How do you know the monotributo has stopped working for you? The question always arrives late, usually when an accountant tells you that you should have changed months ago, and it almost never arrives as a notice.

It is worth understanding the mechanism before the number, because the mechanism does not change and the number does. And that is exactly why this article will not give you the figure.

How the regime is built

The monotributo has eleven categories, from A to K, each with its own ceilings. A creator enters one and moves up as they invoice more.

The parameters defining the category are not only income. Floor area used for the activity, electricity consumed and accrued rents also count, which in practice means a creator working from home is defined almost entirely by one parameter: what they invoiced over the last twelve months.

That simplification is convenient and hides a trap. Because you only watch one number, it is easy to forget the others exist, and the day you rent a studio or a storage unit the rest start counting again.

Three signs the change is coming

You do not need a spreadsheet to notice. Three signs appear before the problem does.

You move up a category at every recategorisation

Two consecutive jumps in the same direction are not a streak, they are a trend. And because recategorisation looks at the previous twelve months, by the time you notice you have already been at that level for a while.

It is worth looking at with some perspective: the good month does not matter, what matters is whether the line rises. A creator alternating strong and weak months whose annual average grows is heading for the change even if no single month says so.

Your clients start asking for an A invoice

They cannot ask you for what your category does not issue, and that friction is data: it means you are working in a segment where the simplified regime is no longer the norm.

It is also the cheapest sign to read, because it arrives on its own and in writing, in an email from a purchasing department explaining why they cannot process your document.

Your VAT bearing expenses stop being incidental

Equipment, studio rental, professional services, subcontracting. When that happens, the general regime stops being only a cost and starts having something on the other side.

It is the only one of the three signs that can bring the decision forward rather than merely announce it: if you buy a lot with VAT, the arithmetic can favour the change before you are obliged to make it.

What changes the day you move to the general regime

It is worth knowing what is gained and what is lost, because it is not only "paying more".

Simplicity is lost. You move from a fixed monthly fee to periodic filings, VAT on one side and income tax on the other, and that means having an accountant permanently rather than occasionally.

What is gained is the ability to credit the VAT on your purchases and to deduct real expenses against income tax. For somebody investing in equipment, hiring editing or renting spaces, that counterpart can offset a good share of the difference.

And your relationship with corporate clients changes: you start issuing the document their administrative circuits expect, which in practice opens budgets you could not reach before.

There is also a change of method nobody anticipates and which is worth preparing. Under the general regime, the price you quote and the price the client pays stop being the same number, because VAT is shown separately. Quoting as before, without saying whether the amount includes it, is the fastest way to lose the difference in the first negotiation.

The reasonable objection is that all of this sounds like complicating something that was working. That is true, and it is equally true that the simplified regime is designed for a particular scale: staying in it out of convenience once you are past that scale is not saving, it is accumulating a regularisation.

Why this article does not give you the figure

Because any number we wrote today would be false before long, and an out of date figure in an article is worse than none: it is read with the same confidence and used to decide.

The regime's values are updated, the official page states from when the current ones apply and keeps a history of previous ones. That date of application is the important fact, and it is the one to look at.

The right way to use this guide is therefore as follows: here is the mechanism and the signs, and the number is on ARCA's categories page, which is the only source that updates itself. Looking at both takes five minutes and does not age.

Sources

Checked on 12 September 2026. This guide is not tax advice. The regime's amounts and categories are updated: always check the figures in force at the official source before deciding.