Superbonus never ceases to amaze with its downside. New data shows how over 122 billion allocated to the infamous subsidy for home renovations has been used, after costs soared beyond all forecasts, devastating public finances and influencing much of the Meloni government’s economic policies. In this case, Pnrr 13.7 billion fund came into play. Part of the Recovery and Resilience Plan funded energy efficiency interventions, but almost half was used for renovations on 46,922 villas. The rest went to apartments, and with some record interventions, above all, a cost of over 38 million euros for one building in a town of 800 inhabitants. Today.it has processed the latest available data and we now have more details on how and in which locations the Superbonus is spent.
Pnrr provides funds for the renovation of houses and apartments with Superbonus
The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) provides an intervention line of the mission “Green Revolution and ecological transition”, dedicated to financing the Superbonus with 13.95 billion euros. The goal is to renovate over 100 thousand buildings to save energy produced and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Financing the energy retrofit of residential buildings, including social housing, encouraging deep restructurings and the conversion of the national property park to ‘near-zero energy buildings’,” we read on the government’s dedicated website for Pnrr.
In June 2024, the Ministry of Environment published the data: With 13.7 billion, almost the entire available fund, we renovated 46,922 villas and 13,833 apartments. Despite the aims announced on the government’s website, there is no trace of “social housing” in the data and approximately 200 million euros remain to be spent. These amounts are among the non-refundable grants provided by the European Commission, and therefore Italy will not have to repay them with interest.
38 million for a condominium: Top 3 of Superbonus record spending
Once the data has been extracted, it is possible to track the details of the renovations financed through the Single Project Code (Cup) of each intervention. According to Today.it, there are some remarkable records scattered throughout Italy. The most expensive intervention took place in Mezzana, in the autonomous province of Trento. In this town with a population of approximately 800, an apartment was renovated in 2020 for 38.8 million euros.
We read in the intervention paper that the apartment complex consisted of “mainly residences”, but that it was not possible to know other details due to the privacy law. However, the classification is stated as “Contributions to disasters”. The autonomous province’s website does not show any similar funding allocated to the municipality due to extreme weather events in the last four years. It is possible that the intervention refers to Seismabonus.
In second place in this particular ranking is an apartment in the province of Arezzo, renovated with Pnrr funds worth over 18 million euros. The characteristics of the intervention are the same as before. It comes in third place for an apartment in Turin that closed the podium with a 16.4 million euro renovation.
P6.5 billion for Super Bonus in Villas: spending podium
When it comes to detached houses, the record goes to a renovated house in Guidonia Montecelio in the province of Rome for 426,969 euros. The only other villa above 400,000 euros for intervention is located in Tarzo, in the province of Treviso. The bronze medal for interventions in villas went to Torre del Greco, Naples, with 389 thousand 429 euros.
Almost half of the available Pnrr funds went to villas: around 6.5 billion euros were needed to renovate 46,922 of them. The remaining 7.1 billion was shared among 13,833 apartments. Although some of these studies date back four years, no detailed data was available until now, but the recent Pnrr decree approved by the government allowed them to be published by the Ministry of Environment.
Superbonus refresh map with pnrr funds: where to spend the most
The fact that most of the renovation work is concentrated in northern Italy confirms the general trend already seen in Superbonus, which represents 60 percent of all interventions. Lombardy alone accounts for over 21 percent, with spending of 2.9 billion euros.
In the centre, the regions that benefited most from the renovations were Tuscany for villas (420.2 million euros) and Lazio for apartments (443 million euros). On the other hand, just over 26% of resources went to the South; this was a few percentage points less than the typical 40% provision of Pnrr funds, with record spending going to Sicily, where it exceeded €3 billion.
Italians’ taxes could be cut for 10 years with Superbonus money
Taking these EU funds into account, Superbonus cost state coffers 122.7 billion euros for the renovation of just 4 percent of residential buildings examined in Italy, according to the latest data from Enea.
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Source: Today IT
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
