As housing subsidies are scaled back, only the standard incentive is increasing
The reduction in other forms of aid means that beneficiaries now account for 45.8 per cent of the total
by Dario Aquaro and Cristiano Dell'Oste
Everything you need to know about the renovation tax credit. In the Form 730 tax returns submitted this year, there is just one tax relief scheme that has seen a significant increase in the number of beneficiaries: the ‘standard’ tax relief for building renovation. Between 2025 and 2026, the proportion of taxpayers claiming this relief out of the total number of taxpayers rose from 40.8 per cent to 45.8 per cent, an increase of 5 per cent.
We are referring, in particular, to the ‘standard’ tax relief on renovation work, governed by Article 16-bis of the Tuir, which is generally 36 per cent and rises to 50 per cent for the main residence. It is this tax relief that taxpayers seem to have focused on in a year of ‘meagre’ tax incentives such as 2025.
This trend emerges from an analysis of the tax returns of 742,000 employees and pensioners who consistently used the CAF Acli offices to submit Form 730 between 2022 and 2026.
The 45.8 per cent of beneficiaries includes all those who declared an instalment of expenditure covered by the renovation bonus on Form 730/2026, both for expenditure paid in 2025 and for expenditure from previous years. It is clear, then, that if this percentage increases compared with the tax returns submitted last year, it means that the number of people who have ‘joined the scheme’ (by claiming the first instalment this year) is greater than the number who have ‘left the scheme’ (having claimed the tenth instalment on the return submitted in 2025).
In fact, the renovation bonus appears to have benefited from the suspension or scaling back of other incentives, from the earthquake bonus to the superbonus.
