There is an image of over-indebtedness that resists with surprising tenacity, and it is that of the consumer who loses control because he has lived beyond his means, accumulating holidays that he could not afford, useless purchases, credit cards used too lightly and loans taken out to pursue a lifestyle incompatible with his income. It is a simple representation, reassuring even, because it transforms debt into an almost moral consequence of individual choices and allows us to draw a very clear line between those who would have been prudent and those who, instead, would have simply exaggerated. The problem is that, at least by looking at the files of those who actually end up in a situation of serious over-indebtedness, that photograph seems to tell only a small part of the story.
In the “Consumer” sample analyzed by the Legge3.it Study Center in its Special Press Office Report – Consumer Debt and Flash Financingdrawn up in July 2026, 88.7% of the files present unpaid utilities or other arrears among the causes that contributed to the formation of the debt. It is not the trip, the expensive bag or the latest smartphone that dominates the trajectory that leads a family towards insolvency, but something much less spectacular and much more difficult to eliminate from the household budget: electricity, gas, rent and expenses necessary for daily life.
The distinction is important because it changes the very meaning of instruments such as personal loans, salary-secured loans, revolving cards and instant financing. Products created to anticipate consumption or defer a purchase end up, in the most fragile cases, becoming an improper form of family welfare, a small private financial shock absorber used when the income of the month is no longer enough to reach the next one. You don’t borrow money to buy something extra, but to avoid losing something essential.
When credit becomes a way to get to the end of the month
The phenomenon emerges particularly clearly when looking at the structure of the debts analyzed by Legge3.it. The overall average exposure of the consumer debtor considered by the report reaches i 243,381 eurosa figure in which very different liabilities naturally flow together, from fiscal to banking and financial ones, while consumer credit would represent approximately one fifth of the passive mass.
However, the overall figure alone risks being misleading, because over-indebtedness rarely arises from a single catastrophic choice. More often it proceeds by stratification: an already existing installment meets a bill that cannot be postponed, the current account is not enough, a new loan arrives, then a second exposure, while interest and maturities slowly begin to consume that portion of income that should have been used for ordinary expenses.
In the files examined, the salary transfer or payment delegation appears in 38.7% of caseswhile the revolving cards are present in 11.7%. In consumer credit alone, personal loans constitute by far the main component, with 84.9%, followed by salary-backed loans with 14.5%; revolving and formulas similar to flash financing weigh much less in terms of overall amounts, but their meaning becomes interesting when you observe how they are used.
The revolving card is perhaps the most immediate example of this. If its weight is calculated on the entire consumer sample, the average amount appears almost irrelevant, around 187 euros; however, considering only the files in which this type of paper is actually present, the average exposure rises according to Legge3.it a approximately 2,480 euros. This is where the small monthly payment shows its ambiguity: it seems sustainable when observed alone, but can become problematic when added to a personal loan, a salary loan, a tax arrear and family expenses that continue to arise every month.
The more general context also shows how consumer credit is now a structural component of the economic life of families. Data from the European Central Bank indicated at the end of 2025 beyond 131 billion euros in consumer credit to Italian families held by monetary financial institutions, while the Bank of Italy detected in the first half of the same year an increase in the demand for financing from families in all macro-areas of the country, both for the purchase of homes and for consumption purposes; at the same time, precisely for consumer credit, the supply conditions had become more restrictive, especially in the South.
The geography of unpaid bills
Even the territorial distribution of Legge3.it files reflects a phenomenon much more linked to daily economic fragility than to excess consumption. Among the eight regions with the highest number of practices analyzed, in Lazio, Puglia and Campania 100% of the mapped cases have utilities or arrearsa percentage that reaches 93.3% in Tuscany, 90.6% in Lombardy, 90% in Piedmont and 87.5% in Emilia-Romagna. Veneto ranks lower, at 60%.
