Italy's 2026 Commercial Vehicle Ecobonus Goes Live: What the Click Day Means for Used Van Sellers and Buyers

The click day starts today at noon

From 12 pm on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, Italy reopens bookings on the ecobonus.mimit.gov.it platform for new incentives on low-emission N1 and N2 category commercial vehicles, alongside grants for LPG and methane retrofit kits. Bookings apply to purchases made from June 26, 2026 onward and stay open through December 31, unless the funds run out first. As with every scheme of this kind, timing is everything: whoever books first locks in the grant, whoever arrives later risks finding the pot already empty.

The two measures have separate budgets: 40 million euros for low-emission commercial vehicle purchases, 4 million for LPG and methane conversion kits. Spread across thousands of potential applications, that money tends to disappear faster than expected, just look at how quickly previous years' car ecobonus rounds sold out, often within a few weeks.

How much it is worth, and why scrappage is the real catch

For electric and hydrogen vehicles, the grant can reach up to 20,000 euros, the maximum reserved for cases where an old vehicle of the same category is scrapped. For traditional or alternative fuels, including LPG, methane and hybrids, the grant tops out at 10,000 euros for heavier vehicles, but only when the buyer scraps a vehicle up to Euro 4, owned for at least 12 months and belonging to the same category as the new one.

This is the part that matters most to anyone active in the used market: the incentive does not simply reward buying something clean, it rewards taking an old vehicle off the road. Anyone who owns a Euro 3 or Euro 4 van and was planning to sell it privately, perhaps on a used car and motorcycle marketplace, now faces a genuine choice: hand it over to the dealer for scrappage and pocket the discount on a new one, or sell it on the used market at a price that, as more owners lean toward scrappage, could soften over the coming weeks as the pool of older vans for sale shrinks and buyers grow choosier.

For the retrofit grant, the mechanism is different and simpler: the contribution stays fixed at 400 euros for LPG kits and 800 euros for methane kits, installable on vehicles rated Euro 3 or above. No scrappage is required here, it is direct help for anyone who wants to turn a car they already own, even a used one, into a cheaper-to-run bifuel vehicle.

A shortcut for anyone hunting a used LPG car

It is no coincidence that used LPG car is among the trending Google searches in Italy right now: with fuel prices refusing to come down, more drivers are looking at LPG as the affordable answer, and the retrofit ecobonus lands at just the right moment. Anyone shopping for a used compact car on a marketplace like VendiVoce can now think about it differently: instead of hunting for a model that has already been converted, often sold with an unjustified markup, it can pay to buy a Euro 3-or-newer petrol car at full price and convert it right afterward, with the state grant taking the edge off the installation cost. With an LPG kit typically running between 1,800 and 2,500 euros, a 400-euro grant will not decide things on its own, but combined with the fuel savings over time it changes the math for anyone covering serious mileage each year.

What to do if you own a Euro 4 van right now

If you own a Euro 4 commercial vehicle, the practical advice is to move quickly, but with a calculator in hand. The dealer processing the scrappage will typically offer a flat valuation for the old vehicle, often lower than what you could get selling it privately to a tradesperson or small business hunting for a cheap, working van. Before handing over the keys for scrappage, it is worth comparing two numbers: the trade-in value offered by the dealer plus the ecobonus discount, against the realistic private sale price plus the time needed to find a buyer. If the gap is small, selling now makes sense, before the wave of scheduled scrappage over the coming months pushes Euro 3 and Euro 4 used values down further.

What to do if you are buying

For anyone shopping for a used van or commercial vehicle, today's click day is a signal worth watching rather than an obstacle. In the short term, Euro 5 and Euro 6 used vehicles, which are not caught up in the scrappage requirement and are therefore in no danger of vanishing from the market, remain the steadier pick, neither destined for mass scrappage nor at risk from imminent circulation restrictions. Anyone eyeing an older vehicle purely for its low price should factor in that, with scrappage incentives running through year-end, the supply of Euro 3 and Euro 4 vehicles for sale could thin out, pushing prices up on whatever is left once the state funding runs dry.

The real risk: the money running out before December

Recent history with Italian ecobonus schemes shows that announced budgets rarely make it to year-end without running dry first. With just 40 million euros earmarked for commercial vehicles, spread across grants that reach up to 20,000 euros per vehicle in the best case, the number of applications the fund can actually cover is in the low thousands nationwide. Anyone who has already decided to buy a low-emission commercial vehicle, and has an old one to scrap, would do well to complete the booking in the first days it is open, rather than waiting until autumn.