How to Invoice International Clients (2026)

An invoice to a client in another country has to answer two questions that a domestic one does not. Do you add VAT, and if so whose? And how much of the amount you billed actually reaches your account?

Both have definite answers. Neither is obvious from the invoice template your accounting software gives you.

Whether you charge VAT depends on who your client is

Inside the EU, the place where a service is taxed is set by three rules, and which one applies turns on whether your client is a business or a private individual.

Business clients are covered by article 44 of the VAT Directive: the place of taxation is where the customer is established. Not where you are. If you are in Portugal invoicing a company in Germany, the supply is taxed in Germany, and under article 196 the German customer accounts for the VAT themselves. You invoice without VAT and note that the reverse charge applies.

Private clients are covered by article 45: the place of taxation is where the supplier is established. Invoicing a consumer in Germany from Portugal, you charge Portuguese VAT at your own rate.

Private clients outside the EU are a special case under article 59. For services like advertising, consultancy, legal and financial work, the place of taxation shifts to where that person is established — so it leaves the EU VAT system.

Your client	Where the service is taxed	What you put on the invoice
Business in another EU country	Client’s country (art. 44)	No VAT, reverse charge note, client’s VAT number
Business outside the EU	Outside EU VAT scope	No EU VAT
Consumer in the EU	Your country (art. 45)	Your own country’s VAT rate
Consumer outside the EU, listed services	Client’s country (art. 59)	No EU VAT

The practical consequence for most freelancers is pleasant: if you sell professional services to businesses, almost every foreign invoice you issue carries no VAT at all. The obligation is to prove the client is a business, which means holding and quoting a valid VAT number, and to keep the reverse charge wording on the document.

Registration thresholds decide whether you are in the system

None of the above matters until you are VAT-registered, and the threshold varies enormously. These are the figures we have verified against primary sources for the countries this site covers:

Country	VAT / GST rate	Registration or exemption threshold
Estonia	24%	€40,000 of Estonian turnover
Georgia	18%	₾100,000
Portugal	—	€15,000 exemption limit (CIVA art. 53)
Singapore	9% (GST)	Not verified here
UAE	5%	Not verified here

Two of these deserve a note. Estonia’s threshold counts Estonian turnover, so an e-resident company invoicing businesses elsewhere may never approach it however much it bills. Georgia treats services supplied to foreign businesses as supplied outside Georgia, with the same practical effect. In both cases the headline rate is close to irrelevant for a pure export business — which is a large part of why those two jurisdictions appeal to freelancers in the first place.

Where a threshold is marked not verified, we have not confirmed it from an official source and are not going to guess at it. Check the tax authority before relying on a number.

The reverse charge comes with paperwork attached

Not charging VAT is the easy part. The obligations that come with it are the part people discover late.

You have to establish that the client really is a taxable person, because that is what moves the supply under article 44 in the first place. The Commission runs VIES, a service that checks whether a VAT number is registered in the relevant national database. Validating before you invoice is not a formality: if the number turns out to be wrong, the basis on which you left VAT off the invoice is gone, and the liability lands on you rather than on the client who gave you the bad number.

You then have to report those supplies. A taxable person making intra-Community supplies files a recapitulative statement with their own tax administration, giving the totals supplied to each customer in another member state for the period, quarterly in the standard case. The customer VAT numbers you quote on it must be correct, which is the same requirement arriving from the other direction.

This is the step that catches freelancers who correctly worked out that their invoices carry no VAT and reasonably concluded there was nothing further to do. There is: a nil VAT charge is still a reportable transaction.

The system is under reform. The Commission has proposed replacing recapitulative statements with transaction-level digital reporting, on the basis that the current quarterly summaries are too slow to detect fraud. That is a proposal rather than current law, but it points at where the compliance burden is heading — more granular, and closer to real time.

Getting paid costs more than the fee you can see

The second question is what survives the transfer, and here the published fee is the smaller half of the answer.

Every cross-border payment is charged twice: once as a stated fee, and once through the exchange rate you are given, which is compared against nothing because the mid-market rate is not shown to you anywhere in the flow.

PayPal publishes both numbers, which makes it easy to demonstrate. Its US merchant schedule charges 4.99% plus $0.49 on international commercial transactions, and applies a 4% spread when converting currency. On a $5,000 invoice that is roughly $440 all in — about 8.8%, of which the invisible half is $190.

Wise publishes a rate policy rather than a rate: it converts at the mid-market rate with no markup, and charges a stated fee starting from 0.57%. The hidden component is zero by design, so the quoted percentage is the whole cost.

A bank wire is the case with no published answer at all. The wire fee appears on the tariff; the exchange margin does not appear anywhere. On the same $5,000 with a typical 3% margin and a $15 fee, the margin is roughly 91% of what the transfer costs you and none of it is itemised.

You can put your own numbers in with our International Payment Fee Calculator, which separates the two and shows what lands.

Practical points that save arguments later

Bill in a currency you and the client both accept, and say on the invoice which one it is — an amount with a bare currency symbol invites a dispute when the symbol is shared by several currencies.

Quote your own tax identification number and the client’s VAT number where the reverse charge applies. Payment terms in days, with a clear due date rather than “on receipt”. Bank details in the format the corridor needs, IBAN and BIC for Europe, which prevents the repair fees that intermediary banks charge for incomplete instructions.

If your rate was set against a domestic benchmark, check it still works once the transfer cost is deducted — our Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator works backwards from the take-home you want.

What this guide does not cover

The VAT rules above are the general place-of-supply rules for services. Several situations follow different ones: services connected with immovable property, passenger transport, admission to events, and digital services supplied to consumers, which have their own regime and a one-stop-shop filing system.

Nor does this cover what you owe on the profit once the money arrives. That depends on where you are tax resident, which is a separate question from where the invoice was taxed, and one the country guides on this site each answer for a specific place.