Buying a luxury home in italy: taxes to pay

What are the taxes for purchasing a luxury home? Are any discounts available? When can a house be considered luxury? These are the questions that echo in the heads of those who are thinking of making an investment in a luxury home and we have created this article to clarify and give transparent and exhaustive answers.

When is a property considered luxury?
Before knowing what the purchase taxes are for a luxury home, it is advisable to know when the property is considered such.
Let's start by saying that a property is considered luxury when it is located in an urban area, considered as such, larger than 3,000 m2 or if there is a swimming pool of at least 80 meters. To be considered luxury apartments, however, must have a surface area greater than 240 m2, excluding parking spaces, cellars, terraces and attics. Apartments consisting of one or more rooms, which make up a single accommodation, with a surface area greater than 200 m2, excluding the elements indicated above, are also defined as luxury.
A house, on the other hand, is defined as luxury when it has a total surface area greater than 160 m2, with terraces with a surface area of at least 65 m2, and with more than one lift per staircase.


Buying a luxury home: taxes
Once it has been clarified when a property can be defined as luxury, let's move on to the main taxes to be paid when purchasing this type of house, which are 3:
· registration tax;
· mortgage tax;
· cadastral tax.
The mortgage tax and the cadastral tax have a fixed taxation, while the registration tax varies depending on the amount of the purchase. For luxury properties the taxation is 9%, while for the sale of a luxury property the VAT applied stands at 22%.
Furthermore, anyone who owns a luxury property is not entitled to the ban on foreclosure on their first home. In practice, anyone who has a luxury home and does not pay the tax collection agent can have their property either mortgaged or foreclosed. The debt must however be higher than 20,000 euros to trigger the mortgage and 120,000 euros to trigger the foreclosure.


We conclude by specifying that what is written above applies only to Italy and each nation has different regulations.