Alimony in Italy: What Foreigners Need to Know

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“Alimony” Is Not One Thing in Italy

In most common-law countries a single award, usually called alimony or spousal support, is decided when the marriage ends. Italy works differently, because the marriage is normally unwound in two stages: first legal separation, then divorce. (A few narrow grounds allow a direct divorce without separation, and some of them concern international couples.) Each stage has its own payment, and the second is not a continuation of the first.

This matters in practice: an amount agreed at separation does not automatically carry over into the divorce. It is decided again, under different criteria, and it can be higher, lower, time-limited, settled once and for all as a lump sum, or refused altogether.

Child maintenance is a third, separate obligation. It follows the child, not the couple: the child’s right does not depend on whether a spouse receives anything, though the two figures are set together, because what one parent pays the other changes the income each has available.

There is a fourth and much narrower obligation, alimenti: bare subsistence support, owed between close relatives and, in limited cases, between spouses, and only to someone genuinely without means. It is the closest literal translation of “alimony” — and it is not what most people mean by the word.

STAGE 1

Maintenance During Separation

Separation maintenance is the payment one spouse makes to the other once the separation takes effect. Its purpose is to keep the economically weaker spouse as close as possible to the standard of living the couple had while married. It is not automatic: three conditions have to be met.

What the judge weighs

The income of both spouses, their overall assets, each spouse’s earning capacity and realistic employment prospects, the contribution each made to the family, and how long the marriage lasted.

A spouse with no income is generally entitled to maintenance, but the reason for having no income counts. If it followed a shared decision during the marriage — giving up work to raise children, or to follow the other spouse abroad, which is common among international couples — the claim is stronger. If it reflects inactivity, the amount can be reduced or limited in time.

The law makes no distinction by gender. In practice maintenance is claimed more often by wives, but a husband has exactly the same right on the same criteria.

CHILDREN

Child Maintenance Follows the Child

Child maintenance is governed by its own rule and its own logic. In setting it, the court considers the child’s current needs, the standard of living the child had while the parents lived together, the time the child spends with each parent, both parents’ income and assets, and the economic value of the day-to-day care and domestic work each parent takes on.

That last factor surprises people: caring for a child is treated as an economic contribution, not merely a practical arrangement.

It does not stop at 18. This is the rule that catches out almost every foreign parent, because most systems close child support at majority or at the end of studies. In Italy the obligation runs until the child is genuinely self-supporting — often well into their twenties — and after majority the payment is normally made to the child directly. The older the child, the more rigorously the courts expect self-sufficiency to be pursued.

There are no binding national tables. Some courts publish local guidelines — Genoa’s are the best known — and they are useful for an order of magnitude. But the amount is always built on the specific case: the child’s age, the split of time between parents, ordinary and extraordinary expenses, what happens to the family home, and both parents’ means. A figure quoted without your actual numbers is an order of magnitude, not an answer.

Extraordinary expenses — the ones that fall outside routine costs — are normally shared as a percentage rather than folded into the monthly figure, and the split follows the parents’ means: it is not automatically 50/50, which is the assumption most people arrive with. It is worth being precise about which expenses qualify when the agreement is drafted. Vagueness here is the most common source of arguments years later.

LIVING ABROAD

If One of You Is Outside Italy

Two questions come before the amount: whether an Italian court decides your case at all, and whether what it decides can be enforced where the paying spouse actually lives.

Italian jurisdiction over the divorce is broader than most people expect: habitual residence in Italy, an Italian spouse, or a marriage celebrated in Italy can each be enough. Our guide to divorce in Italy sets out those grounds in detail.

Maintenance does not simply follow the divorce. Which court decides it is a separate question, and the answer is not always the same: where the Italian court’s power over the divorce rests only on one spouse’s citizenship, the maintenance claim does not automatically travel with it. And which country’s law governs the maintenance itself is a third question again — it is not always Italian law, even when the divorce is Italian. Everything on this page describes Italian law; whether Italian law is the law of your case is the first thing to establish, and we verify it for free before anything starts.

On the second, cross-border recovery of maintenance is well established, but the route depends on where the payer lives and on the assets available there. It is a question to settle while the agreement is being drafted, not after the first missed payment: an agreement that is easy to enforce in the country that matters is worth more than a higher figure that is hard to collect.

Practical points worth settling in the agreement rather than later: which currency the payment is expressed in, which account it goes to, and how the obligation is worded so that an authority outside Italy can read it without ambiguity.