One of the most frequent — and most contentious — issues in the management of separation or divorce concerns the so-called extraordinary expenses for children: those items that fall outside ordinary maintenance and that often become a battleground between parents. Who pays? Who must be consulted beforehand? And what happens when one parent acts alone, without the other's consent?
Clarity is provided by the Corte di Cassazione with ordinanza n. 23946 of 23 July 2026, which reaffirms and reinforces a principle already present in case law: the absence of a prior agreement between parents is not sufficient to automatically preclude the right to reimbursement of the share owed by the parent who did not bear the expense.
What Is Meant by Extraordinary Expenses?
In the context of separation, expenses for children are traditionally divided into two categories. Ordinary expenses are those that are recurring and foreseeable — food, clothing, basic school supplies — and are generally covered by the monthly maintenance allowance. Extraordinary expenses, on the other hand, encompass everything that falls outside the routine: specialist medical treatment, sporting or artistic activities, school trips, language courses, dental or psychological expenses, and so forth.
For the latter, judicial orders often provide for a percentage allocation between the parents — usually in proportion to each parent's income — and sometimes require that decisions be made by mutual agreement. It is precisely on this point that the most frequent disputes arise.
The Issue of Prior Consent
It frequently occurs that one parent — due to urgency, communication difficulties, or simply a difference of opinion — incurs an extraordinary expense without having first obtained the other parent's consent. In such cases, the parent who paid then seeks reimbursement of the share attributable to the former partner, who however refuses to pay it, citing precisely the absence of prior agreement.
Until now, certain more rigid interpretations tended to treat the consent requirement as an almost indispensable condition for reimbursement. The Cassazione's ruling scales back this reading, shifting the focus of the assessment to a substantive rather than a purely formal criterion.
The Principle Established by the Cassazione
With ordinanza n. 23946/2026, the Suprema Corte establishes that a judge, when faced with a claim for reimbursement of extraordinary expenses not previously agreed upon, cannot confine itself to noting the absence of consent in order to dismiss the claim. The judge is instead required to carry out a substantive assessment, verifying two fundamental elements:
- Whether the expense corresponds to the inter
