thirty-seven

Comma 186 makes its half-price contribution alternative to other rate reductions, and it does so for the thirty-six months it runs. Nothing in it bars the comma 77 request afterwards, and that request has an ordinary deadline: 28 February, with a new activity expected to say so as soon as the registration comes through.32 From month thirty-seven both cohorts are on 65%, and the difference between them stops growing. At the minimum it is €2,031.27 after three years, after five and after ten.

The last people who qualified started trading in December 2025, so their half rate runs into late 2028. Anyone who registers a first artisan or trader business between now and then is alongside someone paying two thirds of what they pay for the same insurance.

What this does not price

Only the 24% pension component is in any figure here. Whether either reduction also reaches the 0.48% supplement traders pay towards the cessation indemnity, or the flat €7.44 a year for maternity, is not stated in the circolare, so both stay out.3 Both cohorts are priced at 2026 parameters, which is what isolates the reduction: the minimum income is revalued every year against the ISTAT consumer-price index and moves the two together.

The half-price contribution is granted as de minimis aid under regulation (EU) 2023/2831, so it consumes headroom that another public support might need — a cost this does not attempt to price.1 Whether INPS in practice admits a 2025-cohort member to the 35% at month thirty-seven is not addressed in the 2026 circolare either; the reading above is of what comma 186 says, and the operating instruction may be narrower.

None of this reaches a professional practice. Both reductions are written for the artisan and trader schemes, and a consultant, designer or lawyer on the flat tax is insured in the Gestione separata, where neither applies.