Billing €30,000 in €150 invoices costs €400 in stamp duty

A translator on Italy’s flat tax bills €30,000 in a year, in jobs of about €150. Two hundred invoices go out, and each of them carries €2.00 of stamp duty: €400 over the year. The income tax on the same €30,000, at the 5% rate a new practice pays for its first five years, is €864.98.12

The duty is charged per document, not per euro, so it is the shape of the billing that decides it. The same €30,000 invoiced in €2,500 pieces carries €24.3

Why the flat rate attracts it

An invoice that carries VAT carries no stamp duty, and the reason is one line in the table of exemptions annexed to the 1972 stamp act. Article 6 of that table exempts “fatture ed altri documenti … riguardanti il pagamento di corrispettivi di operazioni assoggettate ad imposta sul valore aggiunto” — invoices for operations that VAT is charged on.4

A flat-rate invoice is not one of those. The regime’s defining feature is that no VAT is charged on the invoice, so the condition the exemption sets is never met and the charge in article 13 of the tariff applies instead: €2.00 on every invoice whose total is above €77.47.52 The Agenzia delle Entrate applies exactly that test to the electronic invoice file: a document is put on the quarterly list when its totals exceed €77.47 and its Natura field carries one of the codes for operations outside or exempt from VAT.1

So this is not a cost of freelancing. It is a cost of not charging VAT, and it lands on the regime built around not charging VAT.

What it costs over a year

At €150 an invoice the duty is €400, which is 46.2% of the €864.98 of substitute tax the same year attracts at 5%, and 15.4% of the €2,594.94 it attracts at the ordinary 15%. At €80 — a piano lesson, a short consultation, a single translated page — two hundred invoices become three hundred and seventy-five and the duty reaches €750, within a hundred and fifteen euros of the tax itself.3

None of this touches the pension contribution, which is €6,100.38 on the same billing and dwarfs both. The comparison is with the tax because the tax is what the regime is named after: a practice choosing between 5% and 15% is choosing between numbers the duty is a real fraction of.

The line that never moved

The exemption for small invoices sits in note 2, letter a) of the same article: the duty is not due “quando la somma non supera L. 150.000”. It is still written in lire, which is why the figure the Agenzia applies is €77.47 rather than a round number.5

Normattiva serves every version an article has ever had, stamped with the window it was in force for, so the date that figure was last touched can be read off the statute rather than inferred. All twenty-five versions of the article were fetched and the two figures pulled out of each. Invoices first appear in it on 24 August 1992 — before that, article 13 was about duplicates of bills of exchange — and the exemption arrived with them at 150,000 lire. It reads 150,000 lire in every one of the twenty versions since.65

The duty did move. The tariff’s own figure went from 2,000 to 2,500 lire on 1 January 1997, and the amount actually payable is now €2.00. One of those two numbers has been revised since 1992, and it is not the one that protects the small invoice.

Where the €2 actually comes from

The tariff still says 2,500 lire — about €1.29 at the same conversion that turns its 150,000 into €77.47. The €2.00 comes from somewhere else entirely: article 7-bis, comma 3 of a 2013 decree, which provides that the fixed stamp duties “currently set at €1.81 and €14.62, wherever they occur, are redetermined at €2.00 and €16.00 respectively”.7

That decree is titled Disposizioni urgenti per il rilancio dell’area industriale di Piombino and goes on to cover environmental emergencies, the 2012 earthquake, reconstruction in Abruzzo and Expo Milano 2015. The stamp increase is in it because comma 5 of the same article uses the extra revenue to fund the rest.7 Drafting it as “wherever they occur” raised every fixed stamp duty in the statute book without editing any of them, which is why the tariff a reader opens today still prints its figure in lire.

It also explains why the exemption stayed put. A redetermination worded that way reaches le misure dell’imposta fissa di bollo — the amounts of duty. A threshold below which no duty is due is not one of those, so nothing in that sentence touches it, and the Agenzia delle Entrate’s own June 2026 guide still applies €77.47.71

What happens in 2027

Both articles — the one that charges the invoice and the one that exempts it — are repealed with effect from 1 January 2027 by the 2025 consolidation of Italy’s indirect taxes, as amended at the end of that year. The stamp duty moves into that text, whose article 139 makes the acts and documents in its own annex 3 liable.8

The rule that puts the charge on a flat-rate invoice survives the rewrite unchanged. Article 6 of the new table of exemptions repeats the old wording word for word — invoices for operations charged with VAT are exempt — pointing at articles 9 and 10 of the new tariff instead of the old article 13.8 We cannot yet say what figures that tariff carries: it is published as a graphic annex, so its text is not in the consolidated record the rest of this piece was read from. Whether the 150,000-lire line is finally rewritten in euros, and at what number, is the one thing worth watching in a rewrite that otherwise changes nothing here.

What this does not price

Three things. The duty can be charged on to the client, and often is; whether a recharged €2.00 then counts as revenue for a flat-rate taxpayer turns on practice this piece has not verified, so the €400 is priced as the issuer’s cost and not adjusted either way. The average invoice is a stipulated profile, not a measurement of how Italian freelancers actually bill — that is why the whole curve is published rather than one point on it. And the comparison is with the substitute tax alone: the pension contribution is several times larger than either number here.

One date is worth putting in a calendar. The duty on electronic invoices is settled quarterly, and the second quarter falls due on 30 September — deferred to 30 November if the first two quarters together come to no more than €5,000, which they do for anyone in the range above. The Agenzia delle Entrate computes the amount from the invoices it already holds and shows it in the taxpayer’s own area of the invoicing portal. The list it computes from can be corrected up to a date the same guide sets, which is what to do with an invoice that should never have been flagged.1