Italy Digital Nomad Visa Numbers: Two and a Half Years On, No Published Count of Visas or Permits

What the decree of 29 February 2024 set up

The visa took two years to arrive. Its legal basis is article 6-quinquies of Decree-Law 4 of 27 January 2022, added when Parliament converted the decree with Law 25 of 28 March 2022. That provision created an entry and residence route for highly qualified remote workers but left the detail to an implementing decree. The implementing decree is dated 29 February 2024. It was signed by four ministers: Matteo Piantedosi for the Interior, Antonio Tajani for Foreign Affairs, Daniela Garnero Santanchè for Tourism and Marina Calderone for Labour. The Court of Audit registered it on 22 March 2024, and it was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, the official journal, no. 79 of 4 April 2024.

Its final article says it applies from the day after publication, which makes 5 April 2024 the first day of the scheme. Not every official page agrees. A notice from the Italian consulate in Buenos Aires, dated 1 April 2024, says the visa entered into force from 4 April 2024. The difference is one day, and it is a small example of a pattern that runs through this subject: consular pages restate the decree, and sometimes restate it differently.

The decree defines two kinds of applicant. A nomade digitale is a non-EU citizen who works on a self-employed basis using technology that allows remote work. A lavoratore da remoto is a non-EU citizen who does the same work as an employee or contracted collaborator. In both cases the work must be highly qualified, by reference to the existing rules for highly qualified workers in article 27-quater of the immigration code. The employer or client is described as an "impresa anche non residente", a business that may or may not be resident in Italy. The decree does not require the employer to be outside the EU.

For stays of more than 90 days, entry is allowed outside the annual quotas that govern most work migration to Italy, the so-called decreto flussi. Digital nomads are exempt from the provisional clearance (nulla osta) that self-employed applicants normally need, and remote workers are exempt from the work clearance. In practice the consulate is the first gatekeeper. That matters for measurement, because the office that issues or refuses the visa is also the one whose counts we could not find in public.

The requirements, as written and as consulates state them

Article 3 of the decree lists five conditions. Applicants must have a minimum annual income from lawful sources of at least three times the minimum level set for exemption from healthcare cost-sharing. They must hold health insurance covering medical treatment and hospital stays in Italy for the whole stay. They must document their accommodation. They must show at least six months of previous experience in the work they will do remotely. And remote workers must present an employment or collaboration contract, or a binding offer, for work that meets the highly qualified standard.

The decree states the income test as a formula, not a figure. It does not put a euro amount on the page, and it does not cite the provision that sets the healthcare exemption level. The euro numbers in circulation come from elsewhere. The Buenos Aires consulate's notice gives €28,000 a year. An information sheet from the Italian embassy in Tunis gives "circa 27 mila euro", about €27,000. The tax news site FiscoeTasse, on 11 April 2024, wrote about €25,000. Sheets from the embassies in Chisinau and Pretoria repeat the formula without any figure. Il Fatto Quotidiano and Forbes Italia both use about €28,000; Il Fatto adds that the threshold is often raised in online forums, where many users find it demanding, especially freelancers whose income varies.

We could not settle which number is right from the documents we opened. What we can say is narrower: the legal test is three times a healthcare exemption level, consular pages translate it into amounts between about €27,000 and €28,000, and at least one specialist outlet put it near €25,000. FiscoeTasse adds that the threshold rises with dependent family members, the Chisinau sheet adds that remote workers' pay must not be below the average gross annual salary recorded by ISTAT, the national statistics institute, and the Pretoria sheet applies the same floor to the income requirement. Anyone planning around a single figure should ask the consulate that will handle the application.

A criminal record check is often listed among the requirements. The decree does not ask the applicant for one. Its criminal-record clause concerns the employer: a visa is refused, or revoked, if an employer or client resident in Italy has been convicted in the past five years of certain offences under the immigration code, and the applicant must supply the employer's signed declaration that there are no such convictions. Consulates may still ask for documents beyond the decree's list. The Tunis sheet, for instance, calls its list "meramente orientativo", indicative only. But a clean personal record is not one of the decree's five conditions.

After arrival the applicant has eight working days to ask the Questura, the provincial police headquarters, for a residence permit. The permit carries the wording "nomade digitale - lavoratore da remoto", lasts no more than one year and can be renewed each year while the conditions hold. Spouses and minor children can join under the ordinary family reunification rules, with family permits of the same length. The permit can be revoked if tax and social security obligations are not met.

Who could count the visas, and what they publish

Three offices handle each case, and each produces its own count. The consulate records visa applications, issues and refusals. The Questura records permits. The tax and social security agencies are notified of each permit. None of the counts is published as far as we could find. The decree itself sets no statistical or monitoring duty: its only information flows are notifications between offices.

