What is ViDA? EU VAT reform and deadlines

ViDA, or „VAT in the Digital Age“, is a package of reforms to the European Union’s VAT system – and it is no longer a draft. The package was adopted by the Council on 11 March 2025, published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 25 March 2025 and entered into force on 14 April 2025, and According to the European Commission's ViDA page It will be implemented in stages until January 2035. There are three important milestones for your company: from 14 April 2025, Member States may require national e-invoices, from 1 July 2028, the rules for platforms and the single VAT registration will change, and from 1 July 2030, cross-border B2B transactions must be settled with a structured e-invoice and their data must be transmitted to the tax authorities.

ViDA in one minute: what was adopted and when

The package consists of three pieces of legislation, all from 11 March 2025: Council Directive (EU) 2025/516, amending VAT Directive 2006/112/EC, Council Regulation (EU) 2025/517 on administrative cooperation and Council Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/518.

It is worth refuting a common misconception here. ViDA did not establish an EU-wide national B2B e-invoicing obligation. Its entry into force only gave Member States the right to establish mandatory national e-invoicing under certain conditions – each country decides whether and when this will be done. E-invoicing will become mandatory at the EU level in cross-border B2B trade, and only in 2030. The rest before that is national policy.

To organise this, the Commission has undertaken a gradual implementation: in July 2026, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1869 was published, which updates the detailed rules for the special VAT schemes and adds its own module for the transfer of goods.

ViDA Timeline: 2025, 2027, 2028, 2030 and 2035

Date	What changes	Who is concerned?
14.04.2025	Member States may introduce mandatory national e-invoicing; IOSS control tools improved	All companies, but only through countries that exercise the right
01.01.2027	OSS expands to include B2C e-charging services; clarifications for OSS and IOSS users	E-commerce, B2C sellers of services
01.07.2028	Deemed supplier rule for accommodation and road passenger transport platforms (state may postpone until 01.01.2030); Single VAT Registration and mandatory reverse charge for non-established suppliers	Platforms, entrepreneurs providing services through them, cross-border sellers
01.07.2030	Digital Reporting (DRR) for cross-border B2B transactions; e-invoice becomes the default method of invoicing	All VAT registered businesses that carry out the listed cross-border transactions
01.01.2035	Countries with domestic real-time transaction-based reporting obligations must align their systems with the EU model	Companies from countries that already have their own reporting system

Commission Work programme for 2026 confirms the same order and adds that from July 1, 2030, cross-border reporting will be based on mandatory e-invoicing.

From July 1, 2030: who is affected by e-invoicing and reporting obligations?

The new Article 262 links the obligation to four types of transactions: intra-Community supplies of goods and transfers of own goods, intra-Community acquisitions of goods and listed reverse charge supplies and acquisitions. Directive 2025/516 links this obligation to every taxable person identified as a VAT payer – there is no general turnover limit or small business exemption for cross-border reporting.

In practice, this means that a three-person IT company in Tallinn that sells one service per month to Riga is under exactly the same obligation as a large exporter. Purely domestic sales to an Estonian customer are not covered by the EU DRR – they are regulated by Estonian law.

What's changing in the invoicing and reporting workflow

An e-invoice, in the sense of ViDA, is an invoice that is issued, transmitted and received in a structured electronic format that allows for automatic processing. A PDF invoice does not meet this condition: it is a human-readable document, not a machine-readable data set. An e-mail attachment does not become an e-invoice just because it is transmitted electronically.

Two concepts are constantly getting confused here. EN 16931 is a European e-invoice standard that describes which data fields and meanings must be on an invoice; it evolved Directive 2014/55/EU for public sector invoices. Peppol, on the other hand, is a transmission network – a channel through which the invoice moves from your software to the client’s software. The standard says what’s on the invoice; the network says how it gets there.

ViDA requires that Member States allow data to be submitted in a format that complies with the European e-invoice standard. However, the final technical picture is not yet in place: the exact permitted syntaxes, validation rules and national specificities will only be determined by implementing acts and national decisions, which are foreseen in the Commission's Work Programme for 2026. So don't expect a specific list of file formats now - expect the ability to create and accept structured invoices in general.

The deadlines are becoming shorter. For intra-Community supplies of goods and listed reverse charge supplies, the invoice must be issued no later than 10 days after the chargeable event occurs; the same 10 days apply to the relevant advance payment invoice after receipt of payment. The data is provided to the Member State that issued the VAT identification number used in the transaction.

