Tightening of compensations, under scrutiny 140 billion
New limits on contributions, withholding taxes and insurance premiums are coming. The expected revenue is minimal, but the intervention affects all bonuses from housing to accrued and still unused investments
At least EUR 140 billion, considering the credits already accrued and those that will be consolidated in the course of 2025. This is the gigantic perimeter within which, from 2026 and for the next few years, the narrowing of compensations, as set out in the Budget Law 2026, in the version that has just been approved by the Senate, will act. The bulk of this figure (over EUR 130 billion) concerns home bonuses accrued from 2020 and not yet used. The rest comes mainly from credits accrued in the course of 2025 through investments in the Special Economic Zone of Southern Italy and the Transition 4.0 and 5.0 plans.
The time schedule
The magnitude of these numbers explains the concern of businesses, overwhelmed by a double stranglehold that will also have a differentiated time frame. From January 2026 the amount of unpaid tax bills (for which there are no suspension measures in progress) will be halved from EUR 100,000 to EUR 50,000, which will trigger a freeze on the possibility of using credits for offsetting; in other words, above this threshold of unpaid tax bills there is a real risk of losing tax credits.
From July 2026 comes the second, somewhat harsher squeeze: the scope of a clearing ban already in force since January 2025 for banks, financial intermediaries and insurance companies on home bonuses will be extended to all. Tax credits can no longer be offset against social security and welfare contributions, insurance charges, withholding taxes and substitute taxes.
These measures, contained in Article 26 of the Budget Bill, do not have a great impact in terms of financial effects: in total, when fully implemented, they are worth just under 300 million. The real value of the work, however, must be measured in terms of the effect on controls.
Objectives and Critical Issues
One of the key objectives of the Inland Revenue, in fact, is an increasingly in-depth analysis of tax credits, in order to avoid the use in F24 of benefits resulting from offences. By reducing the exit channels of these credits, the preventive control activity becomes more effective. An activity that, in the first nine months of 2025 alone, has led the Inland Revenue to discard 561 million euro and to suspend for further investigation approximately three billion euro for which, as the technical report to the manoeuvre explains, net of those already discarded, no attempts at compensation have been made.