The foreign ministry, MAECI, is the most likely holder of a visa count. Its freedom-of-information registers show that it answers questions about visa numbers when asked. The 2025 register lists the January 2025 request for 2024 digital nomad visas, granted in February. It also lists a trade union's request for 2024 visa statistics across the ministry's network, granted on 31 March 2025, and several requests for visa data from single embassies. The 2024 register has no request about digital nomads. The register for the first half of 2026 has one request about remote work, which concerns a 2023 exchange of notes between Italy and the United States on dependants of US military personnel and was refused on grounds of international relations. It is not about this visa.

The registers show what a published series would need. A count of visas issued in one year already exists, because the ministry could answer the journalist's question within a month. A breakdown by consulate, by nationality and by the two categories in the decree, self-employed digital nomads and employed remote workers, would tell readers where demand comes from and which route is used. Refusals would show how strictly the income and qualification tests are applied. The Questure would hold the second half of the picture: first permits, renewals after the first year and revocations for unpaid tax or contributions. Renewals matter most, because a one-year permit that is rarely renewed would suggest people use the route for a single long stay rather than to settle. None of these figures is in the public record that we could find, and the decree does not require any of them to be published.

The ministry's statistical yearbook for 2025, posted on the ministry's site in August 2026, has a table of entry visas issued by purpose, table 2.52 on page 255. The text layer we could read stops in the first chapter, so we could not see whether a remote work or digital nomad category appears in it. That remains unverified. According to its foreword, entry visas issued by the network rose by 16% in the year covered, mainly for tourism but also for business, employment and study, and gives no figure for remote work in the text we could read.

European Union visa statistics do not help here. The figures the European Commission compiles cover short-stay Schengen visas. The digital nomad visa is a national long-stay visa; the Pretoria embassy's sheet says it can be valid for up to 365 days. A visa of that length falls outside the short-stay statistics altogether, so the only place a count could appear is in Italy's own national visa data.

The Interior Ministry holds the permit data. ISTAT's report on non-EU citizens for 2025, published on 22 October 2026, uses data the ministry supplies and counts 426,956 new residence permits issued in 2025, against 290,119 in 2024. It groups them under work, family, study, asylum and protection, and other reasons. Work permits came to almost 59,000 in 2025, 49,114 issued to men and 9,884 to women. The report does not mention digital nomads, remote work or the permit wording "nomade digitale - lavoratore da remoto". If those permits are in the figures, they cannot be picked out. For the wider picture of who holds permits and why, see our analysis of Italy's foreign residents and Italians abroad.

We found no parliamentary answer that gives a count. The Interior Ministry's site lists an answer to a parliamentary question whose title refers to the delay in issuing the implementing decree; the page returned an error when we tried to open it, so we cannot report its content. Our searches for later questions on the number of visas or permits found none, but they were not exhaustive.

EU statistics cannot isolate the permit

Eurostat publishes first residence permits for every member state, and Italy's figures for 2025 are there. The dataset migr_resfirst gives 433,099 first permits issued by Italy to non-EU citizens in 2025: 176,876 for family reasons, 36,358 for education, 57,362 for employment and 162,503 for other reasons. This is a different series from ISTAT's, with different definitions, and its total does not match ISTAT's 426,956.

A second table, migr_resocc, splits the employment permits. For Italy in 2025 it gives 855 EU Blue Cards, 985 permits for researchers and 55,522 for other employment reasons, with no data shown for highly skilled workers or seasonal workers. The three figures add up to the 57,362 total. For 2024 the same table gives 39,090 employment permits, of which 633 Blue Cards, 620 researchers and 37,837 other employment reasons. Remote work permits, if Italy reports them under employment, would most likely sit in other employment reasons. Eurostat does not say so, and we found no Italian note that does. Either way, they cannot be separated from tens of thousands of other permits, and the rise in the category between 2024 and 2025 cannot be attributed to them.

The same limit applies to Italy's labour migration more broadly. Our analysis of hospitality's labour shortage and work-permit quotas shows how quota-based work routes are counted and announced in detail. The remote work route sits outside those quotas, and so outside the counts that come with them.

The press figures, and what they are

Most numbers attached to Italy's digital nomad visa in the press are not counts of the visa at all. Il Fatto Quotidiano's January 2026 article, by Viola Giacalone, gives no number of applications or approvals and quotes no ministry. It relies on the fourth Rapporto sul Nomadismo Digitale and on the association's president, Alberto Mattei, as Il Fatto identifies him. Its case that the visa is a flop rests on bureaucracy, consular delays and requirements, not on a figure. It also reports that a proposed amendment offering a 50% tax reduction on income up to €600,000 for this group was not adopted. We did not find the amendment text.

Forbes Italia, in an article by Enzo Argante on 19 February 2026, and Quotidiano Nazionale, in an article by Vittorio Bellagamba on 17 February 2026, give the figures that most often travel. Both draw on the same fourth report, which analysed more than 800,000 social media conversations and 155 press articles. The estimate of 20,000 to 45,000 "traceable" digital nomads is obtained by scaling Spain's published authorization data to Italian flows. The estimate of 850,000 to 900,000 a year applies a method used in Estonia, which counts overall presence rather than visas, to Italian tourist numbers. Quotidiano Nazionale presents both as the author's estimates and adds a third, €150 million to €450 million a year in uncaptured tax and contributions. Forbes Italia's page title and web address say that 900,000 digital nomads a year "risultano" in Italy, a verb that suggests a recorded figure; its visible headline speaks of 900,000 people a year. Its own text says the opposite: there is not yet any official figure to measure precisely how many enter or stay.

