€220 of Italian VAT on every €1,000 a flat-tax freelancer buys abroad

A designer in Milan on Italy’s flat tax pays a Dublin company €1,000 a year for the software she draws in. Italy charges €220 of value-added tax on that invoice, she is the person who has to pay it, and she will never get it back. The same €1,000 spent by the studio down the road, registered for VAT in the ordinary way, carries no net VAT at all.465

The regime forfetario is described, including by its own statute, as the regime without VAT. Comma 59 of the article that created it says its users are “esonerati dal versamento dell’imposta sul valore aggiunto e da tutti gli altri obblighi” of the 1972 VAT act. The commi on either side of that sentence send them back into the same act nine times.1

Who owes the tax

A service sold by one business to another is taxed where the customer is, not where the supplier is: that is article 7-ter of the VAT act, and it puts the Dublin subscription inside Italy. Article 17 then says that when the supplier is not established here, the obligations belong to the customer — the buyer works out the Italian tax on the supplier’s invoice, writes it on, and pays it. The mechanism is called inversione contabile, reverse charge: the tax is charged, but by the person receiving the service rather than the one providing it.45

Every VAT-registered business in Italy does this. What makes it a cost rather than paperwork is the last sentence of comma 58, which says flat-rate taxpayers “non hanno diritto alla detrazione dell’imposta sul valore aggiunto assolta, dovuta o addebitata sugli acquisti” — no right to deduct the tax they have just charged themselves. The ordinary business records the same €220 twice, as tax owed and as tax recoverable, and the two cancel. The flat-rate business records it once.1

What survives the exemption

Commi 58 to 60 name nine provisions of VAT law and apply each of them to a taxpayer the same block calls exonerated. Three of the nine can end with Italian VAT to pay. They are listed below as the statute orders them; the counting rule is simply every explicit reference of the form articolo N attached to one of the three decrees that carry this part of the law.11

Alongside those nine, commi 59 and 60 keep or add six duties that name no article: number the purchase invoices and the customs bills, keep them, certify takings, keep the certificates, issue or integrate the invoice showing the rate and the tax, and pay that tax. Fifteen lines in all, in the three commi that describe an exemption.1

What it costs

Nothing about a purchase reduces a flat-rate taxable base. Income is revenue multiplied by the coefficient the activity’s ATECO group carries, and real costs are irrelevant to it, so the €220 is neither recoverable as input tax nor deductible as an expense. It is simply gone.10

That makes it comparable with the substitute tax, which is the other payment the regime produces. A professional practice billing €30,000 on the 78% coefficient owes €864.98 of substitute tax in the five start-up years, when the rate is 5%. Buying €327.64 a month from suppliers outside Italy generates as much irrecoverable VAT as that. At the standard 15% rate the same crossing sits at €982.93 a month, so the result belongs to the start-up years rather than to the regime as a whole.12

The coefficient moves it too, in the direction that surprises people: the activities with the lowest presumed profit share pay the least substitute tax, so their VAT overtakes it soonest. At €50,000 of billing on the 5% rate the crossing runs from €602.08 a month for construction on the 86% coefficient down to €280.04 for food and retail on 40%.12

The date it falls due

Comma 60 sets the general deadline at the 16th of the month after the operation. Since 13 June 2025 the reverse charge has had its own, later one: lettera e-bis of comma 58 requires the tax on those purchases by the 16th of the second month after each calendar quarter, four payments a year instead of twelve. The lettera was added by article 6 of a corrective decree of 12 June 2025, and it is absent from the text of comma 58 in force on 20 May that year and present in the text in force on 30 June.321

For purchases made between April and June 2026 that date was 16 August, which fell on a Sunday; payments due on an F24 between 1 and 20 August may be made by the 20th without a surcharge, so the money was due on Thursday 20 August 2026. The next one covers July to September and falls on Monday 16 November 2026.89

Goods have a threshold, services do not

Buying a laptop from Germany and buying a subscription from Ireland are not treated alike. Comma 58 sends goods bought in the EU to article 38 of the 1993 intra-EU decree, which says the purchase is not an intra-EU acquisition at all while the year’s total, and the previous year’s, stay at or below €10,000 net of tax: below that line the supplier charges its own country’s VAT and Italy asks for nothing. Services carry no such floor. Article 7-ter applies to the first euro, which is why a one-person business with no imports at all can still owe Italian VAT on its software.74

What this does not settle

Whether the Italian tax is charged at all depends on the supplier recognising the buyer as a business, which in practice means the buyer’s VAT number being in the EU’s VIES register. A supplier that treats the customer as a private consumer charges its own country’s VAT instead. That is not a way out: the tax is then paid abroad and is equally unrecoverable. How often each of the two happens is not something these commi can say, and it is not measured here.

The crossing points are spend levels, not a claim about anyone’s budget. What a one-person business actually pays foreign suppliers is not in any of these documents; the table says what the arithmetic does at each level and leaves the level to the reader. The 22% is the standard rate, and a few services carry a reduced one. Everything above reports what the documents say and what the computation produces, which is not the same thing as advice about what to do.6