TLDR: A new law that took effect in December 2025 just rewrote one of the riskiest parts of buying property in Italy. Forced heirs can no longer claw back a house from a buyer years after a gift or inheritance went through. They can still sue for money, but the property itself stays put. Here’s what changed, who it affects, and what to check before you sign anything.
Italy Just Closed a Decades-Old Loophole in Property Sales
For years, buying a house in Italy that had once been gifted to someone carried a hidden risk. Under the country’s forced heirship rules, certain relatives, mainly the spouse, children, and in some cases parents, are entitled to a protected share of an estate. If a parent gave a house to one child and that child later sold it, another sibling could show up years afterward and sue to get the property back, even from a buyer who had nothing to do with the original gift.
That risk just got a lot smaller. Law 182/2025, which entered into force on 18 December 2025, rewrote Articles 561, 562, 563, 2652, and 2690 of the Italian Civil Code. The short version: a forced heir can still bring a claim, but they can no longer take the house away from a third-party buyer. Their remedy is now limited to money, owed by the person who received the original gift or by that person’s estate.
Why This Matters If You’re Buying
Notaries and estate agents in Italy have long flagged “donated property” as a red flag during due diligence. Banks were sometimes reluctant to finance purchases where a past donation sat somewhere in the chain of title, because the twenty-year window for a forced heir to challenge the gift made the property’s legal status genuinely uncertain.
That uncertainty is a big part of why some perfectly good homes sat unsold, or sold at a discount, simply because a donation showed up in the history. With the new rule, a completed purchase is much harder to unwind. The seller’s exposure didn’t disappear, it just moved from the property to the seller’s wallet.
Who Still Needs to Pay Attention
This protection isn’t automatic for every transaction. The reform applies to successions where the person who made the gift dies after the law took effect, so older cases still fall under a six-month transition period running to 18 June 2026 if a reduction action was already filed and registered before the new law kicked in. If you’re closing on a property with a donation in its history, your notaio still needs to check whether any such claim was registered before that cutoff.
Inheritance Tax Rules Changed Too, Separately From This Reform
Property owners dealing with Italian inheritance should know this isn’t the only recent shift. A separate measure, Legislative Decree 139/2024, scrapped the old “coacervo successorio” rule starting in 2025. That rule used to force lifetime gifts and a final estate to be added together when calculating the €1 million tax-free allowance for spouses and children. Now gifts and inheritance each get their own, separate allowance.
What the Allowances Actually Look Like Now
In practice, a spouse or child can receive up to €1 million tax free, with a 4% rate applying above that threshold. Siblings face a 6% rate, and unrelated heirs or distant relatives face 8%. None of these are progressive bands the way UK inheritance tax works. Italy taxes the heir directly, not the estate as a whole, and if a spouse or child inherits a home and continues living in it, that property transfer is exempt from the tax entirely.
Life Insurance Still Sits Outside the System
One detail that surprises a lot of foreign property owners: life insurance payouts in Italy aren’t subject to inheritance tax at all, regardless of the amount or who the beneficiary is. That’s made life insurance a fairly common planning tool for people trying to move wealth to heirs without running into either the tax or the forced heirship rules.
What Property Owners Should Actually Do
None of this makes estate planning in Italy simple. The forced heirship system is still rooted in Roman law and doesn’t bend just because a gift happened decades ago. But the practical risk for buyers has genuinely shrunk, and that’s likely to loosen up a corner of the property market that’s been stuck for years.
If you own property in Italy, received it as a gift, or are thinking about buying something with a donation somewhere in its past, now’s a sensible moment to have a notaio or commercialista check where you stand. The rules just moved, and the six-month transition window closing in June 2026 isn’t going to wait for anyone.
