Buying in Sardinia:
the rules that make a sale void.

Purchases in Sardinia rarely fall through over price. They fall through because somebody finds out too late something that could have been asked in a week: that nothing on that plot can be touched, that the swimming pool never had a permit, that the municipality has not aligned its planning rules and so the heritage authority holds a veto. In the rarest and worst case, the buyer finds out that the deed itself is void. This page lists those checks one by one, and says what happens to the people who skip them.

Can a foreigner buy a house in Sardinia?

Yes, and there is no residency requirement, no minimum value and no separate permission to obtain. Citizens of the European Union, the European Economic Area and Switzerland buy on exactly the same terms as Italians. Everyone else is subject to the condition of reciprocity: Italy lets you buy if an Italian could buy in your country, and for most of the countries our owners come from that condition is satisfied.

One case deserves a careful sentence rather than a confident one. For British buyers the position changed after 2021, and it is not settled by an explicit rule written for the purpose. Italian notarial commentary concludes that British citizens can still buy, and in practice they do, every week. It is still worth asking your notary to confirm the point before you commit money to a preliminary contract, because it is his job to state it and yours to have it in writing.

The tax code comes before everything else

Nothing moves without an Italian tax code, the codice fiscale. It is the identifier the notary, the revenue agency, the utilities and the banks all use, and every other step waits on it. It is requested on form AA4/8, and you do not have to fly in to get it: a representative you have formally authorised can file it for you, and Italian consulates abroad also issue it.

Two practical notes. If somebody signs the deed for you under a power of attorney, that person needs a tax code of their own. And if you are buying jointly, every buyer needs one, including a spouse whose name goes on the deed but who never sets foot in the notary's office.

An Italian bank account is not compulsory, but you will want one

This is the question we are asked most often, and the honest answer has two halves. No law requires a non-resident buyer to hold an Italian bank account in order to purchase. The purchase price can be settled from abroad, and the notary's escrow account works either way.

What comes after the purchase is a different matter. Utilities, the property tax IMU and the waste charge TARI are all easier, and in some cases only practical, from an Italian account with direct debits set up: municipal payment channels are not built for foreign banks, and a missed waste charge in a small comune is a nuisance out of all proportion to its size. Most of our foreign owners open an account in the months around the purchase, not before it. It is a convenience, not a condition.

The 300 metre coastal belt is national law, not a Sardinian rule

Everyone names this constraint and almost nobody explains it. The strip of 300 metres from the shoreline is a landscape asset by operation of law across the whole of Italy: it is set out in the code of cultural heritage and landscape, article 142, paragraph 1, letter a) of legislative decree 42 of 2004. It was not invented by the Sardinian regional government, and it is not something the municipality can negotiate away.

Inside that belt, any work that changes the external appearance of the place needs landscape authorisation. Not just a new house: a veranda, a boundary wall, a swimming pool, sometimes the colour of a facade.

There is one exception worth knowing, because it puts whole town centres outside the constraint. Paragraph 2 of the same article excludes areas that on 6 September 1985 were already classified as zones A and B in approved planning instruments. An apartment in the old centre of a seaside town can be two hundred metres from the water and fall outside the 300 metre belt. Outside that belt, however, does not mean unconstrained: the regional landscape plan and any specific constraint on the building itself still apply, and still have to be read.

Sardinia's landscape plan is still the 2006 one

The regional landscape plan was approved by regional council resolution 36/7 of 5 September 2006, and it is still the plan in force. In April 2026 the Region approved the start of a revision. That is true, and it is currently the single biggest source of confusion in negotiations.

Starting a revision suspends nothing. The rules that apply to your purchase, and to the application you file next month, are the 2006 ones. Anybody telling you to buy now because the rules are about to change is selling you an expectation rather than a building: if the project only works under a plan that does not exist yet, today it does not work.

The heritage authority's opinion is binding, and that is what really costs time

Where landscape authorisation is needed, the file does not end at the town hall. The Soprintendenza, the state heritage authority, issues an opinion, and until the municipality has aligned its own planning instrument with the landscape plan that opinion is binding: article 146, paragraph 5 of legislative decree 42 of 2004. Binding means that if the heritage authority says no, the municipality cannot say yes.

