Italian citizenship by residence: the years, the income, the language and the timescales

Ten years in Italy do not make you an Italian citizen. They make you someone who can apply — and that is already a great deal, because many people reach fifteen or twenty years without knowing they could.

The route is called citizenship by residence, and it is set out in article 9 of law no. 91 of 5 February 1992. The word that matters is concession: those who meet every requirement file an application, and then the administration decides. Meeting them is necessary; it is not in itself enough.

Below are the requirements with the exact figures. It does not say whether your application will succeed — only someone who can see your whole history can look at that. There is, however, one thing you can check yourself before spending a euro, and it is the most important one: it is in the third section.

How many years of residence are needed

It depends on where you come from and who you are. There are seven cases, and most people are in the first.

If you are	Minimum residence
A citizen of a non-EU country (art. 9 f)	10 years
A citizen of the European Union (art. 9 d)	4 years
Stateless (art. 9 e) or a refugee (art. 16 § 2)	5 years
An adult adopted by an Italian citizen (art. 9 b)	5 years from the adoption
The adult child of a foreign national who became Italian	5 years from the parent's citizenship
A direct descendant of Italian citizens by birth, to the second degree	3 years
Born in Italy (art. 9 a)	3 years

Three points that shift a great deal, and are better known at once:

• holders of subsidiary or humanitarian protection do not come under the concessions granted to refugees: for them it stays at ten years. It is a distinction that surprises almost everyone;
• British citizens have been third-country nationals in every respect since 1 January 2021;
• anyone who has worked for the Italian State, including abroad, for at least five years does not have the residence requirement (art. 9.1 c).

«Legal residence»: the two words that stop most applications

Having been in Italy for ten years is not enough. The law asks for residence that is legal, continuous and unbroken: it means having been registered with the Anagrafe throughout, with no months of residence abroad and no periods of being untraceable.

The difference between «having been here» and «appearing on the register» sounds like a technicality and is not. In a working life, gaps open for ordinary reasons: a move declared late, a period when the permit had expired and the town hall did not know, a visit from the officer who did not find you at home because you were at work.

Those months, even ten years ago, count. And they are almost always discovered too late — after everything else has been paid for, translated and legalised.

How to check your residence before spending a euro

This section is worth the time, because it is the one that saves real money.

Every municipality can issue you a historical residence certificate (storico di residenza individuale): a certificate stating, with dates, when you were registered there and when you were not. Every Italian anagrafe issues it.

There are two things to plan for, and neither is convenient:

• you need one certificate for every city you have lived in. Each one covers only the time spent in that municipality: at present there is no single national certificate putting them together. If in ten years you lived in Milan, then Brescia, then Rome, that is three requests to three different offices;
• each one costs € 16.52 — € 16.00 of stamp duty plus € 0.52 of office fees.

Three cities come to nearly fifty euros. That sounds like a lot, until you set it against the € 250 fee, the legalised translations, and two or three years of waiting thrown away for a gap that could have been seen in advance.

And here is the thing to understand clearly: those certificates are not for the town hall. They are for you.

When you file the application, the public administration may not ask you for certificates, nor even accept them. This is stated in article 40 of presidential decree 445 of 2000: certificates are valid only between private parties, and in dealings with public offices they are always replaced by a declaration of your own. Asking you for them is, under article 74 of the same decree, a breach of official duty. That it happens anyway, and it often does, does not change the rule.

So for the application your own self-declaration is enough: a signed statement, with no stamp duty and no authentication of the signature. You do not have to buy the certificate in order to hand it in to anyone.

You buy it to be sure of what you are declaring. You are the one signing that statement, and the same decree is blunt about what happens if it is untrue: in the event of an untruthful declaration the citizen is punished under the criminal code and the special laws on the matter, and also forfeits any benefits obtained through the self-declaration (artt. 75 and 76).

In this procedure «forfeiting the benefits» means one very concrete thing: losing the citizenship you were granted, even years later. And a three-month gap from ten years ago that you had forgotten counts like any other: good faith does not change the fact declared.

That is what the fifty euros of certificates are for: signing in full knowledge.

There is also a free way, and you already have it

If you are a non-EU citizen, every time you renew your residence permit you must go back to the town hall and renew the declaration of habitual dwelling (dimora abituale) within sixty days. We wrote about it here: the declaration to renew with every permit.

That errand, which looks like one more piece of paperwork, is in fact a periodic proof that your registration is alive. The reasoning is simple: if the anagrafe updates your data, it means you are on the register. Had you been struck off, they could not update anything — and they would tell you so, replying that your data cannot be changed because you have been cancelled.

There is a second effect, and it is the one that sometimes saves the case: confirming your habitual dwelling interrupts any procedure already under way for being untraceable. You arrive before the cancellation is completed, and you stop it.

