Italian universities handle diverse sets of payments every day. Public universities handle tuition fees through pagoPA, Italy's national digital platform for payments to the public administration and public service providers. Other payments – such as those for master's programmes, training courses, language certifications, and certain university services – involve different payment methods and workflows.

For those who manage universities or develop GovTech platforms (i.e., technological solutions for the public sector, such as payment platforms for universities in Italy), the challenge lies in creating a smooth digital experience that accommodates the various payment methods required for tuition, master's programmes, and other services.

Digitising a university's payments can simplify administrative tasks and create a smoother, more responsive experience for students. This includes single payments and instalment payments. In this article, we cover the main topics around university payments in Italy, including their organisation within the Italian system and the role of pagoPA. We also explain how to manage online payments for master's programmes and other services and which solutions are effective for platforms that serve multiple universities.

Key takeaways

• Italian universities manage different types of payments that do not all follow the same process. Tuition at public universities is typically paid through pagoPA, but master's programmes, courses, and other services can use different payment methods.
  
• Digitising payments for master's programmes, courses, certifications, and other services can simplify the university's revenue collection and enhance the student experience at the same time. This allows students to complete payments faster and more efficiently.
  
• When fees for university tuition or programmes are divided into multiple instalments, there are also more deadlines to track and manage. Automatically recording payments and flagging outstanding balances helps the university manage the payment schedule and allows students to know when and how much they owe.
  
• GovTech platforms serving multiple universities need to handle payments for each institution while keeping separate accounts and financial flows. A centralised infrastructure can simplify this process and facilitate the integration of new institutions into the same platform.
  

Using pagoPA at universities: Coverage and freedom of choice

Italy's national system that citizens and businesses can use to make electronic payments to public administrations and other participating organisations is called pagoPA. The guidelines issued by the Agency for Digital Italy outline the rules and standards for using the system, covering everything from payment processing to reconciling funds received.

For public universities, pagoPA is used to collect tuition and university contributions students owe. Students can pay tuition through the channels the university makes available and by the payment service providers participating in the system. The university receives the information necessary to reconcile the payment with the student's account status.

However, universities also offer master's programmes, training courses, certifications, accommodation, and other services. It is necessary to determine if these payments must go through pagoPA or if the university can adopt a different payment system. Determining up front which payment methods apply to each revenue stream lets the university properly design the corresponding collection process.

Discretionary payments: Master's programmes, training courses, certifications, and other services

Tuition fees represent only one part of the revenue that universities manage. Over the course of a year, a university can receive payments for a wide range of activities, each with its own enrolment process, amounts, and deadlines.

Payment streams that can require dedicated handling can include the following:

• Master's and postgraduate programme enrolments
  
• Professional training and refresher courses
  
• Language courses and certifications
  
• Accommodation and other fee-based university services
  

For these services, pagoPA is not required. Instead, the university is free to choose a payment method that best fits its needs. For example, with master's programmes and other programmes, the university can require full payment up front or allow students to split the fees into multiple instalments.

For enrolment fees, universities can integrate Stripe Payments directly into their websites or portals and accept cards, digital wallets, and other payment methods. Stripe also supports payments in more than 135 currencies and offers integrated tools for fraud prevention.

However, if the fees are split into multiple payments, there are different sets of requirements, which we cover in the section on instalment payments below.

How outdated payment systems can slow enrolment and increase administrative tasks

When a university handles payment separately from online enrolment, a fairly straightforward process can require multiple steps. For instance, to enrol in a master's programme or a course, the student might have to complete the application, wait for payment instructions, make the payment separately, and then forward confirmation of payment. The longer and more cumbersome the process, the greater the risk that the student will abandon it before reaching the end.

Naturally, this represents a drawback for the university as well. When the university handles enrolments and payments separately, administrative staff do a lot of manual work. This includes verifying incoming payments, matching them to the right applications, and tracking down missing or misidentified transactions. With hundreds or thousands of enrolments, these tasks can become time-consuming.

Instead, it is possible to eliminate many of these steps by integrating payment directly into the enrolment pathway. Once the transaction is complete, the payment is automatically matched to the application, and the enrolment status is updated, with no manual follow-up required.

How to digitise instalment payment plans for tuition fees

Splitting tuition fees into instalments allows the total amount due to be spread across multiple due dates. From an administrative standpoint, each instalment represents a payment that has to be processed and verified. When these checks are not automated, the workload increases, especially in universities with a large number of students.

Therefore, a digital system for instalment payments must handle the entire payment schedule, not just individual transactions. Depending on the university's procedures, the instalment payment system could also do the following:

• Define the amounts and deadlines of the various instalments.
  
• Automatically record incoming payments, and match them with the correct students.
  
• Show which amounts have already been paid and which are still outstanding.
  
• Handle failed payments and subsequent collection attempts.
  
• Send due date notifications without requiring manual intervention from administrative staff.
  

Stripe Billing can simplify the management of recurring payments through automation of manual tasks. The university can manage expected deadlines, monitor payment statuses, and have a clearer view of collected and outstanding amounts. Billing also provides automated reminders for missed or overdue payments, along with tools to handle failed collections.

If an instalment payment fails, Billing's Smart Retries feature automatically retries payments at times when they are most likely to go through. If the problem concerns the payment method – such as an expired card – Billing can send the student an automatic notification with instructions to update it. This allows the university to recover a portion of failed payments without contacting each student individually or scheduling new collection attempts.

