Traffic fines with a company car in Italy: who pays and what the company must do

Three rules govern every fine incurred with a company vehicle in Italy, and it is worth having all three clear because they work on different levels.

1. The notice goes to the company, because the company is the registered owner of the vehicle.
2. The driver loses the points, because a company has no driving licence.
3. Between the two sits an obligation with a deadline: naming the driver within sixty days. Missing it costs a second penalty of €291 to €1,166.

The third one does the damage, and it is the one companies talk about least.

Who receives the notice, and why

When the offence is not contested on the spot — the normal case with speed cameras, restricted traffic zones (ZTL) and red-light cameras — the enforcing authority does not know who was driving. It only knows the plate. So it serves the notice on the registered owner: the company, or the rental company if the vehicle is on long-term rental.

Article 196 of the Italian Highway Code provides that the vehicle owner is jointly liable with the offender for paying the fine, “unless it proves that the vehicle was used against its will”. Jointly liable means the authority can claim the whole amount from the company, without first having to identify or pursue the employee.

The same rule applies, with the same consequences, to the usufructuary, the buyer under retention of title and the lessee under financial leasing — meaning leased vehicles make no difference to the obligation.

“Against its will” is a narrow door: it covers theft of the vehicle, not an employee using the company van for an unauthorised trip.

The obligation with a deadline

This is where article 126-bis, paragraph 2 comes in. If the offence carries a licence points deduction and was not contested on the spot, the vehicle owner — or its legal representative, if the owner is a legal entity — must give the police the driver’s personal and licence details within sixty days of the notice being served.

Two details people often get wrong:

• The sixty days run from service of the notice, not from the date of the offence. A good deal of time can pass between the two, and anyone counting from the day of the speed camera gives themselves a margin they do not have.
• The obligation applies to offences that carry a points deduction. A parking ticket does not trigger it; speeding does.

The deadline is, to all intents and purposes, an administrative deadline of the vehicle like the inspection or the car tax — except that it does not recur and cannot be planned: it starts when an envelope arrives. That is why even companies that manage everything else well handle it badly.

How to comply in practice, what you need and what to do when the driver cannot be identified is the subject of the guide on naming the driver.

What happens if the company does not reply

Failing to name the driver is not an aggravation of the original fine: it is a separate offence, with its own penalty of €291 to €1,166.

This independence has three practical consequences, all counter-intuitive:

• It adds up. The company pays the original fine and this one.
• It cannot be passed on to the employee. The offence was committed by the company, not the driver: it is the company that did not reply.
• Nobody loses points. Nothing is deducted from the owner who fails to reply — with no driver to penalise, the paradoxical result is that nobody loses points. That is precisely the loophole the law punishes with such a high amount.

The Italian Supreme Court’s approach on this point is strict in a way worth knowing: the owner has a duty of diligence to know, and keep a record of, who uses its vehicles. Saying you do not remember is not the “justified and documented reason” the law requires to avoid the penalty. For a company with ten vehicles and twenty people driving them, this translates into a precise organisational duty: always being able to say, after the fact, who had which plate on which day.

On the other side, recent case law has recognised as a justified reason having appealed the underlying notice and informed the authority: if the notice that creates the obligation is being challenged, the obligation cannot be considered breached while the case is pending. It is shifting ground, and worth checking with a lawyer in the specific case.

The vehicle assignment register

All of the above leads to one single operational consequence, and it is not software: it is a piece of data.

You need to be able to answer, for any past date, the question “who was driving this plate”. Not approximately and not from memory — with a date, a name and the licence details, in a form you can attach to an official communication.

With two vehicles permanently assigned to two people this is trivial. It becomes a problem when vehicles are shared, when there is a pool anyone can take, or when six months have passed between offence and notice and the person driving has since changed department.

The three things that make the answer possible:

1. A dated assignment for every vehicle, not just the current one. Knowing who has the van today does not help you answer about March.
2. Licence details collected in advance, because the communication requires them and looking for them sixty days after service is like never looking.
3. The notice treated as a deadline, with a recorded arrival date and an expiry — not as an envelope to get rid of.

The vehicle’s other, recurring deadlines are in the complete overview of a company vehicle’s obligations.

Note

Amounts and legal references on this page were checked on 31 August 2026 against articles 126-bis and 196 of the Italian Highway Code in the text published by ACI. Administrative fines are subject to periodic updates. References to case law describe settled approaches, not automatic rules: for a specific case — especially regarding the relationship between company and employee — this guide is not a substitute for legal or employment advice.

Frequently asked questions

Written and fact-checked by The Busy People. How we check our sources