One rate, taken at the door, and the dividend then disappears from your tax life entirely. The page is worth reading anyway, because people arrive expecting one of three things that are not true in Italy: a top-up bill later, a choice of route, or some relief for the tax the company already paid on the same money.
The withholding is the tax, not an advance on it
A dividend paid to a resident individual bears 26%, withheld by the company as it pays. It is withheld a titolo d’imposta, which is the phrase that settles everything else: the withholding is the whole liability, and the dividend never enters your IRPEF taxable base at all.
That last part has a consequence people miss. Because the dividend is never in the base, the progressive scale cannot reach it. Your salary can be taxed at 43% at the margin while the dividend beside it is still taxed at 26%, and a large dividend cannot push your salary into a higher band either. They are computed in separate universes.
The regional and municipal IRPEF surcharges miss it for the same reason. Those run to roughly 3.33% for the region and 0.9% for the town, and they are charged on the IRPEF base. The dividend is not in that base, so it is not in their reach either.
Nothing is deducted before the rate is applied. The exempt amount is €0: no franchise, no threshold, no deduction for costs.
There is nothing to elect
Portugal gives a shareholder a genuine choice between a flat final withholding and folding the dividend into the general scale, and running both is the whole point of that page. Italy gives you one option because the law contains one. No provision lets a resident individual pull a privately held dividend onto the progressive scale, in either direction, and there is therefore no hidden cost of choosing wrongly.
Two things get mistaken for a choice. The first is the old regime for qualified holdings, under which only part of the dividend went into the taxable base: it was repealed, and the grandfathering for profits earned up to 2017 covered only distributions resolved between the start of 2018 and the end of 2022. That window is shut. The second is holding the shares through a business. That is a fact about where the shares are booked, not a yearly election, and it takes the dividend out of this regime entirely.
The company already paid, and none of it comes back
Italy runs a classical system for the individual shareholder. The company pays IRES and IRAP on the profit, and then the same profit is taxed again in your hands with no imputation credit, no deduction and no netting. The sentence of the tax code that used to leave part of a qualified dividend out of the base was suppressed in 2017 and the consolidated text carries the repeal notice where it used to be.
The exemptions that survive are not yours. A corporate shareholder can exclude almost all of an incoming dividend from its own base, and the participation exemption relieves companies holding shares in other companies. A founder taking a dividend in their own name gets neither, whatever holding period they have behind them.
Stack the two levels and roughly 46.6% of company profit is gone by the time the money is yours, on the Lombardy IRAP rate. The founder page does that arithmetic properly, region by region.
A worked example
Your company resolves a dividend of EUR 100,000.
It withholds 26,000 and pays you 74,000. There is nothing to declare and nothing to settle later. Double the dividend and you keep 148,000: same rate, no band to cross, no return to file on it.
When the flat rate is not the rule
If the shares sit among the assets of your own business, or are held by a partnership you are a member of, this regime does not apply. Instead 58.14% of the dividend joins your other income on the progressive scale, which costs a high earner more than the flat rate and a low earner less. Dividends paid out of profits of a company resident in a privileged tax regime go into the base in full, with no flat rate at all.
This is a resident page. A non-resident shareholder falls under a different regime and any treaty can move the rate, and none of that is modelled here.
What changed for 2026
Nothing. The rate is unchanged, the mechanism is unchanged, and no new election or allowance appeared. The last two changes that mattered are both behind us: the 2018 reform that put every shareholder on the same flat rate, and the closing of the pre-2018 grandfathering window at the end of 2022.
A shareholder here gets no decisions to make. A Portuguese one does, a Spanish dividend at least climbs a scale, and Poland does the same thing Italy does at a lower rate. The decision that exists for an Italian founder sits one level up, at the company, and it is on the founder page.