Italian R&D tax credit

What it funds

It is a tax credit, and no money arrives in the bank: it can only be offset through the F24 form, in three equal annual installments starting from the tax period after the one in which it accrues, and it cannot be transferred to anyone, not even within a tax consolidation group. The base covers staff, depreciation and lease payments on the assets and software used in the project, research contracts, consultancy and materials, under paragraphs 198-209 of law 160/2019.

Two sibling lines run beside it. The one for technological innovation, including the digital 4.0 and green variant, ended with 2025 spend: there is none for later spend. The one for design and aesthetic conception covers the 2026 tax period only, with its own rate, cap and budget, a single annual installment and a notice to MIMIT for budget control.

Requirements and what is left out

• Anyone developing routine software: an ERP, integrations, customizations for a client. Software enters the base only as a tool or object of an activity that meets the R&D criteria, and writing code is not enough.
• Anyone buying software or digital services to modernize the business: that is capital spend, and the channel for it is the 2026 super-depreciation.
• Anyone who cannot have the spend certified by the statutory auditor: without it, the credit cannot be used.
• Anyone without a sworn technical report describing the project's objectives, content and results.
• Anyone expecting to stack it freely with other aid on the same costs: the combination may not exceed the cost incurred, and the base is computed net of any other grants received on the same spend.

How to apply

1. Keep the documentation of the spend, project by project.
2. Have the spend certified by the statutory auditor.
3. Have the technical report written and sworn.
4. Send the notice to MIMIT.
5. Declare the credit in the tax return.
6. Offset it through F24 in the three annual installments.

What it builds

Where a project holds up as research, for instance a model that has to solve a problem with no known solution, I build it keeping experimentation hours apart from ordinary development, with experiments, discarded hypotheses and results tracked in the code. That is the material the technical report needs, and where the work is plain development I say so up front.

This entry is informational and is not advice: I do not handle grant applications, and before committing to a purchase it is worth reading the official source above or talking to whoever files the application.