In Sardinia many municipalities have not yet completed that alignment. This, and not bureaucracy in the abstract, is what stretches the real timeline of a coastal renovation: not one more step, but a step that can stop you.

Then comes the rule that surprises foreign buyers most. Ordinary landscape authorisation cannot be obtained after the fact. Paragraph 4 of the same article forbids granting it retrospectively once the work has been carried out, even partly. Presidential decree 31 of 2017 identifies minor works that are exempt or that follow a simplified procedure, and those are worth discussing; the underlying logic does not change. You ask first and build afterwards. Building first and fixing the paperwork later is not a risky shortcut on this coast, it is a dead end.

A swimming pool is not just landscaping

Almost every buyer looking at a villa in Sardinia is picturing a pool, and many imagine it as simple landscaping. It is not. An in-ground pool is generally a building work; the required planning route depends on its size, features and the rules applying to the site, and a qualified technician should verify it. Inside the protected coastal belt, landscape authorisation may also be required.

Two questions follow, and both belong before signature. For a pool that already exists, under which approvals was it built, and does it match what was authorised? Any irregularities and their consequences should be established before purchase. For a pool you would like to add, the project may not be permitted in some areas, and it is better to know that before building a business plan around it.

Civic use rights: the constraint that voids the deed

This is the most Sardinian risk, the least known, and the only one with no way back. Parts of the island are burdened by usi civici, civic use rights: collective rights belonging to the local community rather than to the registered owner. If the land is civic domain and has never been formally divested, the sale to a private buyer is void. Not voidable: void. There is no amnesty, no regularisation, no sum you can pay to put it right.

What makes it dangerous is that no property listing anywhere has a field for it. The seller can be acting in complete good faith, so can the agency, and the house can have stood there for thirty years with the utilities in somebody's name and the taxes paid. The check on civic use rights is a question somebody has to ask, explicitly, of the municipality where the land sits, and it has to be asked before completion. Afterwards, what you signed is worth nothing and your money is something you chase.

If you are buying land, or a house with land, in an inland comune or in an agricultural zone near the coast, this is the first question to ask. Not the last.

Planning compliance: what the notary writes, and what has to exist

The last check concerns the building's planning identity. The deed of sale has to state the details of the building permit, and if that permit does not genuinely exist the deed is void: article 46 of presidential decree 380 of 2001 and article 40 of law 47 of 1985.

The crucial word is genuinely. The notary receives a declaration from the seller and records it in the deed; the notary does not retrieve and verify the municipal file. A qualified surveyor or architect with a right of access to the records performs that check when instructed. Comparing the registered floor plan with the building as it stands, and confirming that the permits cited exist and cover everything visible, belongs before the preliminary contract, not between the preliminary contract and completion, when a deposit has already been paid. Timing depends on the municipality and the procedure; allow up to 30 days for a formal request to access municipal records.

Discrepancies turn up in the same places every time: an enclosed veranda, a loft turned into a bedroom, an extension at the back, a change of use never declared. At that point the question is no longer whether to buy, but who pays to put it right and whether it can be put right at all.

The checklist before completion

There are six checks. Timing varies by municipality and procedure; allow up to 30 days for formal requests to access municipal records. Every check costs far less than the mistake it prevents.

If one of these answers is slow to arrive, that is not a detail to postpone: it is the reason the preliminary contract needs the right conditions written into it. How to word them is a question for your notary, who is also the only person who can do it.

We run these checks before you sign

None of this is done from an armchair, and none of it replaces anybody: the notary answers for the deed, the surveyor for compliance, the registered agent for the sale itself. What we add is the part that is usually missing. We know which questions have to be asked in that particular comune, of whom, and in what order, and we get them asked before you have signed anything.

There is a self-interested reason too, and we would rather say it out loud. If we end up managing that house, we are the ones who have to let it. A villa that cannot be renovated, or a pool that stretch of coast will never allow, is not only your problem, it becomes ours. That is why the business plan we write starts here rather than with the revenue line.

How the whole route works, from the estimate before purchase to management afterwards, is set out on the page about turnkey property investment in Italy. For what comes once the house is yours there are the guides on the flat tax on short lets, the CIN code and what a holiday home actually earns in Sardinia.

Written by the Propertize team, who manage homes in Sardinia, Milan and Sicily. This page was last updated in August 2026.