Leasing, leased-out businesses and intangible assets: patents, trademarks, concessions and goodwill

In 2026 Giulia takes over a travel agency and pays €90,000 for its goodwill, expecting to write it off in a few years like a software licence. Her accounts spread it over ten years, yet Italian tax law allows at most one eighteenth a year. For a long stretch her company will pay tax on costs it has already booked.

Leasing from the user's side

Under a finance lease the business uses an asset that remains the property of the leasing company, pays periodic instalments and can usually buy it at the end. A lessee reporting under Italian accounting standards books the instalments as an expense. Tax law, however, does not let the contract term alone set the pace of the deduction.

Paragraph 7 of article 102 provides that the lessee deducts lease payments over a period of no less than half the depreciation period that matches the asset's table rate, whatever term the contract sets. A contract shorter than that minimum does not speed the deduction up.

Where the contract runs longer than the tax minimum, nothing changes: payments are deducted as they accrue. Where it is shorter, the part of the payments above the yearly allowed share is added back and recovered in later years, until the minimum period has been reached.

Keep the lease agreement together with the payment plan, the delivery date of the asset and the purchase option price. These papers let the business rebuild, year by year, how much of the payments has been deducted already and how much is still to be recovered after the contract expires.

Buildings, cars and embedded interest

For real estate, paragraph 7 sets its own minimum: lease payments are deductible over at least twelve years, whatever the building's table rate. The update note applies this to contracts signed from the date law no. 147 of 27 December 2013 came into force.

For cars and the other vehicles covered by article 164, paragraph 1, letter b), the minimum is longer: payments are deducted over no less than the full depreciation period, not half of it. On top of that come the amount limits specific to vehicles, which a separate course covers.

A lease payment also contains a financing element. The paragraph ends by stating that the implicit interest taken from the contract follows the article 96 rules on interest expense. The lessee therefore has to split each payment between the part that repays the asset and the part that rewards the lender.

For the leasing company, which books the payments as income, the same paragraph allows depreciation equal to the instalments of the financial amortisation plan. It is the mirror rule: the lessor recovers cost at the contract's pace, while the user cannot move faster than the tax minimum.

A business let to someone else or held in usufruct

When owners let their whole business to another operator, the assets stay theirs but are used and maintained by someone else. Paragraph 8 of article 102 moves depreciation to the tenant or usufructuary: the charges are deducted in their income, because they are the ones wearing the assets out.

The tenant's charges are measured on the original cost shown in the owner's books and may be deducted until the cost not yet written off is used up. A business lease should therefore come with a schedule of the assets, showing historical cost and the depreciation the owner has already deducted.

If the owner has not kept the register of depreciable assets, or an equivalent book, properly, the law treats half of the charges for the period already elapsed as deducted. The owner's sloppiness thus leaves a smaller balance for whoever takes the business over.

The rule does not apply when the parties contract out of article 2561 of the Civil Code, meaning the duty to keep the assets in working order stays with the owner. In that case the wear falls on the owner, who keeps deducting the depreciation in their own income.

Patents, know-how and copyright

Intangible assets follow article 103, with a different limit for each family. For rights to use works of the intellect, industrial patents, and processes, formulas and information drawn from acquired experience, the yearly deductible charge may not exceed 50 per cent of cost. The shortest tax schedule is therefore two years.

This family covers, for instance, software protected as a work of the intellect, a patent bought from an inventor or a package of technical expertise acquired from a competitor. The commercial label matters little; what matters is the nature of the right the business acquires.

Trademarks, concessions and goodwill

Trademarks face a much tighter limit: one eighteenth of cost for each year. Under paragraph 3, the same eighteenth applies to goodwill recognised as an asset in the balance sheet. The cost of a trademark or of goodwill is therefore recovered for tax over eighteen years at the very least.

Concession rights and other rights recognised as assets work differently: charges are deductible in line with the period of use set by the contract or by law. A ten-year concession is deducted over ten years, a twenty-five-year one over twenty-five, with no ministerial table involved.

For businesses reporting under international accounting standards, paragraph 3-bis extends the eighteenth to intangible assets with an indefinite useful life, starting from the year their cost is charged to profit or loss. Paragraph 4, finally, applies the leased-business rule described above to intangible assets as well.

When the accounts write off a trademark or goodwill faster than the eighteenth, the difference is added back every year. It is a claim against the tax authority that only unwinds at the tail end of the schedule; for a young company that means paying tax early for many years, which belongs in the cash-flow plan.

The eighteenth is a ceiling, not a requirement. A longer accounting plan flows into taxable income unchanged; a shorter one creates add-backs. Either way, the register and the schedule of differences have to follow the asset until its very last instalment.

Paragraph 3 speaks of goodwill recognised as an asset in the balance sheet: in practice, the amount paid for a business or a branch over the value of its individual assets. A reputation built up in-house, with no price actually paid, has no recognised value on which to calculate charges.

Before signing an acquisition it therefore pays to split the price, with supporting evidence, between tangible assets, trademarks, patents and goodwill. The split changes the pace of deductions: an amount assigned to a machine comes back at the sector rate, while the same amount assigned to goodwill takes eighteen years.

Tracking the differences over the years

Short leases, goodwill written off over ten years in the accounts and trademarks expensed quickly all create differences that last more than a decade. An off-book schedule, asset by asset, showing book charge, tax charge and the cumulative amount added back, keeps the business from losing deductions due in the final years.

That schedule should be reconciled every year with the adjustments reported in the income tax return. If an asset is sold or scrapped, any amount added back and not yet recovered forms part of the residual tax cost and affects the gain or loss: forgetting it means taxing the same sum twice.

The wording that applies in 2026

Leases, business leases and intangibles in 2026 follow articles 102 and 103 as they stood before the reform. The new consolidated act approved by decree no. 117 of 2026 runs from 2027; anyone planning long schedules, such as goodwill, will need to reread its rules for the years that follow.