The EU, Tech Companies & VAT

Starting from January 2015, there are going to be some changes to way EU tech companies need to charge VAT to consumers. In the past, you would simply charge EU consumers VAT at your country’s VAT rate however from 2015, companies will need to charge VAT the rate in the consumer’s country.

This in itself isn’t a particularly challenging issue for tech companies to deal with, however reliability determining the VAT rate for a country is slightly tricky. Unfortunately, there’s no provided API which contains the VAT rates for countries therefore I have quickly knocked together a quick services which returns the VAT rates for every EU member country.

This can be accessed free of charge at jsonvat.com and the data which is served can be found in this GitHub repository.

Here’s some lovely example JSON:

{
  "details":"http://github.com/adamcooke/vat-rates",
  "rates":[
    {
      "name":"Italy",
      "code":"IT",
      "periods":[
        {
          "effective_from":"0000-01-01",
          "rates":{
            "super_reduced":4.0,
            "reduced":10.0,
            "standard":22.0
          }
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name":"Greece",
      "code":"EL",
      "periods":[
        {
          "effective_from":"0000-01-01",
          "rates":{
            "reduced1":6.5,
            "reduced2":13.0,
            "standard":23.0
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

While I will try to keep the data in the repository up to date, please do feel free to share this post and encourage others to submit pull requests when new VAT rates are announced. As I’m in the UK, I’ll be on top of the UK changes.