ViDA: what VAT in the Digital Age changes for invoices, and when

ViDA is Council Directive (EU) 2025/516 of 11 March 2025 amending Directive 2006/112/EC as regards VAT rules for the digital age, published in the Official Journal on 25 March 2025. It entered into force twenty days later (Article 7), on 14 April 2025.

It is a directive, not a regulation: it binds the Member States, which then change their own law. A business is bound by its country's transposition, not by the directive directly. The directive sets the latest date by which that must happen.

Its amending articles are grouped by the date they take effect:

Dates from Article 6 (transposition) and Article 7 (entry into force) of Directive (EU) 2025/516.

Until ViDA, the VAT Directive left an electronic invoice to the recipient's acceptance. A country that wanted to make e-invoicing mandatory needed an exception to that rule. Two paragraphs added by Article 1 of ViDA changed this, and Member States may apply them since 14 April 2025 (Article 6(1)).

Two limits sit in the wording itself:

• Domestic only. The option covers supplies within the Member State's territory, and excludes those referred to in Article 262, which are the intra-EU transactions.
• An option, not an obligation. Nothing in these two paragraphs requires a Member State to use it. Whether and when a business must e-invoice at home still comes from its national law.

Of the five countries this site covers, what each one currently requires is in the table of national mandates.

Article 5 rewrites the invoicing chapter of the VAT Directive. Member States must apply it from 1 July 2030 (Article 6(5)).

An electronic invoice means a structured one

The current definition accepts any electronic format:

The new one does not:

A PDF alone will no longer be an electronic invoice in the sense of the directive. A PDF carrying structured data can be, if the structured part holds everything that must be reported:

E-invoices become the rule, to the European standard

That standard is EN 16931. What it contains, and what a national format adds to it: EN 16931.

Acceptance by the recipient ends for standard invoices

An invoice in another standard, or in a format that is not an electronic invoice, still needs the recipient's acceptance under the same article, subject to the options it leaves to Member States.

Ten days to invoice an intra-EU supply

Two new mandatory particulars

Article 226, the list of what an invoice must contain, gains two points: for a corrective invoice, the sequential number of the invoice it corrects (point 16), and the supplier's bank account numbers, virtual account numbers or other identifiers of the accounts into which the invoice can be paid (point 17).

For intra-EU supplies and acquisitions, the invoice data goes to the tax authority transaction by transaction, replacing the periodic recapitulative statement.

• The supplier transmits the data “at the time when the invoice is issued or should have been issued” (Article 263(1)).
• The acquirer transmits “no later than 5 days after the invoice is received” (Article 263(2)).
• “Articles 265 to 271 are deleted”: the recapitulative statement goes (Article 5, point (18)).

Member States may also require domestic transactions to be reported, under new Articles 271a and 271b; they must then accept data taken from invoices that follow the European standard.

Countries that already ran a real-time domestic reporting system before 2024 are given longer to bring it into line with the EU model:

The same subparagraph lets the Commission propose a later deadline if its interim evaluation report, due by 31 March 2033 under new Article 271c, finds shortcomings. The directive does not list which Member States fall under this paragraph, and this page does not guess.