Sovraindebitamento: Italy's Court Procedure for Over-Indebted Consumers and Small Debtors

Sovraindebitamento is Italy's legal term for over-indebtedness. It names three distinct court procedures under the Codice della crisi d'impresa e dell'insolvenza (D.Lgs. 14/2019) that restructure, liquidate, or, in narrow cases, discharge a consumer's or small debtor's debts, run through a court-appointed OCC.

This page is written for English-speaking residents of Italy, cross-border workers, and anyone managing debt tied to an Italian household or small business who has run into the term «sovraindebitamento» in a court notice, a bank letter, or a search for how Italian debt relief actually works. It explains what each procedure does, who can use it, and, just as importantly, what none of them does. For more on Italian consumer protections, see our Italy consumer rights section; for the wider map of Italian legal topics this site covers, see the Italy legal guides hub.

Sovraindebitamento often becomes relevant only after a creditor has already started ordinary debt collection, or is already seizing wages directly. See our companion pages on debt collection and the decreto ingiuntivo process and wage garnishment in Italy for how those processes work on their own, outside the sovraindebitamento system.

Information verified on 21 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice for an individual situation.

What sovraindebitamento means, and who can use it

Art. 2, comma 1, lettera c) of the Codice della crisi defines sovraindebitamento as the state of crisis or insolvency of a consumer, a professional, a small entrepreneur (impresa minore), an agricultural entrepreneur, an innovative start-up, or any other debtor who cannot be subjected to liquidazione giudiziale or another liquidation procedure under the civil code or special laws. In plain terms, it is the regime for debtors too small, or too personal, for ordinary corporate bankruptcy.

Whether a debtor counts as a «consumatore» matters throughout, because it decides which of the three procedures is even available. Art. 2, comma 1, lettera e) defines a consumer as a natural person acting for purposes unrelated to any business, trade, craft, or professional activity they may also carry on, including a partner in certain company types, provided the debts at issue were taken on in that consumer capacity.

Members of the same family who cohabit, or whose over-indebtedness shares a common origin, can file a single joint request for one of these procedures rather than separate cases (art. 66), which matters for a household carrying debt across more than one earner.

The three procedures compared

The three are not ranked from mildest to harshest. They answer different questions: can the debtor propose a plan without creditor consent (ristrutturazione), does the debtor need creditors to agree (concordato minore), or is there nothing left to negotiate over (liquidazione controllata).

Ristrutturazione dei debiti del consumatore: the consumer's path

A sovraindebitato consumer, assisted by an OCC, can propose a piano di ristrutturazione dei debiti to creditors, specifying how and when the over-indebtedness will be resolved. The plan's content is largely free: it can provide for partial and differentiated satisfaction of different creditors in almost any form, including restructuring debts secured by a cessione del quinto of salary, TFR, or pension (art. 67, commi 1 and 3). Readers who also want the mechanics of the TFR figure this kind of plan can touch should see severance pay (TFR) in Italy.

The application must be accompanied by a full list of creditors and what is owed to each, an inventory of assets, a record of any act of extraordinary administration in the last five years, the debtor's last three tax returns, and a statement of all income in the household (art. 67, comma 2).

The distinctive feature of this route, compared with concordato minore, is that creditors do not vote on it. Once the judge opens the procedure, creditors have twenty days to file observations, and the judge then homologates the plan if it is admissible and feasible. If a creditor objects on the ground that the plan is not convenient, the judge can still approve it as long as that creditor's claim would be paid at least as well as it would in a liquidazione controllata (art. 70, comma 7). The judge can also order a stay of enforcement actions against the consumer's assets while the case is pending (art. 70, comma 4).

Access is not automatic. Art. 69 bars a consumer who was already discharged in the five years before the application, who has already benefited from a discharge twice before, or who caused the over-indebtedness through colpa grave, malafede, or frode. A creditor who is itself found to have contributed to the debtor's over-indebtedness through irresponsible lending cannot object to the plan's convenience.

A worked scenario. Consider a household with 42.000 euro of consumer debt across three lenders, one secured by a cessione del quinto of the household's TFR. The OCC helps prepare a plan repaying 35 percent of the unsecured balance over five years from disposable income, while restructuring the cessione del quinto's terms within the limits art. 67 allows. If one lender objects that it would recover more by forcing liquidation, the judge tests that claim directly: if liquidazione controllata would in fact leave that lender better off, the plan cannot be approved unchanged; if it would not, the judge can approve it despite the objection.

Concordato minore: the path for everyone else

Concordato minore is the equivalent procedure for a sovraindebitato debtor who is not a consumer: a small entrepreneur, a professional, an agricultural entrepreneur, or an innovative start-up. Art. 74 allows it where continuing the business or professional activity is possible, or, failing that, only where the proposal brings in outside resources that meaningfully increase the assets available to creditors.

Unlike consumer restructuring, concordato minore needs creditor buy-in. Art. 79 requires approval by creditors representing a majority, by value, of the claims admitted to vote, with additional rules where one creditor alone holds a majority, or where creditors are divided into classes. Creditors fully secured by privilegio, pegno, or ipoteca do not vote unless they waive part of their priority, and close relatives of the debtor and conflicted creditors are excluded from the count.

The procedural mechanics mirror consumer restructuring closely: the judge opens the case, the OCC communicates the proposal to creditors, and the judge can suspend enforcement actions that would undermine the plan while it is pending (art. 78).

