The “lowest TV fee in Europe”. The director of Rai, Giampaolo Rossi, recalled this yesterday when he spoke about the funds available for investments and the debate on the advisability of maintaining the license fee for the public television service in Italy, which is being pushed in particular by the Lega. In the past, some polls have said it is “Italian’s most hated tax”.
But what is the European framework for paying this burden? Do all countries have it? Is Italy really the lowest?
If you pay 90 euros a year in Italy (in the electricity bill since 2017), the burden in Germany is 210 euros, in France 139 euros (89 for overseas departments), in Great Britain it is around 174 euros (with exceptions for over 75-year-olds and people with vision problems).
The European average is 125 euros.
Alongside Spain, the Netherlands and Cyprus, where the service is encouraged through general taxes rather than a fee, Italy is ahead of Greece in Europe, where you pay just 36 euros.
The highest bill is paid in Switzerland instead, with the equivalent of around 410 euros.
However, according to Mediobanca’s annual report on the media and entertainment sector, published in 2023, Italy is entitled to the lowest unit fee among major European countries, even below the European average: 0.25 euros per day per subscriber versus 0.32 euros on average . In Germany, public television costs the taxpayer €0.58 per day in Germany, €0.50 in the UK and €0.38 in France.
In Italy, the portion of the normal license fee collected by Rai represents about 86% of the amount paid by the user, for a total of 290 million euros, with percentages lower than in Germany (98%), Great Britain (96). %) and France (96%), while the European average is 89.5%.