Italy caps how many adult citizenship-by-descent applications each consulate may accept per year

What changed

A law that has been in force since 19 February 2026 limits how many adult citizenship-by-descent applications each Italian consulate may accept in a year. Legge 19 gennaio 2026, n. 11 was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, Serie Generale n. 28 of 4 February 2026, and it replaces article 10 of decreto legislativo 3 febbraio 2011, n. 71 outright. The Consulate General in Montreal now states the cap on its own ius sanguinis page.

The four provisions that matter to descent applicants

1. An annual intake cap per consulate. Until adult recognition moves to a central office in Rome, each consular office may receive in a year no more adult recognition applications than the number of such proceedings it concluded in the benchmark year, which is 2025. The benchmark is fixed rather than rolling. There is a floor: in no case fewer than 100 applications. For a post carrying a heavy backlog this is a hard ceiling on new intake, and it compounds, because the fewer files an office closes, the fewer it may accept later.

2. A 36-month statutory term. The term for concluding those proceedings is thirty-six months. This supersedes the 24-month or 730-day figure still quoted in many places, including by some consulates. That older figure comes from provisions governing citizenship by marriage and by naturalisation, not recognition by descent.

3. Centralisation in Rome. Adult recognition applications move off the consular network to a central Foreign Ministry office from 1 January of the third calendar year after the law took effect. The statute prints no year; counting from 19 February 2026 gives 1 January 2029, which is a derivation from the statutory formula rather than a date the law itself states.

4. Paper filing, by post. The application must be filed on paper and sent by mail, in express derogation from Italy's digital administration code. Later communications may be made by telematic means.

What it does not change

This law does not change who qualifies. The descent restriction in article 3-bis of Law 91/1992, the Constitutional Court's referral of that question to the EU Court of Justice, the resolution of the so-called minor issue by the Court of Cassation, and Interior Ministry Circular 65050 are all separate matters and are untouched by it. What changes is access and timing: the volume a consulate may take in a calendar year is now fixed by statute and tied to last year's closures rather than to its own scheduling discretion, so an office that is behind may reach its ceiling early in the year.

What applicants should do

• Ask your own consulate what its annual number is. The statute sets the mechanism but does not publish per-office figures.

• If you were planning against two years as the legal outer bound on processing, the term now in force is thirty-six months.

• Book early in the calendar year where you have the choice, since a post that is behind on closures may exhaust its intake allowance.

Sources

• Consulate General of Italy in Montreal, citizenship ius sanguinis page

• Legge 19 gennaio 2026, n. 11 - summary and Gazzetta Ufficiale citation

This is general information, not legal advice. Consult a licensed Italian citizenship lawyer about your specific line of descent.