The same €36,000 through a platform, and a €1,160 gap in Italian tax

A translator in Bologna finishes a year of work booked through a marketplace. Clients paid €40,000 for it. The platform kept 10% and paid over €36,000, which is what the bank statement shows. On Italy’s flat-rate regime she is left with €24,406 or €25,566 depending on whose name the invoices were written in — a difference of €1,160 on money that arrived, to the euro, identically.313

Nothing about the work changes between those two figures, and neither does the amount she received. What changes is one term in the platform’s contract, and it is not the one about the fee.

Two ways to write one job

Italian law knows both arrangements and names the second one explicitly. If the marketplace acts in the seller’s name, the translator supplies the client and the client owes her €40,000; the commission is a separate service she buys from the platform. If it acts in its own name, article 3 of the VAT act deems the service supplied twice over — “le prestazioni di servizi rese o ricevute dai mandatari senza rappresentanza sono considerate prestazioni di servizi anche nei rapporti tra il mandante e il mandatario” — so her counterparty is the platform, and what she is paid for her supply is €36,000.1

The two readings therefore put a different number in the revenue box: €40,000 with a €4,000 cost beside it, or €36,000 with no cost at all.

What the difference costs

The flat-rate regime taxes a fixed share of revenue. Article 1 comma 64 of law 190/2014 applies the coefficiente di redditività — the share of turnover the statute presumes is profit, 78% for professional work — to “l’ammontare dei ricavi o dei compensi percepiti”, and the only thing that may then be deducted is compulsory social contributions. A commission is not on that list. So a commission inside the revenue box is taxed, and a commission outside it never appears.34

On €40,000 of billing at the professional coefficient, the presumed profit is either €31,200 or €28,080. The €4,000 of commission is the whole of that difference, and carrying it inside the base costs €1,160 of the year’s take-home.

Most of that is not income tax. Gestione Separata is charged on the presumed profit at 26.07% before the substitute tax is worked out on what is left, so the larger base raises the contribution first and the tax second: seven euros in every ten of the €1,160 is pension contribution. That is money that buys pension rights, which softens the blow without changing the cash.63

The share the flat regime gives back on a euro of revenue it no longer sees is 28.98% at this coefficient, and it is the same constant that decides how much of a destination-country VAT charge an Italian seller ends up carrying — set out in the piece on selling to EU consumers.

Why ordinary rules do not care

Run the same two readings through ordinary IRPEF and the answer is €20,615 either way. Article 54 of the income tax act defines professional income as “la differenza tra tutte le somme e i valori in genere a qualunque titolo percepiti” and “l’ammontare delle spese sostenute”. Gross minus the commission is the net, by construction, so the deduction undoes the larger revenue exactly.2

That identity held at every point tested: 384 combinations of billing level, commission rate and coefficient, and the ordinary-regime difference is zero euros in all of them. It is the reason the finding is about the flat tax rather than about arithmetic. A regime that deducts real costs cannot care how the same transaction is papered; a regime whose coefficient stands in for costs has no way not to.13

The higher the presumed profit share, the more of the commission the base picks up, so the professional coefficient sits near the top of the range rather than at the worst of it. In the first five years, when the substitute tax is 5% instead of 15%, the same case is €929 — smaller, because the tax half of the gap shrinks, and still there, because the contribution half does not.13

Your rate, your coefficient

The worst corner of the grid is a builder on the 86% coefficient billing €85,000 through a platform that keeps a fifth: €5,433 between the two readings of one year’s work.13

What the platform already tells Rome

The question is not academic, because both numbers are already in the hands of the Agenzia delle entrate. Since the 2023 reporting period a marketplace has to report each seller by name, address, tax code, VAT number, date of birth and the account the money went to, along with “il Corrispettivo totale versato o accreditato nel corso di ogni trimestre” and, separately, “eventuali diritti, commissioni o imposte trattenuti o addebitati dalla Piattaforma”, by 31 January of the following year.811

The consideration in that return is defined “al netto di spese, commissioni o imposte trattenute” — the net reading. The commission is reported beside it, which means the office holds both numbers and can add them. A platform with no establishment anywhere in the Union is inside the same obligation as soon as it facilitates the work of a reportable seller, so a US marketplace is not outside it.710

There is a de minimis in that regime, and it is not for freelancers. A seller is excluded where the platform facilitated “meno di 30 Attività Pertinenti mediante la vendita di Beni” worth €2,000 or less. That covers goods. Personal services — a translation, a design, an hour of consulting — carry no threshold, so someone who earned €50 on a platform is reported by name and someone who sold €1,900 of second-hand furniture is not.9

One cost sits only on the first reading and is not counted in any figure here: where the commission is a service bought from a supplier outside Italy, a flat-rate buyer owes the Italian VAT on it and cannot deduct it, which is 22% of the commission.

What this does not settle

Which reading applies to a given marketplace is a question about that marketplace’s terms, not about the tax code, and it is not answered here. The platforms’ own fee schedules and contracts were not read for this piece; the commission rates in the table are a range to look your own up in, not anybody’s published rate. What the figures show is what each reading produces once it is settled.

The engine assumes Gestione Separata at 26.07% and no other business costs, so a freelancer with real expenses of their own will see different absolute nets — though not a different gap, since the commission is the only thing moving between the two columns. Artisans and traders pay INPS on a different basis and are not modelled. The legal texts are the versions in force on 22 September 2026, and the VAT act is being consolidated into a testo unico that replaces the 1972 decree, so the article number quoted here is one to re-read next year.612

None of this is advice about how to invoice. It is what the two readings cost once the contract has decided which one you are in.