Effective tax rate by profession under the forfettario (2026)

Two freelancers in Italy invoice the same €50,000. One keeps €37,552, the other €34,021 — a difference of €3,530 a year, decided by nothing but the ATECO code they registered. Under the forfettario the taxable base is a statutory share of revenue (the coefficiente di redditività) that depends on the activity12, so the effective rate is a property of the code, not of the person. We computed it for all 24 activities in our calculator dataset.

What we found

• 24 professions, 3 rates. Every activity in the dataset lands in one of 3 Allegato-4 coefficient bands, and everyone inside a band pays the same effective rate to the cent — from 24.9% to 32.0% at €50,000, a spread of 7.1 percentage points.
• The rate does not move with revenue. Substitute tax and INPS are both proportional to the same base, so a 67%-coefficient freelancer pays 24.9% at €30,000 and at €85,000 alike. The ordinario climbs across the same range — 42.0% to 50.3% — because IRPEF is progressive4.
• Most of the bill is not tax. At €50,000 the 86% band pays €4,768 in substitute tax and €11,210 in INPS gestione separata contributions3.

Effective rate at €50,000 of revenue

Every profession, ranked

Effective rate = (substitute tax + INPS) ÷ revenue. Take-home is what is left after both. The rate column is a single figure because it is the same at every revenue up to the €85,000 forfettario ceiling.

How this was computed

• Coefficients are not entered by hand: each profession's ATECO 2025 code2 is resolved to its Allegato-4 group under Legge 190/20141, which is why software and IT activities resolve to 67% instead of the professional-services rate a lot of guides quote for them.
• Taxable base = revenue × coefficient. INPS gestione separata is charged on that base at the 2026 freelancer rate3 and is deductible from it; the substitute tax (15%, or 5% for the first five years of a new activity) applies to what is left.
• The ordinario comparison is progressive IRPEF4 on revenue less INPS, with the standard detrazione da lavoro autonomo and an average regional + municipal addizionale. It excludes deductible business costs, which a real ordinario taxpayer would subtract — so treat it as the ceiling of the comparison, not a prediction.
• Excluded on purpose: VAT (outside the forfettario), the INPS artigiani and commercianti contributions (a different scheme from the gestione separata this study prices), the impatriati relief (not combinable with the forfettario), and any regime other than the 4 the engine models. Revenue is assumed collected in the year it is invoiced.
• Figures are produced at build time by the same deterministic engine behind our calculators and /api/calculate, and are pinned by a unit test against it — the page cannot silently disagree with the product.

Want your own activity priced? Open the per-profession calculators or read how we source and check numbers.