Crossing €85,000 costs a professional €18,145 a year

Italy’s flat-rate regime ends at €85,000 of revenue a year, and every guide says so.1 What the far side of that line looks like is harder to find, and it is the part worth planning around.

The figures below come from the tax engine behind our public calculators: 2026 rates, INPS Gestione Separata at 26.07%, IRPEF plus regional and municipal surcharges on the ordinary side, no business costs assumed.345

The size of the drop

At €85,000 of revenue, a professional on the 78% coefficient keeps €60,363 after tax and contributions. Under ordinary IRPEF, that same €85,000 leaves €42,218. The regime is worth €18,145 a year to them — a bit over a fifth of the take-home it protects.2

The second figure matters more for planning. To reach €60,363 again under ordinary rules, they have to bill €129,820. Between those two points the extra revenue does not arrive: tax and contributions absorb all of it, and €44,820 of additional billing leaves the year’s income exactly where it started.

Not the same height for everyone

The forfettario taxes a fixed share of revenue, set by your activity’s ATECO group — between 40% and 86%, depending on what you do.1 A lower coefficient means a smaller taxable base, which makes the regime worth more, which makes losing it cost more. The cliff is steepest for the activities the regime treats best.

When it actually bites

The chart draws a clean vertical drop; the law is gentler about timing. Bill between €85,000 and €100,000 and you keep the regime for the year you are in and lose it from the next one. Pass €100,000 and it ends immediately, with VAT obligations from the moment you cross.1

Read the drop as the year after, then — which is harder to plan for, not easier. The invoice that costs €18,145 is one you send in November and pay for the following December, by which time it cannot be unsent.

People already avoid the line

There is good evidence that the threshold changes what people invoice. Francesco Alosa studied Italian administrative records around the regime’s earlier €65,000 cut-off and found a pronounced pile-up of taxpayers just underneath it.6 The excess — the crowd over and above what the underlying spread of turnovers would predict at that point — came to roughly three and a half times the expected number of people.

His estimates of how far turnover bends are small in absolute terms: for professionals, around a 0.07% change in reported turnover for each 1% change in what the tax leaves them. That sounds negligible, and it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is why they bend at all: less than half of the pile-up is explained by the regime’s lighter paperwork, so most of what keeps people under the line is the tax saving itself.

In other words, the threshold already shapes Italian invoicing. The figures above say how much is at stake in that decision.

What we assumed

Three assumptions do most of the work. There are no deductible business costs: under ordinary rules real costs come off the taxable base, so a consultant with heavy expenses faces a shallower drop and an earlier break-even. The rate is the standard 15% rather than the 5% available in the first five years, which would make the drop larger. And contributions are Gestione Separata; a professional in a cassa or an artisan in Gestione Artigiani has a different profile.3

None of that changes the shape. A regime that ends at a fixed revenue figure rather than tapering has to produce a discontinuity, and the size of that discontinuity is a fact about the rules rather than an opinion about them. For anyone billing in the seventies, it is also the number worth having in front of you well before November.