These are percentages that should be read with caution, because it is a proprietary sample made up of people who turned to a company specialized in the management of over-indebtedness, and not a statistically representative survey of the Italian population. The regional numbers are also very different: 64 files in Lombardy, 40 in Veneto, 33 in Lazio, 30 in Piedmont, up to 10 in Campania. They therefore do not authorize us to say that nine out of ten Italian families are unable to pay their bills, but they show very clearly something different and equally significant: among those who have already asked for help for a serious debt situation, arrears on essential expenses are a much more frequent constant than luxury expenses.
And this is perhaps precisely the most interesting part of the phenomenon, because it forces us to separate the problem of over-indebtedness from the very different one of compulsive buying. A person can get into debt because he consumes too much, of course, and cases of this type exist; but he can also get into debt because his income has stopped being sufficient to cover all obligatory expenses at the same time, and every new loan purchased to earn a few months’ respite ends up subtracting a further portion from future income.
The picture becomes even more understandable if it is placed alongside the indicators on the economic conditions of families. According to the latest Istat update, published in April 2026, in 2025 the 22.6% of the Italian populationapproximately 13.3 million people, were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. The figure has improved compared to the 23.1% recorded in 2024, but remains high enough to show how large the segment of the population is in which even a relatively modest change in income or expenses can alter family balance.
The improvement of the average indicators, in fact, does not mean that vulnerability has disappeared. Istat also notes that in 2024, 5.1% of the population was in a situation of serious housing cost overload, a particularly useful indicator when trying to understand why rents and utilities can become the first link in a debt chain.
It is within this unstable equilibrium range that a loan can change its nature. The loan initially contracted to purchase a car or a household appliance coexists with an increase in rent, a separation, a temporary loss of job, a decrease in family income or simply with a series of unexpected expenses; when the margin goes to zero, the possibility of getting money quickly becomes a way to move the problem over time.
Gianmario Bertollo, founder of Legge3.itsummarizes the result of the analysis in this passage: in the files observed, the flash loan or the revolving card often stop being tools linked to the purchase to become the means by which a family tries to stay afloat, while singularly modest instalments, once accumulated, contribute to making the debt increasingly difficult to manage.
The paradox of the small installment
It is also the reason why the apparently reassuring dimension of new payment instruments can become deceptive. An installment of a few tens of euros seems to have a minimal impact on the monthly budget and, taken in isolation, it probably does; the problem arises when that promise of lightness is replicated several times and overlaps with obligations that cannot be eliminated.
The real risk, therefore, is not necessarily the large loan taken out at a single moment, but the progressive occupation of future income. Fifty euros here, one hundred euros there, a deduction from your pension or salary, the balance of a revolving loan that drags on, a personal loan already open: each operation has its own logic and its own apparent sustainability, until the sum of the installments no longer leaves enough space for what cannot be financed indefinitely.
It is the point at which credit, from being a tool that allows you to anticipate a future possibility, risks turning into the opposite, because a growing portion of the following months’ salary has already been promised to pay the previous ones.
Over-indebtedness is not a fault to be described with stereotypes
In Italy there are specific procedures to deal with over-indebtedness crises of individuals who cannot access traditional insolvency procedures, through crisis settlement bodies and the tools currently regulated by the Corporate Crisis and Insolvency Code. The Ministry of Justice maintains the register of bodies responsible for managing these paths, created precisely to respond to situations in which a person is no longer realistically able to meet their obligations.
Even before the legal problem, however, there is a cultural one. Continuing to imagine the over-indebted mainly as someone who has not been able to control himself means reading with old categories a much more complex form of vulnerability, in which consumption remains present but can only be the last visible level of a domestic budget that had already stopped functioning.
The data from Legge3.it alone cannot tell the indebtedness of all Italian families and it would be wrong to use them in this way, but they tell well the story of the people who have already reached a breaking point: when almost nine out of ten files contain bills, rent or other arrears, the problem is no longer understanding what those people bought, but rather why they needed to go into debt to continue paying for what they couldn’t stop buying.
And this is probably the most disturbing picture of the new economic fragility: not a society that asks for loans to indulge in too much, but a part of families that uses instruments designed to finance consumption in an attempt to finance normality.
