Which EU countries require e-invoicing, and when?
There is no single European deadline. Each member state legislates its own B2B mandate on its own timetable, and the dates move, so any answer is only as good as the date it was checked.
There is no one European date. Directive 2014/55/EU obliged public bodies across the EU to be able to receive structured e-invoices, and that is the only genuinely EU-wide obligation in force. Everything else, the B2B mandates people mean when they ask this question, is national law on national timetables, passed at different times and drafted differently.
So the honest answer is per country, and it carries a date it was last checked. Mandate dates slip: France’s slipped once, the UK’s detail is still pending, Slovenia’s enacted date differs from what some European reference pages still show. A page stating a deadline without saying when it was verified is not telling you enough to act on.
The three markets with an imminent B2B obligation
Germany
| Date | What changes |
|---|---|
| 1 January 2025 | Every domestic business must be able to receive an EN 16931 e-invoice. |
| 1 January 2027 | Issuing becomes mandatory for businesses with prior-year turnover above EUR 800,000. |
| 1 January 2028 | Issuing becomes mandatory for all remaining domestic businesses. |
Paper and PDF invoices (with the recipient's consent) and non-conforming EDI stay permitted through 31 December 2027.
Last verified against the German Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) and the European Commission eInvoicing country page, cross-checked against the June 2026 confirmation that the 2027 date is unchanged on 24 August 2026. Official source.
France
| Date | What changes |
|---|---|
| 1 September 2026 | All businesses must be able to receive; large enterprises and mid-caps (ETI) must issue and e-report. |
| 1 September 2027 | Small and medium enterprises (PME) and micro-enterprises (TPE) must issue and e-report. |
The 1 September 2026 and 2027 calendar was reconfirmed in April 2025; a further delay was rejected. Dates can still move by decree, so re-confirm against DGFiP before relying on them.
Last verified against DGFiP / AIFE and the European Commission eInvoicing country page on 24 August 2026. Official source.
Belgium
| Date | What changes |
|---|---|
| 1 January 2026 | Issuing and receiving structured e-invoices is mandatory for domestic B2B. |
| 1 January 2028 | Near-real-time e-reporting is added on the Peppol 5-corner model. |
A three-month penalty tolerance ran to 31 March 2026 and has now passed.
Last verified against FPS Finance and the European Commission eInvoicing country page, including the Royal Decree of 8 July 2025 penalty scale and the tolerance window that closed on 31 March 2026 on 24 August 2026. Official source.
The rest
Beliq builds and validates for further markets whose B2B timelines sit further out, or where today’s obligation is a public-sector receive duty rather than a general B2B one: Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, whose regime is confirmed in outline and pre-confirmation in its detail. Each carries its own milestones, formats, pinned authority and verification stamp on the mandate calendar, which is the source this page renders from.
Some markets with active reforms are deliberately not on that list, because their detail is not settled or because Beliq does not pin their ruleset end to end. The clearance-model markets are the main examples.
Three things that trip people up
Receiving comes before issuing. Germany is the clearest case: the duty to be able to receive a structured e-invoice landed years before the duty to issue one, and it applied to every domestic business at once rather than phasing in by size. A company that reads only the issuing date discovers late that it has already been obliged to accept structured invoices from its suppliers.
A mandate is not a network. “Belgium requires e-invoicing” and “Belgium requires Peppol” are different statements, and the second is what determines what you have to procure. Some mandates route over the Peppol network, some through a certified national platform, some point-to-point. The format you generate and the channel you send over are separate decisions, and the mandate calendar states both per country.
The EU-wide date that does exist is later than most people think. ViDA introduces mandatory structured invoicing and digital reporting for cross-border B2B in 2030. It is not the reason your national deadline is in 2026 or 2027, and treating it as the horizon means missing the ones that arrive first.
Why the stamps are on the page
Every entry above renders from one dated source of truth, and each carries the authority it was checked against and the date of that check. That is deliberate. A stale date on a compliance vendor’s page is worse than no date, because a reader acts on it. Treat the stamp as a freshness signal and re-confirm against the linked authority before you commit a project plan to it.