Conto termico, the Ministry of the Environment cuts subsidies for private individuals

The allocation of resources of the thermal account changes. More precisely, 50 million euro are moved from the ceiling dedicated to private individuals and businesses to that reserved for the public administration. This is the effect of Directorial Decree No. 72 of 10 April 2026 of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, which has just been published. A few hours after the reactivation of the portal for requesting subsidies from the Gestore dei Servizi Energetici (Gse), several interventions have arrived that are functional to the restart of the incentive, such as details on the extension of the deadline for direct access applications.

The first change, brought about precisely by the Mase measure, is the reshaping of the annual expenditure limits cumulated for the Conto termico incentives for 2026. In this regard, it must be remembered that up to now the division of the 900 million envisaged that 500 million were reserved for private individuals and businesses and 400 million for the Public Administration. This division changes to 450 million for each container. Thus,50 million pass from private individuals to the Pa.

The reasons for this are given in the introduction to the decree. Here, Mase explains that "an analysis of the flow of applications shows a greater saturation of the quota destined for public administrations. It is, in fact, precisely the requests received from the municipalities using the reservation mechanism (available for works yet to be started) that led to the blocking of the portal. For this reason, the reservation has already been blocked (only the direct access mode remains, for works already completed) and now comes this reshuffling of resources.

A second novelty concerns direct access to subsidies. In this case, it is possible to apply for funds within 90 days of the closure of the works. During the month-long closure of the portal, which began on 3 March and ended with the reopening on 12 April, many works lost their window of access to resources. To remedy these situations, a Faq on the Gse website communicates the details of the reopening of the deadlines.

It will concern all applications for admission to the Conto termico 'for which the 90-day deadline from the date of completion of work falls within the portal's suspension period'. In these cases, 'there will be a 40-day extension for submitting the application'. But that is not all. The Faq takes a very open approach and explains that 'the extension also applies to applications with an end date between 25 December 2025 and 12 April 2026'. For these requests, when submitting the application, 'the date of submission of the application must be indicated as the "end date of the work", solely to allow the application to be submitted following the temporary suspension of the portal'.