Buying a House in Italy as a Danish Buyer: 0.6% Becomes 9%
Registering a Danish transfer costs 0.6% plus 1,850 kroner. Italy charges 9% on a second home, or 2% on a main one. Here is the rest of what changes.
Denmark charges 0.6% to register a change of owner. Italy charges 9% to buy the same kind of house.
Skatteministeriet, the Danish tax ministry, sets the transfer registration duty at 0.6% of the purchase sum plus 1,850 kroner. Italy's Agenzia delle Entrate charges imposta di registro at 9% on a second home from a private seller, or 2% with prima casa relief. On 400,000 euro that is 2,400 against 36,000.
| Tax and market | Rate (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| Italy, second home | 9.0% | |
| Italy, with prima casa relief | 2.0% | |
| Denmark, ejerskifte | 0.6% |
Why do Danish sources quote both 1,825 and 1,850 kroner?
They are two separate duties sitting in the same act, and each carries its own fixed component.
Skatteministeriet's rate table for the tinglysningsafgiftslov, the Danish act on registration duty, lists them apart from one another. Registering an ejerskifte, the change of ownership itself, costs 0.6% of the purchase sum and a fixed 1,850 kroner. Registering pant i fast ejendom, a mortgage over real property, costs 1.25% and a fixed 1,825 kroner.
Only one of the two moved recently. The Danish tax administration's newsletter on tinglysningsafgift records the mortgage rate falling from 1.45% to 1.25% with effect from 1 January 2026, and confirms the fixed mortgage duty staying at 1,825 kroner. That confirmation is about the mortgage. Lift it, attach it to the transfer duty, and you have manufactured the 25 kroner discrepancy that keeps circulating.
The number worth carrying to Italy is the first one. A Dane's instinct for what changing owner costs is built on 0.6%, and the Italian line in the same position reads 9%.
Denmark vets the buyer. Italy vets the deed.
Denmark screens who is permitted to acquire a home in the first place; Italy screens whether the deed and the seller's title stand up.
A Dane is an EU citizen, so the reciprocity check the notaio genuinely runs for a third country national never starts. Denmark, by contrast, restricts its own market for holiday homes tightly. Under the erhvervelsesloven, the Danish acquisition act, a buyer without Danish residence who has not previously lived there for five years needs permission from the Ministry of Justice, obtained through Civilstyrelsen. Italy asks an EU buyer for none of this.
The Italian condition that does exist is aimed elsewhere. Article 16 of the preleggi, the preliminary provisions issued with Regio Decreto 16 marzo 1942 n. 262, makes a foreigner's civil rights in Italy conditional on reciprocity, and the Consiglio Nazionale del Notariato places European Union and European Economic Area citizens outside it. What the notaio examines instead is the property itself, through the visure catastali and visure ipotecarie held at the Catasto and the property registers.
Where the advokat used to stand
Nobody in an Italian purchase is working for the buyer alone, and for a Dane that is the largest procedural change of the lot.
A Danish sale runs with an advokat on the buyer's side, reading the paperwork in the buyer's interest and raising the objections that follow from it. The notaio is not that. The notaio is a public officer who confirms the deed is lawful and the parties are who they say they are, collects the taxes, and registers the sale with the Agenzia delle Entrate and the Catasto, serving both sides at once while doing it.
The sequence also moves the commitment earlier than a Danish buyer expects. A proposta d'acquisto opens the transaction. The contratto preliminare, which everyone calls the compromesso, closes it, with the caparra handed over at that point. The rogito formalises what the compromesso already settled, and the notaio's role attaches to the rogito rather than to the compromesso. The document that binds you is therefore the one signed without the public officer in the room.
From 0.6% to 9%, and what the 9% lands on
The contract price, unless the buyer asks in the deed to be taxed on the cadastral value instead.
The Agenzia delle Entrate sets imposta di registro at 9% for a second home bought from a private seller and 2% where prima casa relief applies, and adds a fixed imposta ipotecaria and imposta catastale of 50 euro each. Those two fixed 50 euro lines are the only part of the Italian bill that behaves the way the Danish fixed 1,850 kroner behaves.
The variable part is where prezzo-valore comes in. The Agenzia delle Entrate lets a private individual buying residential property have the registration tax computed on the valore catastale rather than on the price agreed. The election belongs inside the deed and cannot be bolted on afterwards.
On a 400,000 euro purchase the Italian 9% works out at 36,000 euro and prima casa at 2% works out at 8,000 euro, against 2,400 euro for the Danish 0.6%. Nothing there is a published comparison; it is two rate cards applied to one price.
What Italy bills every year
IMU, TARI and the spese condominiali, none of which is calculated from what you paid.
IMU is the imposta municipale propria, the property tax each comune sets for itself. Under legge 160/2019, article 1, commi 740, 748 and 754, the Dipartimento delle Finanze publishes 0.86% as the base rate for a home that is not the owner's main residence, 1.06% as the ceiling a comune may reach, and 1.14% for comuni that had applied the former TASI maggiorazione.
| Rate | Share of cadastral value (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| Base rate | 0.86% | |
| Comune ceiling | 1.06% | |
| Ceiling with former TASI maggiorazione | 1.14% |
The multiplier is the valore catastale and not the sale price. TARI, the tassa sui rifiuti, pays for waste collection, and the spese condominiali pay for the building. If the place will be let, the 2026 cedolare secca limits set what that income costs.
Where the numbers stop
Italian statistics stop short of the buyer's nationality. Neither the Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare at the Agenzia delle Entrate, nor the Banca d'Italia, nor ISTAT, the national statistics institute, nor the Consiglio Nazionale del Notariato breaks residential sales down that way. There is no official count of Danish buyers in Italy, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it.
We do not give buying or selling advice, and nothing above says whether an Italian property is worth buying. What the sources carry: 0.6% plus 1,850 kroner to register a Danish transfer and 1.25% plus 1,825 kroner to register a Danish mortgage, the mortgage rate cut on 1 January 2026, permission through Civilstyrelsen for a Danish summer house, 9% imposta di registro on an Italian second home against 2% with prima casa relief, 50 euro each for the ipotecaria and the catastale, a cadastral base only on request in the deed, and an annual IMU the comune sets between 0 and 1.06%.
AiMYNDi reads the listing, the condominio accounts and the legal paperwork for one specific property, so a charge on the registry entry or a pending building levy surfaces before the compromesso rather than after it. You can see an example of what a report looks like first.
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