What Does Italian Dual Citizenship Really Cost? A Full, Itemized Breakdown

Search "Italian dual citizenship cost" and you'll get numbers from a few hundred dollars to well over ten thousand. That range isn't because anyone's lying. It's because they're quoting different things. One price is just government fees; another bundles in document procurement, translations, and years of professional work. Comparing them head-to-head is like comparing a plane ticket to a whole vacation.

So here's the honest version: every euro that goes into an Italian citizenship case, sorted into buckets, so you can read any quote and know what's actually in it.

Bucket 1: Government and official fees

These are mostly fixed and go to authorities, not to any service.

• Consular or processing fees for a descent application: around €600 per applicant, set by the authorities.
• For a 1948 court case: the court's filing contribution (contributo unificato) and related court costs, which are higher than an administrative application because it's litigation.
• Apostilles on your U.S. vital records: a per-document state fee, usually modest, but it adds up across a family.
• Certified translations into Italian, priced per document or page.

This bucket is unavoidable and roughly the same no matter who helps you. It's also the smallest part of most real cases.

Bucket 2: Getting the documents

This is where cases quietly get expensive, and where DIY attempts often stall.

• U.S. vital records (birth, marriage, death certificates) for everyone in your line. Each has its own ordering fee, and you usually need certified long-form copies.
• Your ancestor's naturalization records, or proof they never naturalized, which often means a search through U.S. immigration archives. Proving a negative is its own small project.
• Italian records from the comune (town) where your ancestor was born.
• Corrections when names or dates don't match across documents, which is extremely common with immigrant-era records. These can require amendment filings before anything else can proceed.

How much this costs depends entirely on how many people are in your line and how cooperative the records are. A clean two-person line is cheap. A five-applicant family with a misspelled surname and a missing record is not.

Bucket 3: Professional help

This is the part that varies most between providers, and it's worth understanding what you're paying for:

• Eligibility analysis, reading your line against the current law before anyone spends money on documents. This is the step that should catch a broken line early, not after you've paid for everything.
• Document procurement and assembly, the legwork of ordering, chasing, correcting, and organizing the file.
• For 1948 cases, representation by Italian-admitted lawyers who file and appear in court.

You'll see this sold three ways: hourly, à la carte per service, or as a single flat fee for the whole case. Hourly and à la carte can look cheap up front and balloon. A flat fee costs more on paper but removes the surprise.

So what's the real number?

For a straightforward consular descent case, the all-in cost (every bucket combined) is meaningfully lower than for a 1948 court case, which involves litigation and Italian counsel. Beyond that, an honest answer to "how much" requires knowing your specifics: how many applicants, how complex the line, and how much document repair is needed. Anyone who quotes you a precise total before seeing your family situation is quoting a marketing number, not your number.

How we price it

We work on a flat fee for your whole case, agreed up front before any work begins, so the buckets above are folded into one number you approve in advance. No hourly meter, and no "oh, that's extra" later. The third-party government and document costs in Buckets 1 and 2 are passed through honestly rather than marked up.

We'll quote you a clear price once we've seen your line. And if the case isn't viable, we'll tell you that instead of selling you a document search that leads nowhere. Tell us your family story and we'll come back with a straight number.

Information current as of February 2026. We update this guidance when the law changes.