EU adopts VAT in the Digital Age: e-invoicing, platform rules and single registration phased in from 2025 to 2035

What changed in detail

Council Directive (EU) 2025/516 of 11 March 2025 amends the VAT Directive (2006/112/EC) “as regards VAT rules for the digital age”. It was published on 25 March 2025 (OJ L, 2025/516) and entered into force twenty days later. Article 6 phases it in:

• 14 April 2025 (Article 1). Member States may apply the new Article 218 paragraph and the Article 232 change at once: they may require businesses established on their territory to issue e-invoices for domestic supplies without an EU derogation, and, where they do, may dispense with the recipient’s acceptance of those e-invoices.
• 1 January 2027 (Article 2). The deemed-supplier rule in Article 14a(2) is recast to cover platforms facilitating intra-EU supplies of goods by non-EU sellers, and the One Stop Shop schemes are extended.
• 1 July 2028 (Article 3). Platforms facilitating short-term accommodation rental (up to 30 nights) or road passenger transport become deemed suppliers unless the provider gives its VAT number and declares it will charge the VAT (new Article 28a); Member States must apply this point at the earliest from 1 July 2028 and at the latest from 1 January 2030. A transfer-of-own-goods OSS scheme is added.
• 1 July 2029 (Article 4). Articles 243(3) and 262(2) are deleted.
• 1 July 2030 (Article 5). E-invoices to the European standard become the default, and transaction-based digital reporting replaces recapitulative statements for intra-EU B2B supplies.
• 1 January 2035. Member States that had domestic real-time reporting in place, authorised or legislated before 1 January 2024 have until this date to align their domestic e-invoicing and reporting with Articles 218, 271a and 271b.

What it means

ViDA is enacted and mid-rollout. Only the 2025 option is live: Member States no longer need Council permission to mandate domestic B2B e-invoicing. The 2027 platform and OSS changes come next, and their OSS/IOSS return format is set by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1869. The platform deemed-supplier date is not uniform: a Member State can start it anywhere between mid-2028 and January 2030. The information-exchange and record-keeping halves of the package are Regulation (EU) 2025/517 and Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/518.