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Mandatory certified email for Italian businesses: what happens if you don't have it, and what it costs
The fine for not having communicated a certified email address (PEC) to Italy's Business Register runs from 206 to 2,064 euros for a company, and from 30 to 1,548 euros for a sole proprietorship. This isn't a new rule: PEC has been mandatory for companies since 2009 and for sole proprietorships since 2012. What changed from 2025 is that the obligation now also covers directors personally, with a PEC address of their own separate from the company's, and the deadline to comply has already passed.
The basic obligation isn't new: it's over a decade old
Certified email as a mandatory address to communicate to the Business Register comes from two separate rules:
- for companies, since 2009, under article 16, paragraph 6, of Decree-Law 185/2008, converted with Law 2/2009
- for sole proprietorships, since 2012, under article 5 of Decree-Law 179/2012: businesses already active at that time had to communicate their PEC by 30 June 2013 (source: coordinated text published in the Official Gazette, checked on 23 August 2026)
Anyone who has started a business in the last ten years almost certainly already has a PEC on file with the Business Register: it's a step any accountant or online business-registration service includes by default. Where many companies have fallen out of compliance is somewhere else, and it's recent.
The 2025 change: a personal PEC for the director
From 1 January 2025, Italy's 2025 budget law (article 1, paragraph 860, of Law 207/2024) extended the digital-address obligation to the directors of companies in corporate form, on top of the company's own PEC. Italy's Ministry of Enterprises then clarified, in a note dated 12 March 2025, that this address must be personal and distinct from the company's: simply listing the company's PEC again under the director's name isn't enough.
The deadlines shifted more than once over the course of the year:
- MIMIT initially set the deadline at 30 June 2025 for already-established companies
- with an official statement on 25 June 2025, it pushed that back to 31 December 2025, citing implementation difficulties reported by several Chambers of Commerce
- Decree-Law 159/2025, converted with Law 198/2025, then narrowed who is actually required to comply: not every director, but only the sole director, the managing director, or, failing that, the chair of the board, and only in capital companies, cooperatives and consortium companies, not in partnerships (sources: MIMIT and Unioncamere, checked on 23 August 2026)
For anyone holding one of these roles as of 31 October 2025, the deadline to communicate a personal PEC was 31 December 2025: today, in August 2026, that deadline is already eight months past. If your company hasn't taken this step yet, there's no upcoming deadline left to meet: it's already overdue.
What actually happens if the PEC is missing
For a missing company PEC, the administrative fine is clearly defined: from 206 to 2,064 euros for companies, reducible to 412 euros if regularized shortly after being notified; from 30 to 1,548 euros for sole proprietorships, reducible to 60 euros. In both cases, the Business Register assigns a replacement digital address of its own, in the format taxcodecompany@impresa.italia.it: that address, however, only receives mail, it cannot be used to send a PEC to a client or supplier (sources: the Chambers of Commerce of Mantova, Cremona-Mantova-Pavia, Genoa and Turin, checked on 23 August 2026).
For the director's personal PEC, the picture is less settled. In March 2025, MIMIT itself wrote that no specific fine existed yet for this violation, and that the practical consequence was the suspension of the filing submitted to the Business Register, up to rejection if not regularized within 30 days. After Decree-Law 159/2025, several professional sources point to the same doubled fine used for companies as applicable, but no law text says so explicitly for this case, and recent reporting (April 2026) describes uneven practice across different Chambers of Commerce, some of which fined businesses even after they complied within the grace period Unioncamere had recommended. I'd rather not print a figure here as if it were settled: what is settled is that it's worth fixing, not worth gambling on an amount no primary source confirms consistently today.
What a PEC actually costs, today
Communicating a PEC address to the Business Register costs nothing: it's a free service through the Chambers of Commerce's online platform, with no stamp duty or filing fees. The cost is only for activating a mailbox with a provider, and it varies quite a bit:
| Provider | Plan | First year | From renewal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aruba | PEC Standard, 1 GB | €5.00 + VAT | €9.90 + VAT/year |
| Aruba | PEC Pro, unlimited, 3 mailboxes | €25.00 + VAT/year | €25.00 + VAT/year |
| Aruba | PEC Premium, unlimited | €40.00 + VAT/year | €40.00 + VAT/year |
| Poste Italiane | PosteCertificate, 2 GB (individuals and small businesses) | €5.50 + VAT | not listed separately |
| Legalmail (InfoCert) | Personal | €5.90 + VAT | €5.90 + VAT |
| Legalmail (InfoCert) | Professional | €15.90 + VAT | €15.90 + VAT |
| Register.it | PEC Agile | free (6-month promo) | €54.15 + VAT/year |
Prices checked directly on providers' official websites on 23 August 2026. For a business with normal mail volumes, a base plan at 5-10 euros a year is almost always enough: the pricier tiers only make sense with more mailboxes or more storage.
Where to start
If you're not sure your company's PEC is still active and correctly on file, or if, as a director, you haven't yet checked your own personal position after the 2025 changes, the fastest way is to check directly on the Business Register: if it has assigned you an official digital address in its place, that's already the sign something is missing. Another digital obligation that follows the same logic, depending on what you do rather than on your revenue, is the digital signature: I've written about it in digital signature: what it really costs and when it's mandatory. If you want to take stock of this and the rest of your business's digital setup, we can cover it inside the digital check-up; otherwise write to me, a couple of lines are enough to know where to start.