The student experience: Mobile payments, saved cards, and simplified processes

Online payment of university enrolment can be the natural conclusion of a digital experience. If a student completes the application on a smartphone but must switch to another device, follow a separate procedure, or re-enter information at the time of payment, the experience loses continuity.

Checkouts customised for smartphones that accept digital wallets can make it faster to pay for a master's programme, training course, or other university service directly from the institution's portal. Some students need to make multiple payments, such as with a programme split into several instalments. The ability to securely save and reuse payment details eliminates the need to re-enter the same information on every due date.

Keeping enrolment and payment together in the same online flow avoids additional steps for students. It also allows the university to easily match each payment back to the corresponding enrolment or service.

Handling taxes: Institutional and commercial activities, value-added tax (VAT), and electronic invoicing

To properly manage payments, universities need to determine the activity type of each payment. Universities operate as noncommercial public entities for their institutional activities, but they take on the status of VAT taxable persons when they regularly carry out commercial activities for fees.

Institutional and commercial activities

Institutional activities include those that are part of the university's core mission. Students' tuition fees and contributions for the university's institutional activities are outside the scope of VAT, so no tax is charged.

Commercial activities differ regarding tax. These activities can include research and consulting on behalf of third parties, laboratory analyses and tests, sponsorships, leases, transfers of goods, and certain educational activities carried out for fees. In such cases, the university acts as a VAT-taxable entity and needs to assess the proper tax handling for each specific transaction.

Commercial activities: Are they taxable or VAT-exempt?

A commercial activity does not necessarily include VAT. Once it has been established that the transaction has tax implications, it is necessary to distinguish between the following:

• Taxable transactions: The VAT rate for the service applies. This can include consulting services, commissioned research, and sponsorships.
  
• Exempt transactions: VAT is not charged for these transactions. Certain teaching and training services can benefit from the exemption set out in Article 10 of Presidential Decree of 26/10/1972 No. 633, provided that they meet the requirements established by the regulation.
  

A VAT exemption does not necessarily mean the absence of invoicing. When a transaction is subject to the electronic invoicing requirement, the document is prepared in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format and transmitted through the Italian Exchange System (SdI). For an exempt transaction, the invoice shows no VAT charged and includes the applicable VAT exemption code N4.

Before configuring online payments for master's degrees, training courses, or other university services, the process can be reduced to two questions. First, does the payment relate to an institutional or commercial activity? Next, if the transaction is commercial, is it taxable or VAT-exempt? The answers to these questions determine which tax and documentation requirements need to be built into the payment process.

How Stripe can help you

For payment flows where the university can choose its own infrastructure, Stripe offers several solutions that can be integrated according to the specific needs of the university or GovTech platform.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments enables businesses to set up and accept 125+ payment methods, including ACH Credit Transfers. It provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business – from scaling startups to global enterprises – accept payments online, in person and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Reconcile payments automatically: Easily reconcile ACH Credit Transfers to a specific payment or invoice with an automatic reconciliation engine that uses virtual bank accounts for each customer and tools for troubleshooting.

• Simplify refunds: Make refunds or return excess funds to the customer.

• Optimise your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save engineering time with prebuilt payment UIs and Link, Stripe's digital wallet.

• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.

• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalise interactions, reward loyalty and grow revenue.

• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customisable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorisation rates.

• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments or get started today.

How Stripe Billing can help

Stripe Billing lets you bill and manage customers however you want – from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing and sales-negotiated contracts. Start accepting recurring payments globally in minutes – no code required – or build a custom integration using the API.

Stripe Billing can help you:

• Offer flexible pricing: Respond to user demand faster with flexible pricing models, including usage-based, tiered, flat-fee plus overage and more. Support for coupons, free trials, prorations and add-ons is built-in.

• Expand globally: Increase conversion by offering customers' preferred payment methods. Stripe supports 125+ local payment methods and 130+ currencies.

• Increase revenue and reduce churn: Improve revenue capture and reduce involuntary churn with Smart Retries and recovery workflow automations. Stripe recovery tools helped users recover over US$8.2 billion in revenue in 2025.

• Boost efficiency: Use Stripe's modular tax, revenue reporting and data tools to consolidate multiple revenue systems into one. Easily integrate with third-party software.

Learn more about Stripe Billing or get started today.

How Stripe Connect can help

Stripe Connect orchestrates money movement across multiple parties for software platforms and marketplaces. It offers quick onboarding, embedded components, global payouts and more.

Connect can help you:

• Launch in weeks: Use Stripe-hosted or embedded functionality to go live faster and avoid the up-front costs and development time usually required for payment facilitation.

• Manage payments at scale: Use tooling and services from Stripe so you don't have to dedicate extra resources to margin reporting, tax forms, risk, global payment methods or onboarding compliance.

• Grow globally: Help your users reach more customers worldwide with local payment methods and the ability to easily calculate sales tax, VAT and GST.

• Build new lines of revenue: Optimise payment revenue by collecting fees on each transaction. Monetise Stripe's capabilities by enabling in-person payments, instant payouts, sales tax collection, financing, expense cards and more on your platform.

Learn more about Stripe Connect or get started today.

FAQs about payments at Italian universities