Credit transfers from 2025 in the deduction trap

Of tomorrow there is no certainty. This could be a fitting expression for the fate that awaits deductions with the next manoeuvre. The cut that will be triggered on the basis of three income classes and the new family quotient on deductible expenses 2025 will at least not be retroactive. A full stop in a sea that promises to be rather rough for Italian taxpayers and also for those who will assist them in compiling the tax returns to be submitted in 2026 (the first in which the new deductions will make their debut).

While the final touches are still being made to the text destined to be stamped and brought to Parliament, the certainty is that the new plafonds imagined by the government to favour households with lower incomes and with more children than others will not take into account the instalments of deductible expenses coming from the past (even the recent past), that is, in particular, transfers made up to 31 December 2024 for works that entitle them (in the presence of all the requirements) to building concessions. A choice that clearly stems from the protection of legitimate expectations: not to betray the trust of taxpayers who had made investment decisions knowing that they could count on the possibility of recovering part of the expenditure through the mechanism of deductions over several years. A different orientation would have, among other things, risked generating inevitable litigation destined to go on for years at all levels of tax justice.

In any case, it is to be imagined as of now that on the 730 or 2026 income form a large simplification effort will have to be made in order to distinguish the double track: on the one hand, building bonuses until 2024 that follow their already predefined depreciation path; on the other hand, those expenses that will fall under the new thresholds based on income and family coefficients. In this second block, tax savings for taxpayers should ultimately be weakened by the impossibility of carrying all costs incurred even for renovation expenses that have a very high ceiling: currently 50% has as a maximum sustainable expenditure 96 thousand euro and even with the descent to 36% for second homes the expenditure ceiling of 48 thousand euro if exploited to the limit in a single tax period would lead to eroding a large part of the plafond for each year of the ten deductions, leaving itself preferred in the choice to other deductible charges (e.g. medical expenses) which then have a lower percentage.

It will then be left to deal with situations such as the furniture and household appliance bonus (always linked to works that qualify for the renovation bonus). In this case, the extension announced by the government should be dry, i.e. 50% for everyone and, above all, within an overall expenditure ceiling of 5,000 euro per real estate unit.