How much money to start a startup: real costs for 2026

Ask how much money to start a startup and most people expect a single number. That number doesn’t exist. A couple of friends building an app in Milan can start with a few thousand euros. A team developing a medical device needs many times that before it sells its first unit.

What you can have is a method. Below you’ll find the formula investors use and what an SRL or an SRLS really costs to open in Italy in 2026. Then we turn those figures into a 12-month budget you could defend in front of anyone, your parents included.

How much money do you need to start a startup? The formula

Investors, accountants and grant agencies all work with the same three ingredients. The first is your burn rate: the cash that leaves the company each month, minus whatever comes in. Second, a milestone. That’s the proof you need before the next step becomes possible, for example 20 paying customers or a pilot signed with a hospital. The third is time.

Put the three together and the sum is: money needed = monthly burn × (months to the milestone + buffer months) + one-off costs. Flip it around and you get your runway, the number of months the company can survive on the cash in the bank.

Why a buffer? Because almost everything takes longer than planned. The app ships late. A customer needs three meetings instead of one. A fundraise alone can absorb months of a founder’s time. The costs don’t pause for it. Three months is the floor for a first budget. Six is safer if your milestone depends on someone else’s calendar, say a public tender or a big company’s procurement office.

How much does it cost to open a company in Italy?

You don’t need a company to test an idea. Incorporate when you have a concrete reason to: a first sale, a contract to sign, money from someone else. In Italy the choice is usually between two kinds of limited company: the SRL and its simplified version, the SRLS (our glossary explains SRL and SRLS in two lines).

The SRLS was designed to be cheap. Only individuals can set one up, the share capital must be between €1 and €9,999.99, paid in full and in cash, and the deed follows a standard model drawn up by the Ministry of Justice. In return, no notary fee is due, and the deed and its registration are exempt from stamp duty and filing fees. The catch is that the clauses of that model can’t be changed, so you can’t add the custom terms investors often ask for.

An ordinary SRL lets you write your own articles. The capital can still be as low as €1, as long as it’s paid in full and in cash; while it stays under €10,000, the law makes you put at least a fifth of each year’s profit into a reserve until the total reaches that figure. Here’s what each form costs in fixed fees in year one, before you pay anyone for advice.

Item	SRLS	SRL	Note
Notary fee	Not due	€1,500 to €3,000 + VAT	Varies with the articles and the notary
Registration tax	€200	€200	Fixed amount
Stamp duty on the deed	Exempt	€156	Paid through the notary
Registro Imprese filing fee	Exempt	€90	Chamber of commerce
Notary archive tax	Ask the notary	€27.50	Small fixed fee
Chamber of commerce annual fee	€120	€120	Year one
Books tax (tassa libri sociali)	€309.87	€309.87	Due every year
Fixed total, year one	€629.87	€903.37 + notary	Share capital excluded

Share capital isn’t a cost, by the way. It’s money you put into the company’s account, and the company can then spend it on the business.

There’s a discount for some. A company registered as an innovative startup doesn’t pay the annual chamber fee, and its Registro Imprese filings, yearly accounts included, are free of stamp duty and filing fees. Our guide on what the innovative startup status gives you explains who qualifies and for how long. If you’re starting with almost nothing, read our guide to starting a startup with no money first: it shows what you can do before you incorporate at all.

The yearly costs nobody mentions

Incorporation happens once. What follows every month is what really sets your burn.

• The accountant. For a small SRL this is usually the largest fixed cost. Fiscozen’s 2026 guide puts online services at €200 to €400 a month and traditional firms at €3,000 to €6,000 a year or more, depending on how many invoices, VAT filings and payslips there are.
• Chamber fee and books tax. €120 and €309.87 in year one, owed even if you haven’t sent a single invoice.
• Certified email (PEC), domain, bank account. Small amounts each, but twelve months of small amounts is real money.
• Software. Start on free tiers. Pay only once a tool saves you real hours.