Put in a way that sticks: every permit renewal is also a free check on your residence. Anyone who has renewed the dimora abituale each time has, without knowing it, ten years of evidence.

Income over the last three years

You must show sufficient means in the three years before the application, and that income must stay stable until the oath — having had it on the day you applied is not enough.

Situation	Minimum income
Single	€ 8,263.31
Married	€ 11,362.05
Married + 1 child	€ 11,878.10
Married + 2 children	€ 12,394.15
Married + 3 children	€ 12,910.20
Married + 4 children	€ 13,426.25
For each further dependent child	+ € 516.00

Only income taxable for IRPEF and declared in Italy counts — what appears in the last three tax returns. Property does not count: owning a house does not replace a wage.

But there is something almost nobody knows, and it changes the fate of many applications: you do not have to get there alone. The income of family members living with you can contribute — spouse, civil partner, cohabiting partner under a written cohabitation contract, children, parents, sons- and daughters-in-law, parents-in-law, brothers and sisters. A maintenance self-declaration and the contributor's identity document must be attached.

It means that a mother working part-time and an adult child in work, living together, can add up. Look at your family status certificate before giving the application up for lost.

Italian at level B1

You need Italian at no less than level B1 of the Common European Framework. It is proved in one of three ways:

• a B1 certificate from a recognised body;
• a qualification obtained at an institute recognised by the Ministry of Education;
• the integration agreement.

Do not confuse it with the A2 test, which is for the long-term residence permit: they are two different exams, and citizenship asks for the higher level. If you sat A2 years ago, that is not enough.

The documents that must come from your country

There are two, and they are the ones to set in motion first, because they depend on distant offices:

• your birth certificate in the original language, legalised and with a legalised translation;
• the criminal record certificate from your country — and from every other country where you have lived — also legalised and translated.

Two details about the criminal record certificate which, if wrong, send you back to the start:

• it is valid for six months from issue, and must still be valid when you send the application. Asking for it too early is as much a mistake as asking too late;
• it is not the Italian casellario giudiziario: it is a document from your own country, and they are two different things.

If you entered Italy before the age of fourteen, the criminal record certificate from your country is not required.

What it costs, and where to apply

At the time of application you pay, through PagoPA:

• the mandatory fee of € 250.00;
• the € 16.00 stamp duty.

The application is made online only, through the Ministry of the Interior portal. There is no counter to hand it in at, and you need no intermediary to file it.

How long the wait is

The deadline for the administration to reply depends on when you applied: the law changed twice, so people who applied in different years wait different lengths of time.

Application filed	Deadline
before 5 October 2018	2 years
between 5 October 2018 and 20 December 2020	4 years
after 20 December 2020	2 years, extendable to 3

During those years the file is not idle: you follow it in your private area on the portal, where notices also arrive. It is worth checking often, along with your email, because some requests carry a deadline to reply.

The oath, and the six months not to miss

If the application is granted, a decree of concession arrives. It is not over yet: you must swear an oath of loyalty to the Republic.

And here is the cruellest deadline of the whole process: the oath must be taken within six months of the decree being notified. After that, the decree has no effect at all — and there is no recovering it: you start again, with the costs and the years again. Ten years of waiting can end like that, over an unopened letter.

You become an Italian citizen the day after the oath. Your municipality of residence will tell you how and when it is done.

If the answer is heading towards no

If grounds emerge during the review that could lead to a refusal, the administration must tell you before deciding: this is the notice of intended refusal, and it opens a window to reply and produce documents. It is not bad news to be endured: it is the chance to explain, and it should be used.

An application may be refused for criminal records, final convictions for certain offences, or reasons of State security; the Ministry weighs each case, including the situation of family members living with you. A refusal can be challenged before the TAR, the administrative court.

Something people say that did not happen

In June 2025 a referendum was held proposing to cut the residence requirement from ten years to five. It did not reach the quorum — turnout was 30.6 % — so nothing changed: for people from outside the EU it remains ten years.

If someone tells you that «five years is enough now», they are giving you wrong information. It is worth knowing before making a decision, or paying somebody for an application that cannot yet be made.

Where to start, in practice

In this order, and the first is free:

1. Count the years and note which cities you were registered in.
2. Ask each of those municipalities for the historical residence certificate — € 16.52 each — and check for gaps. If you have always renewed the dimora abituale with every permit, you already have a good sign.
3. Look at the tax returns of the last three years, yours and those of the people you live with.
4. Set the documents from your country in motion, as they are the slowest — but not too early, because of the six months on the criminal record certificate.
5. Have it all checked by a patronato before paying the € 250. It is free, and the two things they look at — unbroken residence and income — are exactly the two that decide the case.

Is your situation in none of the boxes above? Describe it in the Citizenship section of the community: in this field, unusual cases are the rule.