These estimates may be useful as orders of magnitude. They are not visa counts, and they measure something wider. Many remote workers in Italy, as both articles note, are EU citizens or short-stay visitors who need no permit at all. The visa covers a narrower group: non-EU citizens staying more than 90 days who meet the income and qualification tests. A figure of 900,000 says nothing about how many of them applied, were approved or settled.

Tax and contributions: each case is notified, the totals are not published

The decree builds a paper trail for every permit. When the Questura issues one, it generates the holder's tax code and notifies the Agenzia delle Entrate, the revenue agency, electronically. Self-employed digital nomads must also register for VAT. The Questura sends the employment or collaboration contract to the local offices of INPS, the social security institute, and INAIL, the workplace insurance institute, and informs the labour inspectorate. Where the holder is covered by a third country's social security system, bilateral agreements apply; where there is none, Italian rules apply for the length of the permit. The revenue agency reports any violations it finds back to the Questura that issued the permit.

Each of these flows could, in principle, yield a count of permit holders. We found none published by the Agenzia delle Entrate, INPS, INAIL or the labour inspectorate. Nor did we find any published measure of the tax paid by permit holders.

The wider tax rules changed in 2024. Legislative Decree 209/2023 replaced the earlier regime for workers who move their tax residence to Italy, the impatriati regime, from the 2024 tax year. According to a summary by Assolombarda, the Milan employers' association, the new regime taxes 50% of qualifying income earned in Italy, within an annual limit of €600,000, for people who were not resident in Italy in the three previous tax years and who commit to keeping their tax residence in Italy for at least four. The minimum period abroad rises to six or seven years when the person keeps doing in Italy work previously done abroad, for example for the same employer or for a company in the same group. That is close to the typical situation of a remote worker who moves with an existing job, so the longer period may be the one that applies. A child under 18 raises the exempt share from 50% to 60%, according to the same summary. The regime also requires high qualification or specialisation, and the work must be done mainly in Italy. Whether a given digital nomad or remote worker qualifies depends on facts we cannot assess, and we did not open any revenue agency ruling on the point. Our analysis of Italy's flat tax for new residents found a similar gap for a different group of movers: tax statistics a year or more behind and no count of arrivals by nationality.

The investor visa shows the same pattern, as our report on Italy's investor visa numbers sets out: one official monitoring report with data to 2021, later application counts known only through an access request, and no published count of visas or permits. The citizenship-by-descent figures are better covered, because ISTAT counts acquisitions of citizenship, but the residence routes for newcomers remain largely unmeasured in public.

What this means for travelers, remote workers and analysts

Travelers visiting Italy for a holiday are not affected. The visa concerns non-EU citizens who want to live in Italy for more than 90 days while working remotely. Short stays by visa-exempt nationals, and work by EU citizens, fall outside it.

Remote workers weighing an application can know the rules but not the odds. Nobody outside the administration can tell you how many applications are approved, how long the process takes in practice or how many permits are renewed, because we found no published figures. The decree sets no processing deadline. The Chisinau consulate's sheet speaks of up to 90 days for employed remote workers and 120 days for self-employed applicants, and Forbes Italia reports waits of up to four to five months for a consular appointment, without naming a source. On income, the safe reading is the decree's formula plus the consulate's own figure. How the application works in practice is covered in our guide to the Italy digital nomad visa.

Tourism businesses, local authorities and analysts who want to plan around remote workers have no official base to plan from. Italian towns that market themselves to digital nomads, and the tourism bodies that count visitors, can see arrivals and nights in registered accommodation. They cannot see how many of those guests hold this permit, because no such figure is published. Estimates of hundreds of thousands of digital nomads a year should be treated as models of a wider population, not as a count of permit holders.

Journalists have a short list of citable facts. The legal basis is article 6-quinquies of Decree-Law 4/2022, added by Law 25 of 28 March 2022. The implementing decree is dated 29 February 2024, was published on 4 April 2024 and applies from 5 April 2024. The income test is three times the healthcare exemption level, with consular conversions of about €27,000 to €28,000. The permit lasts up to one year, renewable. The foreign ministry released the number of visas issued in 2024 to a journalist in February 2025, and we found that number nowhere in print. Claims not to repeat include any count of visas or permits presented as official, 900,000 as a recorded figure, and a criminal record check on the applicant as a requirement of the decree. Asking MAECI for the 2025 and 2026 figures under the freedom-of-information rules is the obvious next step, and the 2025 register shows such a request can succeed.

The finding fits a pattern across our insights series. Italy publishes its residence rules in detail, down to the wording on the permit. It has not published, as far as we could find, the outcomes that would show whether the policy works: how many people applied, how many were let in and how many stayed.