Assegno Divorzile: How Italian Courts Decide Post-Divorce Maintenance

Assegno divorzile is money one former spouse can be ordered to pay the other after a divorce is final, once the marriage bond itself no longer exists. It is a different right, governed by a different statute and a different legal test, from the assegno di mantenimento a spouse might receive earlier, during a separation.

Confusing the two is the single most common mistake in this area, and this page exists mainly to prevent it, then to explain what a court actually weighs once a divorce has happened. For the separation-era right, see our spousal and child maintenance page.

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

The legal basis: art. 5, L. 898/1970

Art. 5 of L. 898/1970, the 1970 statute that introduced divorce in Italy, gives the tribunale pronouncing a divorce the power to order one spouse to pay the other a periodic assegno, where that spouse lacks adequate means or cannot procure them for objective reasons. The article requires the court to weigh five things together: the condizioni dei coniugi (each spouse's circumstances), the reasons the marriage ended, the personal and economic contribution each spouse made to the family and to building either spouse's own assets or their shared assets, both spouses' income, and, running through all of it, the marriage's duration.

Reading only the opening phrase, inadequate means, and stopping there is the mistake this page is written against. The statute does not stop at a means test; it directs the court to weigh contribution and duration alongside means, which is exactly the balance the case law below made explicit.

From tenore di vita to a compensatory test: the 2018 turning point

For decades, Italian courts leaned heavily on preserving the tenore di vita, the standard of living the couple enjoyed during the marriage, as the practical measure of the assegno divorzile. A single section of the Corte di Cassazione broke from that approach in 2017, swinging toward a much stricter test asking whether the requesting spouse could achieve autosufficienza, economic self-sufficiency, on their own.

The Sezioni Unite, the Corte di Cassazione's full joint sections, resolved the resulting uncertainty in Cass. SS.UU. n. 18287/2018 (11 July 2018). The ruling settled the assegno divorzile's nature as assistenziale, compensativo and perequativo at the same time: assistenziale because it still addresses a spouse's inadequate means, but compensativo and perequativo because it also compensates that spouse's contribution to the family and to the other's career or wealth over the course of the marriage, and rebalances an imbalance the marriage itself helped create. The ruling explicitly moved past both the automatic tenore-di-vita approach and the stricter, means-only autosufficienza test that had briefly displaced it.

The full text of this ruling sits on a portal that blocks routine access, so this page describes the settled legal test by court, section and case number rather than quoting the decision's own language. The doctrine itself is not in dispute among practitioners; only the exact wording is currently unreachable outside the court's own systems.

What the assessment actually weighs

Putting the statute and the case law together, a court asks two connected questions rather than one. First, a threshold question: does the requesting spouse actually lack adequate means, or the realistic ability to acquire them, given their age, health, and the labor market? If the answer is no, the inquiry generally ends there and no assegno follows.

If the threshold is met, the court moves to the compensative and equalizing side of the test: what did the requesting spouse contribute to the family and to the other spouse's career, business or personal wealth over the marriage; did they sacrifice their own career or earning capacity for the family's benefit; how long did the marriage last; and what is each spouse's age at the point of the divorce, which affects how realistic it is for the requesting spouse to rebuild an independent income going forward.

Why this page will not compute a number

Unlike some countries, which publish an official maintenance table or formula that courts and lawyers can apply directly, Italy has none for the assegno divorzile. Every case is assessed on its own facts against the statutory factors above, and the outcome genuinely varies with each couple's income, contribution history and marriage length.

A page that tried to compute a figure from a salary and a number of years would be promising a precision the law itself does not offer, and would likely mislead more readers than it helped. What this page can responsibly do, and does below, is work through how the factors point in different directions across a few realistic situations, without inventing a euro amount for any of them.

Adjustment, lump sums, and when the obligation ends

The judgment ordering an assegno divorzile must also set a method for adjusting it automatically against monetary devaluation, typically tied to inflation indices, unless the tribunale finds doing so plainly inequitable and explains why in its decision. This keeps a periodic payment from losing real value over years of payments.

Spouses can also agree to settle the entire obligation with a single lump-sum payment (una tantum) instead of ongoing periodic payments, provided the tribunale finds the arrangement equitable. Once a lump-sum settlement is approved on that basis, neither spouse can bring a further economic claim connected to the divorce later.

The obligation to pay ends automatically if the receiving spouse remarries. It can also be modified or ended earlier if either spouse's circumstances change substantially, though that requires a fresh application to the tribunale rather than an automatic recalculation.

A less well known consequence follows the paying spouse's own death rather than the divorce itself. Art. 9 of L. 898/1970 gives a former spouse who still holds an assegno divorzile, and who has not remarried, a right to a share of the deceased former spouse's pensione di reversibilità (survivor's pension), provided the pension relationship predates the divorce judgment. Where a later, surviving spouse also has a claim to the same pension, the tribunale divides it between both, weighing how long each marriage lasted.

Three situations, and how the factors point

A twenty-five year marriage where one spouse left a career to raise children and manage the household. The compensativo strand of the test is squarely engaged: a long marriage, a career genuinely given up for the family's benefit, and likely a real income gap between the spouses by the time of the divorce. These are precisely the factors SS.UU. 18287/2018 directs a court to weigh in the requesting spouse's favor, though the actual figure remains entirely the tribunale's call on the couple's real finances.

A three-year marriage with no children, where both spouses are established, independent professionals. Neither side of the test points toward an award here. The marriage is short, neither spouse appears to lack adequate means or the ability to earn them, and there is no obvious contribution by one spouse to the other's career or wealth that a compensatory assegno would need to address. A court weighing these facts is unlikely to find grounds for an assegno divorzile at all.

A twelve-year marriage where one spouse worked unpaid in the other's growing business without a salary or ownership stake. Even if this spouse now has some income of their own, the compensativo and perequativo strands are directly implicated: real, uncompensated work that helped build wealth the other spouse alone now holds. A court is likely to treat this as exactly the kind of imbalance the 2018 ruling exists to address, whatever the eventual figure turns out to be once the tribunale weighs both spouses' full circumstances.