The Italian payroll compliance calendar for 2026: filings that affect platforms

Italian payroll does not run on a single deadline. It runs on a set of filings, and some of them depend on data your platform holds or feeds to a local partner. This guide covers the year-end certification and annual declaration dates that we have verified for 2026. It is written for partnership, operations and payroll managers at global EOR and payroll platforms.

A note on sources first. The dates below come from a secondary source, not from the tax authority itself. Treat them as a planning baseline and confirm them against official notices before you commit customers to a date.

What the filings are  

The Certificazione Unica, or CU, is the annual certificate of income paid and tax withheld. The employer issues it to each worker and also reports it to the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian tax authority. The Modello 770 is the annual withholding tax return. It summarises what the withholding agent paid and withheld during the year.

Both documents are built from payroll data over the whole year. If a worker moved between entities, changed contract type or left mid-year, the quality of that history decides how clean the filing is.

The calendar, month by month  

January and February  

There is no verified filing date for these months in our data set. Use them for preparation. Close out the prior year, check worker records and reconcile payroll runs against what will appear on each certificate.

March 2026  

This is the busiest month for platforms.

• 16 March 2026: deadline to deliver the CU to employees.
• 16 March 2026: deadline to send the CU to the Agenzia delle Entrate for the same population.

Both dates fall on the same day. That leaves no gap between delivering certificates to workers and reporting them to the authority. Any correction found after delivery means a reissued certificate and a corrected submission.

For a platform, the practical point is data readiness. Your local payroll provider needs final figures before this date. A late correction from your side is the most common reason a CU has to be redone.

April 2026  

• 30 April 2026: deadline to send the CU to the Agenzia delle Entrate for self-employed workers.

This matters if your platform also supports contractors alongside employees in Italy. Self-employed income follows a separate track from employee income. Keep the two populations apart in your data exports, so each one lands in the right filing.

May to September  

No verified filing date for these months is in our data set. Use this window to fix issues found during the spring filings and to prepare the second half of the year.

October 2026  

• 31 October 2026: deadline to send the CU to the Agenzia delle Entrate for the exempt category.

This is a later, narrower deadline. It covers income that is exempt, and it sits well after the main March date. It is easy to miss because it falls outside the main year-end rush. Check whether any of your Italian workers fall into this category and assign an owner for the filing.

The same date, 31 October, is also the nominal deadline for the Modello 770. In 2026 it falls on a Saturday.

November 2026  

• 2 November 2026: the Modello 770 deadline, moved from Saturday 31 October to the next working day.

The 770 is a summary return. It depends on the same withholding data that fed the CU. If the CU data was right, the 770 is mostly a matter of assembly. If the CU needed late corrections, check that the 770 reflects them.

December 2026  

No verified filing date for this month is in our data set. Plan the handover of final-year data and start the next cycle.

What this means for platform operations  

Three habits reduce risk.

1. Work backwards from 16 March 2026. Your internal data freeze has to come before it, with time for review.
2. Separate populations. Employees, self-employed workers and exempt income each have their own date. Tag workers by category from the start.
3. Treat the weekend rule as real. When a deadline falls on a Saturday, it moves to the next working day. In 2026 that is how the 770 lands on 2 November. Do not build your calendar on the nominal date.

What we have not covered  

This calendar lists only the dates we have verified. Other recurring obligations exist across the year, such as monthly payroll and contribution payments. We have not included them here, because we have no verified dates for them in this data set. We will add them once each one is confirmed with its source.

Partnership teams that want to see how payroll data should flow between a platform and a local provider can request the data-exchange specification.