Liquidazione controllata: liquidating what can be sold

Liquidazione controllata is the sovraindebitamento equivalent of an asset liquidation, available to any sovraindebitato debtor, consumer or not, on their own petition (art. 268, comma 1). A creditor can also ask the court to open it against an insolvent debtor, even while an individual enforcement action is pending, but two protections limit that route where the debtor is a natural person: the petition fails outright if overdue unpaid debts total less than 50.000 euro, and, separately, it fails if the OCC certifies that no assets exist, or could realistically be recovered through legal action, to distribute to creditors (art. 268, commi 2 and 3).

Not everything the debtor owns goes into the liquidation. Excluded are assets that cannot be seized under art. 545 of the code of civil procedure, maintenance and alimony payments and the portion of salary, pension, or earnings the judge sets aside for the debtor's and their family's support, the fruits of a legal usufruct over a child's property, and assets held in a fondo patrimoniale together with their fruits, subject to art. 170 of the civil code (art. 268, comma 4).

Liquidazione controllata leads to its own discharge, governed separately by artt. 278 to 282, not by the incapiente rule described below. That ordinary esdebitazione takes effect either when the procedure closes or, if earlier, once three years have passed since it opened, provided the debtor was not convicted of specified offences, did not conceal assets or obstruct the proceeding, and has not been discharged twice before or within the last five years (artt. 280 and 282).

Esdebitazione del debitore incapiente: the one-time fresh start

Art. 283 creates a narrower, separate route for a natural person debtor described as incapiente: someone found meritevole (deserving) who is not in a position to offer creditors any utility at all, direct or indirect, even looking forward. This debtor can access esdebitazione only once in their lifetime, without first going through a full liquidazione controllata or restructuring plan.

The law gives this an income test rather than leaving it to discretion. A debtor meets the incapiente threshold when their annual income, after deducting the cost of earning it and what is needed to support themselves and their household, does not exceed the assegno sociale increased by half, multiplied by the ISEE equivalence-scale factor for the size of their household (art. 283, comma 2). The assegno sociale itself is revalued by INPS every year, so the euro figure this produces changes annually; confirm the current amount on INPS's own assegno sociale page before relying on it for a specific household.

The application goes through the OCC to the competent judge, with a list of every creditor and, where available, their certified email addresses, a record of any act of extraordinary administration in the last five years, three years of tax returns, and a full statement of income for the debtor's household (art. 283, comma 3). The OCC must also report on why the debtor became over-indebted, how diligent they were in taking on the obligations, and whether any lender extended credit without properly assessing the debtor's ability to repay (art. 283, commi 4 and 5). The OCC's own fee for this track is halved by statute (art. 283, comma 6).

The judge grants the discharge by decree only after weighing the debtor's meritevolezza and confirming there are no acts in fraud of creditors and no dolo or colpa grave behind the over-indebtedness (art. 283, comma 7). Debtors and creditors alike can challenge that decree by reclamo under art. 124 within thirty days; a 2024 corrective decree, D.Lgs. 136/2024, streamlined this appeal route into the Codice's general reclamo mechanism rather than the earlier, separately worded provision.

The discharge is not unconditional for three years. If, within three years of the judge's decree, the debtor comes into further utility beyond what art. 283, comma 2 accounts for, and that would allow creditors to actually be paid, the debt on the old obligations becomes exigible again within the limits of that new utility. Financing of any kind received by the debtor does not count as this kind of utility. The OCC monitors this window and, on the debtor's own annual declaration or its own checks, reports any qualifying new resources to the judge, after which creditors can pursue enforcement against those specific new assets (art. 283, commi 1 and 9).

A worked timeline. A debtor receives an esdebitazione del debitore incapiente decree in March 2025 after showing no income above the art. 283 threshold and nothing to offer creditors. In late 2026, an inheritance gives that debtor assets well above the household's support needs. Because this falls inside the three-year window running to March 2028, the OCC must report it, and creditors can pursue the inherited assets specifically. Had the same inheritance arrived in 2029, after the three-year window closed, the old debts would remain permanently discharged.

What sovraindebitamento is not

Every one of these three procedures runs through a court and an OCC, and every one ends in a decree or a judgment, not a private settlement negotiated by a debt-relief company. None of them lets a debtor simply declare their debts cancelled, and none guarantees a specific percentage written off or a specific timeline. A search for «cancellare i debiti» often leads to marketing that implies otherwise; the accurate description is a court procedure with eligibility conditions, documentation requirements, and a judge who decides the outcome, not a product a debtor purchases.

The meritevolezza and no-fraud conditions running through consumer restructuring and both discharge routes exist precisely so that sovraindebitamento functions as relief for genuine financial distress, not as a route around debts a debtor could have paid. A judge who finds grave fault, bad faith, or fraud in how the over-indebtedness arose can and does refuse consumer restructuring or a discharge. Liquidazione controllata's own liquidation stage is not conditioned on that finding; it stays open to a debtor who requests it, even though the discharge that follows it depends on the same good-faith conditions (artt. 69, 280 and 282).

Costs

The OCC's fees are set case by case and are paid from the debtor's own resources, at half the ordinary rate on the incapiente track (art. 283, comma 6). An OCC's involvement is mandatory at every stage, from preparing the application through to the post-discharge monitoring on the incapiente track, so a debtor considering any of these routes should expect to work with that body throughout, not only at the filing stage.