Italy — Taxes

Worldwide taxation, softened by an optional flat tax Italy taxes its tax-residents on worldwide income, at progressive national rates up to 43%, plus regional and municipal surcharges; VAT is 22%. The headline attraction for the wealthy is a flat-tax regime: new residents can elect to pay a fixed 200,000 EUR per year on all foreign-source income (raised from 100,000 EUR in 2024), for up to fifteen years. It is powerful for very large foreign incomes, and a poor deal for modest ones.

The Investor Visa is residence, not a passport The Investor Visa grants EU residence for an investment of 250,000 EUR in an innovative startup, 500,000 EUR in a company, 2 million EUR in government bonds, or a 1 million EUR donation. There is no minimum-stay rule to hold it — but that same absence of presence works against you for citizenship.

The ten-year road to a passport Naturalisation requires ten years of genuine legal residence, one of the longest waits in the EU, and real presence, not just a permit on paper. Judge Italy as a first-rate European residence and lifestyle base, with citizenship a distant, separate horizon.

Residency, tax residence and duties elsewhere Becoming Italian tax-resident turns on presence and your centre of interests, not on merely holding the visa, and the visa does not remove obligations to a country that taxes on citizenship, such as the United States. Compare Italy with the golden visas of Portugal and Greece, read our residency hub and tax hub, and see how each figure is checked in our methodology.