ATECO codes explained: how to define your Italian target market

What is an ATECO code and who maintains it?

ATECO stands for ATtività ECOnomiche. It is the official Italian classification of economic activities, maintained by ISTAT, the national statistics institute. Every company that registers with an Italian Chamber of Commerce declares a primary ATECO code that describes its main activity, and often one or more secondary codes. Tax authorities, INPS (social security) and the business register all use the same code, so it follows a company through its whole life.

The current edition is ATECO 2025. It replaced ATECO 2007 (2022 update), entered into force on 1 January 2025 and became operational in registers and administrative procedures on 1 April 2025. Any target list built before that date on old codes has to be remapped with the official correspondence table before you trust the counts.

Source: ISTAT, the new ATECO 2025 classification and INPS, ATECO 2025 operational notes

How does ATECO relate to NACE codes?

ATECO is the Italian version of NACE, the EU wide classification of economic activities. ATECO 2025 derives directly from NACE Rev. 2.1, introduced by EU Implementing Regulation 2024/1840, and the two are identical down to the four digit class. Italy adds a fifth and a sixth digit for national detail. In practice this means that if you already target NACE divisions in Germany, France or Spain, the first four digits of your filter translate to Italy with no conversion. Only the national detail below the class is Italy specific.

Source: ISTAT, ATECO 2025 correspondence tables and methodological note

How is an ATECO code structured?

The code is hierarchical. Each level adds one layer of detail, and each level is useful for a different targeting job. The section is a letter, the division is two digits, the group three, the class four, and the Italian categories and subcategories five and six. Most market mapping work happens at the division level, with the lower levels used to exclude what you do not want.

Why does the code describe the declared activity, not the real market?

Because a company chooses its code when it registers, and updates it rarely. A metal workshop that moved into automated assembly lines ten years ago may still carry a code for metal products. A group holding company may carry a financial code even though its operating subsidiaries build machines. And what a company buys is not what it declares it makes: a food producer buys packaging machinery, software and logistics, none of which appear in its code. ATECO tells you what a company says it does. Your market is defined by what it needs. The code is the first filter, the one that cuts 1.5 million companies down to a workable universe. It is never the last.

How do you build a supply chain from ATECO divisions?

You combine divisions that share buyers and suppliers, then count. Italy has 1,498,035 active corporations (società di capitali) in the business register. OurAtlas of Italian supply chains maps 1,067,441 of them into 28 supply chains, each built from a set of two digit divisions, with aggregate revenue, median revenue, headcount and regional distribution. Four examples show how divisions turn into markets.

• Construction and installations: divisions 41, 42 and 43 together. 249,644 corporations, the largest supply chain in Italy, median revenue €338,327. A market of small firms, so the filter on revenue matters more than the code.
• Mechanical engineering and metal products: divisions such as 25 and 28. 70,800 corporations with a median revenue of €1,021,586, three times the construction median. This is where most industrial B2B entrants find their first Italian customers.
• Software and IT services: divisions such as 62 and 63. 55,662 corporations, mostly small, concentrated in Lombardy and Lazio.
• B2B wholesale: division 46. 137,672 corporations with €654.7 billion in aggregate revenue, the highest of any supply chain. Wholesalers are the buyers most foreign companies forget to count.

Source: Atlas of Italian supply chains, Clientium, 2026 edition, on Registro Imprese data, CC BY 4.0

The point of the exercise is the number. Before any campaign you should know whether your Italian market is 400 companies, 4,000 or 40,000, because each of those calls for a different go to market. The guide onhow many companies there are in Italy by industrywalks through all 28 supply chains.

How do you go from "we sell X" to an ATECO filter?

Four steps, in order. They take an afternoon with the right data and save months of outreach to the wrong companies.

1. List the activities of your buyers, not your own. Write down what your best customers at home actually do: machinery builders, food processors, logistics operators. Your own code is irrelevant to the list.
2. Find the divisions. Map each activity to a two digit ATECO division using the ISTAT structure. Stay at two digits unless the product is genuinely niche. Add division 46 if anyone resells your kind of product.
3. Count, then add size bands. Check the number of corporations per division in the Atlas or the TAM calculator, then narrow with revenue bands (for example €2 to 50 million) and employee bands. In Italy about 95% of companies have fewer than ten employees, so the size band usually removes more companies than the code does.
4. Validate on twenty real companies. Pull twenty names from the filtered list and check their websites. If fewer than fifteen are companies you would want to call, the filter is wrong, usually too narrow on the code or too loose on size.

What are the most common ATECO mistakes foreign companies make?

Three mistakes account for most of the bad lists we see in mapping sessions.

• Filtering on one six digit code. It feels precise and it is wrong: companies self classify, and the national detail was designed for statistics, not for sales. You end up with a list that misses half your real market and includes firms that changed business years ago.
• Forgetting the wholesalers. Division 46 is the largest supply chain by revenue in Italy. In many sectors the wholesaler or importer is the actual buyer and the actual decision maker, and the end user never issues a purchase order to a foreign supplier.
• Trusting the primary code of groups. Holding companies often carry 64.20 (activities of holding companies) or 70.10 (head office activities) even when the group builds machines or runs plants. Filter on the operating subsidiaries, and read the group structure in the business register before you write to the wrong entity.

How does this fit into entering the Italian market?

ATECO is the language of the Chamber of Commerce data, and Chamber data is the only complete, public source on Italian companies. That is why our market mapping starts there: we translate your buyer profile into divisions, size bands and regions, count the real market, then build the list that the outreach runs on. TheTAM calculator gives you a first estimate in a few minutes; the mapping session gives you the full picture and a conservative projection of appointments. The same filters decide whether it makes sense to work with a distributor or go direct, a choice covered in the guide onfinding distributors in Italy. For the full model, from mapping to appointments that show up, start fromhow to enter the Italian market.