Someone at the Banca d’Italia must have decided it was time to say it plainly. The Annual Report presented on 29 May contains a chapter that Radio 24 listeners (Sebastiano Barisoni cited it on air a few days ago) read twice to make sure they had not misunderstood. Forty per cent of the country’s net household wealth is about to change hands, and address, through inheritance: up from the 30 per cent the same generation received from its own parents. A ten-point jump on a base of €12,326 billion, the net wealth of Italian households at end-2025, equivalent to 8.5 times disposable income. Do the maths. Or use your imagination.
For those who prefer round numbers: the think tank Tortuga, independent and “born from the voluntary initiative of young researchers, economics students and social-science students,” calculated in July 2025 that between 2025 and 2045 roughly €6.46 trillion will change hands by inheritance.
That is eighty Italian budget laws. Sixty NRRPs. A sum that, according to data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth, sits almost entirely in the hands of the over-50s (75 per cent of national wealth, of which 40 per cent belongs to retired over-65s). The under-40s, meanwhile, hold 9 per cent between them. A forty-year-old today is, at constant values, 50 per cent poorer than a forty-year-old in 1986. A matter of demographic arithmetic, not character.
The trouble is that this is a continental phenomenon, and Europe (a single market for goods, capital and financial services) is, for all that, a chaotic mosaic of twenty national succession regimes that have never coordinated on anything, except perhaps the implicit objective of making life impossible for anyone reckless enough to die with assets in more than one country.
Consider the case of the Italian professional of the middle generation: a Milan flat bought in 1988 (cadastral value €120,000, market value €480,000), a securities account in Luxembourg opened during a posting in Brussels, a small chalet inherited from his mother in Carinthia. Resident in Belgium for twenty years, where he works. Dies.
The board game begins. Belgium applies its tax to the deceased resident’s entire worldwide estate; for collateral-line transfers in the Brussels-Capital Region, rates reach 80 per cent. Italy claims its share on the Milan property: 4 per cent, but calculated on the cadastral value rather than the market value, a tax concession dressed up as bureaucracy. Austria (surprise) has had no inheritance tax since 2008, so the chalet passes free of charge. Luxembourg likewise. The result: three probate proceedings across four jurisdictions, two notaries, a tax lawyer at €400 an hour, and a bilateral Italy-Belgium convention of 1983 that neither notary has read in full. EU Regulation 650/2012 on cross-border successions establishes who the heir is, not how much they pay. Taxation remains, as one says in Brussels, entirely a matter of national competence. Good luck. Bon courage.
Take €1 million left by a parent to a child. Same family, same amount, same degree of kinship. The tax depends on where the deceased was resident: in Italy nil (a €1 million exemption per direct-line heir, unchanged since 2006); in Germany around €75,000; in France around €215,000; in the United Kingdom, which no longer belongs to the Union, around £250,000; in Spain around €265,000, though with enormous regional variation. In Belgium the rate can reach 80 per cent on transfers between unrelated parties in Brussels. The Spanish system is so fragmented that the maximum national rate touches 87.6 per cent, whilst in Andalusia the same succession may be almost exempt. Cross-border succession planning is an industry worth billions in Europe alone.
Then there are the countries that abolished the tax without regret: Austria (2008), Sweden (2005), plus Slovakia, Estonia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta and Latvia. The trend over the past two decades in Europe has been towards lightening, not tightening, and revenues from inheritance taxes have fallen in almost every member state as a share of total tax receipts, according to the European Commission’s Annual Report on Taxation 2024.
The aggregate yield tells the story. In Italy inheritance tax raised just over €1 billion in 2022: 0.05 per cent of GDP, less than the state collects from the national lotteries. France raised €14.3 billion (0.74 per cent of GDP), Germany €9.8 billion, Belgium €2.7 billion, Spain €3.5 billion. There is also the cadastral factor: the Italian taxable base is not the market value of property but the cadastral value, often three or four times lower. What is taxed, in substance, is the past.
Italy is the European country with the most lenient succession regime on the continent and at the same time one of those with the lowest social mobility: an intergenerational income elasticity of 0.5, among the worst readings in the OECD. Almost two thirds of Italian billionaire wealth is inherited, against a global average of 36 per cent (UBS Global Wealth Report 2025). The wealthiest 10 per cent hold 60 per cent of national wealth, a share that has grown by 7 points in a decade at twice the average European rate.
This is not a technical anomaly; it is a coherent and cross-party political choice. The constituency of those with an interest in the matter is large, elderly and very active at the ballot box. An amendment to steepen the rates, tabled in the 2026 Budget Law, was filed away without debate. The European discussion has been reignited by external pressure: Gabriel Zucman’s proposal for a minimum annual levy of 2 per cent on billionaire wealth, the FISC sub-committee hearing at the European Parliament in December 2025, the two-volume study published by DG TAXUD in April 2026.
The technical conclusion is straightforward enough: inheritance taxes distort the economy less than net wealth taxes, and their yield depends more on exemption thresholds than on rates. To raise something, you lower the former; to raise nothing, you leave them where they are.
The Bank of Italy included in its dossier a final figure that few have remarked upon: households expecting to receive an inheritance show average consumption 7 per cent higher and savings 17 per cent lower than those without that prospect. Expectation already changes behaviour, before the wealth has moved at all. Millions of under-40s are living on the advance of a prize they have not yet collected and which, like every lottery, is not distributed equally. Those who already have much will inherit more. Those who have little will wait.
Sixty years after the economic miracle, the accumulated wealth is about to shift. The notaries are preparing. The international tax lawyers have already revised their fee schedules. And someone, in a Milan flat within the old Mura Spagnole, with a view over the rooftops and a cadastral value dated 1987, is waiting, full of hope.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