Then there’s the line first-time founders in Italy tend to miss. If you both work in the company day to day, your accountant may tell you that INPS requires you to register as working partners, usually in the gestione commercianti. The 2026 minimum there is €4,611.64 a year per person (INPS circular 14/2026), and it’s owed even if the company earns nothing or makes a loss. If one of you keeps a full-time job, the answer may be different. Ask before you sit down at the notary’s desk, not after.

A worked example: two founders, twelve months

Let’s make it concrete with an invented case. Say Giulia and Marco, both 24, are building an app that helps padel clubs in Lombardy fill their empty courts. They’ve chosen an SRLS, they pay themselves nothing for now, and their milestone is 20 clubs paying a monthly subscription. After their first visits to clubs, they think that will take twelve months.

Monthly cost (example)	Per month	12 months
Accountant, online service	€250	€3,000
Software and cloud (email, design tool, hosting)	€120	€1,440
PEC, domain and website	€15	€180
Business bank account	€15	€180
Chamber fee and books tax, spread over the year	about €36	€429.87
Marketing and sales tests	€600	€7,200
Coworking desk and trips to clubs	€250	€3,000
Total burn	about €1,286	€15,429.87

Now the runway sum, one step at a time.

1. Monthly burn: about €1,286, with zero revenue assumed. If clubs start paying earlier, great, but don’t build the plan on it.
2. Months to the milestone: twelve.
3. Buffer: three months, which takes the plan to 15 months.
4. €1,286 × 15 = €19,290.
5. One-off costs: €200 of registration tax, about €600 for a lawyer to check their terms of service and privacy policy, and €100 for a digital signature device and other small setup costs. That’s €900, for a total of €20,190.
6. If INPS registration applies to both founders, add about €769 a month (2 × €4,611.64 ÷ 12). Burn becomes about €2,055, and 15 months plus one-off costs come to about €31,700.

Picking an SRL instead would add roughly €2,700 up front: stamp duty, filing fee, archive tax and a notary fee of, say, €2,000 plus VAT. So the honest answer for Giulia and Marco is somewhere between €20,000 and €34,400. That’s a range they can actually plan around, with savings, part-time jobs for the first months or a small round from people who know them.

From your first budget to a pre-seed round

Reach the milestone and the question changes. Now you want to hire, and the same formula sizes your pre-seed round: the new monthly burn, salaries included, times the months to the next milestone, plus a buffer. Employer contributions come on top of gross pay in Italy, so build that budget in a proper 36-month financial model rather than on the back of an envelope.

The horizon gets longer, too. In Carta’s US data, the median time between a seed round and a Series A was 1.9 years in the last quarter of 2025, so a round that only lasts twelve months leaves very little margin. In Italy, early rounds are many and small: in the first half of 2026, pre-seed and seed deals made up 59% of all venture rounds but only €172 million of the €813 million invested, according to Growth Capital and Italian Tech Alliance.

Our guide to startup funding stages shows who invests at each step and what they expect to see. When a real round gets closer, continue with the guide to raising capital in Italy.

And don’t forget the person behind the company. The budget above pays nobody, yet your rent still arrives on the first of the month. Work out your personal runway too. Divide your savings by what you need each month to live. A short number is a reason to read when to quit your job for a startup before you resign.

Your budget checklist

• Write the milestone that makes the next step possible, and a date beside it.
• Add up your monthly costs, plus each yearly fee divided by 12.
• Before incorporating, ask an accountant two questions: SRL or SRLS, and does INPS apply to us?
• Multiply the burn by months to the milestone plus at least three months of buffer. Add one-off costs.
• Calculate your personal runway separately.
• Every month, replace estimates with real numbers and recompute how many months you have left.

Still a student? Read how to start a startup at university first: campus incubators and competitions can take a few lines off this budget. The next step on the beginner’s map from zero to your first round is turning these numbers into a plan, so here’s how to write a business plan that banks and grant agencies will actually read.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Fees and rules change: check with a notary or an accountant before you incorporate.