OMI zone codes B1, C2, D1, R1 explained
What the letter and number of the Revenue Agency's price zones mean, what they do not tell you and why they should not be confused with planning zones.
Autore: Editorial team. Aggiornata il .
Anyone looking up house prices on the Italian Revenue Agency's map, or reading a valuation report, comes across codes such as B1, C2, D1 or R1. They are the codes of the OMI zones, the zones into which the Property Market Observatory (Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare) divides every municipality to publish prices per square metre. The letter tells you which band of the municipality the zone is in, and the number sets it apart from the others in the same band.
The five bands
The definitions are those of the Observatory's manual (edition of 20 March 2025, chapter 5, in Italian), summarised.
| Letter | Band (fascia) | What it covers | Example codes |
|---|---|---|---|
| B | central (centrale) | the urban centre of the municipality, the compact built-up core that draws people from around it | B1, B2, up to B12 and beyond in large cities |
| C | semi-central (semicentrale) | the area right around the centre, linked to it by services and transport; it only exists if there are also a centre and outskirts | C1, C2 |
| D | outer (periferica) | from the centre or semi-central band out to the edge of the built-up area | D1, D2 |
| E | suburban (suburbana) | built-up areas cut off from the main settlement by countryside, a river or a railway, such as the larger frazioni (outlying villages) | E1, E2 |
| R | extra-urban (extraurbana), also called rural | the rest of the municipality up to its boundary: fields, scattered houses, areas with hardly any buildings | R1, R2 |
The manual has no band A. The letters are these five across the whole of Italy, so a C zone in Bari and a C zone in Turin sit in the same position relative to their own centre.
How to read the number
The number is a sequence of up to three characters and only serves to name the zone: C2 is the second semi-central zone, B12 the twelfth central zone. It is not a ranking, and B1 is not necessarily worth more than B2.
Next to the code there is always a description, usually the name of the district, the village or the boundary streets. In Rimini, for example, B1 is "Centro storico e Borgo San Giuliano" (the historic centre) and C1 is "Rivabella". In the Agency's files each zone also has a longer national code, starting with the province abbreviation: that is what lets you follow the same zone from one half-year to the next.
How many zones a municipality has
It depends on its size. According to the manual, in the first half of 2024 about 5,500 of Italy's nearly 7,900 municipalities had three zones or fewer, about 2,260 had between four and ten and only 13 had more than thirty; Milan has 43 today. In small municipalities it is normal to find just one central, one outer and one extra-urban zone, with the larger villages in the suburban band.
Some zones have no prices. They exist so that the whole municipality is covered, but they have very few buildings or hardly any sales, and the Agency publishes no figures.
What the letter does not tell you
The band describes where the zone is, not what it costs. The manual says that in small and medium municipalities the central band is "generally" the most sought after: generally, so not always. To compare two zones you have to look at their price ranges, not their letters, and even then it is a comparison between zones, not between houses.
Codes change over time
Every ten years the Agency reviews the zone boundaries. The latest review was in 2024 and redrew the zones of about 900 municipalities, with effect from the second half of 2024; the one before was in 2014, and since then zone boundaries have followed the boundaries of cadastral parcels. A D1 of ten years ago may therefore not be today's D1, and a price chart that runs through 2024 needs reading with care.
OMI zones are not the cadastral microzones set out in presidential decree (DPR) 138 of 1998 either: they started out matching, and were separated with the 2014 review.
Not to be confused with planning zones
The municipality's town plan also uses the letters B, C, D and E, but with a different meaning. In the homogeneous zones (zone territoriali omogenee) of ministerial decree 1444 of 1968, B is the area already built up, C the area set aside for new housing, D the area for industry and E farmland.
The two sets of codes live in different documents and have nothing to do with each other: a house can be in OMI zone D1, on the outskirts, and in planning zone B, an area already built up. The OMI zone is for reading prices, the planning zone says what can be built (how the municipal plan works).
Where to find your zone's code
On the Revenue Agency's OMI price lookup (in Italian) you search for the address and click on the zone: the code, band, description and prices for the latest half-year appear. In our report the zone of the address sits at the top of the prices block, with its band, description and trend over the years. What OMI prices are and why they are a range is explained in Price per square metre in the area.
Sources: the Revenue Agency's property price page and the summary of the database manual (both in Italian).
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Check an address
Enter the address: the report summarises risks, local prices, population, services and transport, with the source for every figure.
For example: Via Dante 7, Milan.