Cyprus zero-rates bread, milk, eggs, baby food, coffee, sugar and nappies to 30 June 2024 and extends the meat and vegetables zero rate (K.D.P. 138/2024)

What changed in detail

Cyprus’s Council of Ministers issued the Value Added Tax (Amendment of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules) Order 2024, K.D.P. 138/2024, published in Official Gazette Annex III(I) No. 5867 on 19 April 2024. It has two parts with different start dates, both ending on 30 June 2024:

• From 1 May 2024 (paragraphs 2(a), 2(b) and 3(a)), a temporary 0% rate on bread, milk, eggs, baby food, coffee, sugar, infant and adult nappies, and women’s hygiene products, which otherwise fall under the reduced rates of the Fifth Schedule.
• From 1 June 2024 (paragraphs 2(c) and 3(b)), the 0% rate on the fresh, chilled or frozen meat and fresh or chilled vegetables listed in K.D.P. 360/2023, whose own window closed on 31 May 2024.

The meat and vegetable list is re-enacted in the same CN-heading terms as K.D.P. 360/2023, so for those goods the effect is one more month at 0%.

What it means

This order is spent: both parts ended on 30 June 2024. For one month, June 2024, all the goods in the chain (the basics and the meat and vegetables) sat at 0% together.

The next link is K.D.P. 231/2024, which kept the same combined list at 0% from 1 July to 30 September 2024. When reconstructing the rate on a historical invoice, note that bread, milk and the other basics start on 1 May 2024, a month earlier than the meat and vegetable extension.