Example: 1200 euro service invoice from Estonia to Latvia

Your Estonian company sells a consulting service to a Latvian client for 1,200 euros and the invoice goes into reverse charge – the buyer calculates the VAT in their own country. After July 1, 2030, it will look like this:

• Invoice: You will create a structured e-invoice, not a PDF, and issue it within the 10-day deadline.
• Your reporting: As a seller, you submit transaction details when the invoice has been issued or should have been issued.
• Client reporting: The Latvian buyer will submit the purchase details no later than five days after receiving the invoice.
• If data is missing: In the case of an intra-Community supply of goods, the tax authority may refuse to grant VAT exemption if the required information is not provided or is incorrect, unless the seller can duly justify the deficiency.

This last point is why ensuring that a customer's VAT number and reverse charge logic are in order is no longer a trivial matter for an accountant, but a financial risk.

Platforms and one VAT registration

From 1 July 2028 – or at the latest from 1 January 2030, if the Member State makes use of the allowed deferral – a platform for short-term accommodation and road passenger transport will generally be considered to be a service provider itself. Short-term accommodation means up to 30 consecutive nights. An exception applies if the actual service provider provides the platform with the relevant VAT number and confirms that it will account for VAT itself.

Single VAT Registration extends OSS, adding its own goods transfer module, a new correction mechanism and mandatory reverse charge for non-established suppliers. If your business is a regular local B2B service, this part will not change your day-to-day billing much. If you sell to consumers in another EU country or store goods in a foreign warehouse, this will change for you.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania: what is already valid before 2030

There are three different tempos in the Baltics and they should not be confused with ViDA.

According to the amendment to the Accounting Act From 1 July 2025, an accounting entity registered in the commercial register as the recipient of an e-invoice may require the seller to submit an e-invoice. Public sector institutions will continue to be registered recipients. There is currently no general B2B obligation in Estonia.

In Latvia there is According to the VID e-invoices page From 1 January 2026, the transmission of e-invoice data to the VID is mandatory in the G2G, B2G and G2B segments, i.e. in transactions where one party is a state institution, and from 1 January 2028, the invoice must also be formatted as an e-invoice and transmitted to the VID in B2B transactions.

Lithuania's domestic stages are related to the years 2027 and 2029, but we have no official source to confirm them here - check the exact status in the VMI guide.

Practical readiness checklist 2026–2030

• Map cross-border flows. Write down which of your invoices are intra-Community supplies of goods, purchases or reverse charge services. These lines will be reported in 2030.
• Check VAT numbers and reverse charge logic. An incorrect or missing number will be a more expensive mistake in 2030 than it is today.
• Ask the software one specific thing. Can it create, send, and receive invoices as structured machine-readable data, not just as PDFs?.
• Review the workflow for corrections and credit notes. When the data reaches the tax authorities, the correction must be traceable, not manually overwritten.
• Keep an eye on national technical regulations. Allowed formats, validation, and sanctions come from the state level, and some of them have not yet been published.
• Shorten your billing cycle now. 10 days to issue an invoice means that "let's do everything at once at the end of the month" no longer works.

If you only get to one thing in 2026, it's this: take a typical cross-border invoice and see if it leaves your system as data or as an image. The answer to this question will determine how big your 2030 project really is.

Read also: English · Latvian · Lithuanian

Last checked: September 14, 2026

FAQ

Will ViDA introduce immediate mandatory B2B e-invoicing across the European Union?

No, the entry into force of ViDA on 14 April 2025 only gave Member States the right to introduce mandatory national e-invoicing without special authorisation. The EU-wide mandatory e-invoicing and digital reporting (DRR) will only enter into force for cross-border B2B transactions on 1 July 2030.

Is a PDF invoice considered an e-invoice according to ViDA requirements?

No, according to ViDA rules, only a document in a structured machine-readable format that complies with the European standard EN 16931 is considered an e-invoice. A regular PDF file sent as an e-mail attachment does not meet the requirements for automatic processing and does not qualify as an e-invoice.

What deadlines will apply to the settlement of cross-border B2B transactions from 2030?

From 1 July 2030, an invoice for a cross-border supply or reverse charge service must be issued no later than 10 days after the taxable event. The seller must provide transaction details when issuing the invoice, and the buyer must provide purchase details within five days of receiving the invoice.