Paritarie, Imu exemption when tuition fees are below the average cost per student
This is one of the novelties of the Budget Law 2026. This overcomes the rigid parameters set by Ministerial Decree 200/2012
by Ilaria Ioannone and Gabriele Sepio
Key points
For educational institutions, Imu exemption is measured according to the average cost per student. This is one of the novelties contained in the Budget Law 2026 (law 199/2025) destined to significantly affect the objective requirements for access to the concessionary regime for non-commercial parochial schools.
Primary schools
The normative intervention operates by way of authentic interpretation, establishing that educational activities carried out in real estate owned and used by non-commercial entities are considered non-commercial when the average fee charged to families is less than the average cost per student (Cms), i.e., the parameter annually determined and published by the Ministry of Education and Merit.
This overcomes the particularly restrictive approach crystallised in the ministerial decree 200 of 2012, which, in response to the infringement procedure of the then Ici, had anchored non-commerciality to the gratuitousness of the service or to the request for merely symbolic fees. Rigid parameters that over the years have proved to be poorly suited to the evolution of the education system, which is now anchored to the standard cost per student as a measure of educational needs.
It is precisely in this context that the regulatory intervention intervenes, ensuring that the parameters set by Ministerial Decree 200 of 2012 are read in a substantive key. Without introducing new criteria, in fact, the authentic interpretation rule enhances the ratio between the fees charged and the actual cost of the service, brought back to the average cost per student. In this way, the requirement of non-commerciality is realigned to its original function, which is to distinguish economic activities from activities of general interest carried out in economic equilibrium, overcoming a merely formal reading of the discipline.
This is not a sudden change of course, but the consolidation of a path that had already been traced at the administrative level. The same instructions of the Imu/Enc declaration model have progressively incorporated a verification logic based on a comparison between the average fee charged and the average cost of the service, confirming that the relevant parameter is not the existence of the fee per se, but its incidence with respect to the standard cost.
