VAT and GST Registration Thresholds for Freelancers (2026)

A freelancer’s first VAT question is usually “at what point do I have to charge it?” The honest answer is that the number varies by a factor of infinity — one of the countries below has no threshold at all — and that for a lot of cross-border freelancers the number is the wrong thing to be watching in the first place.

The table

Country	Registration threshold	Measured over	Standard rate
Spain	None	—	21%
Netherlands	€2,200	Calendar year	21%
Portugal	€15,000	Previous calendar year, national territory	23%
Estonia	€40,000	From the start of the calendar year	24%
Georgia	GEL 100,000 (≈ €33,200)	Rolling 12 months	18%
UAE	AED 375,000 (≈ €89,300)	Past 12 months, or next 30 days	5%
Singapore	S$1,000,000 (≈ €677,300)	Past calendar year, or next 12 months	9%

Euro equivalents use ECB and National Bank of Georgia reference rates of 17 July 2026 and are indicative only; each threshold is legally denominated in its own currency.

The UAE also publishes a voluntary threshold of AED 187,500 (about €44,650), at which a business that wants to register may do so — useful mainly for someone with large input VAT to reclaim.

Registering and being exempt are not the same thing

The Dutch row is the one that shows why this table needs two columns and usually gets one, because the Netherlands runs two separate small-business rules and almost every published comparison shows only the larger number.

The registratiedrempel is a genuine registration threshold: with turnover of at most €2,200 a year you are not required to register as a VAT entrepreneur at all. No number, no invoices, no returns, no input recovery. It is unavailable to anyone who must register with the Chamber of Commerce or who is already registered for VAT, and it ends the moment turnover passes €2,200 in a calendar year.

The kleineondernemersregeling — the KOR, at €20,000 — is a different animal. You are a registered VAT business that has opted into an exemption: you charge no BTW, file no returns and reclaim nothing, but you are inside the system and chose to be. The €20,000 limit must hold for both the year you register for it and the year before.

Most tables list the Netherlands at €20,000. That is the right number for the question “when must I start charging VAT” and the wrong one for “when must I register”, which is €2,200 — a difference of roughly nine times. The distinction matters most to someone testing an idea on the side, who may be under the exemption limit and still obliged to register.

Portugal’s €15,000 and Estonia’s €40,000 are registration thresholds in the first sense. Spain, having neither, is covered next.

Spain is not a low threshold. It is no threshold.

Spain runs no small-business VAT exemption. An autónomo issuing their first €200 invoice charges 21% IVA on it and files quarterly returns from that quarter onwards. There is no turnover level below which the obligation switches off.

This is not an oversight, and it is currently in front of a court. Council Directive (EU) 2020/285 gave every Member State until 31 December 2024 to put the modernised small-enterprise VAT scheme into national law. The Commission sent Spain a letter of formal notice on 31 January 2025, a reasoned opinion on 17 July 2025, and on 11 March 2026 referred Spain to the Court of Justice of the European Union asking for financial penalties. Spain, the Commission notes, is the only Member State that has not transposed it.

The Commission’s own account of Spain’s position is the part that matters to a freelancer: Spain has indicated it will not apply the optional exemption inside its own territory, and prioritises its existing simplified regimes instead. Whatever the Court decides about the transposition, the practical outcome for someone invoicing from Madrid is unlikely to be a Spanish exemption. What Spain does still have to transpose is the machinery that lets Spanish small businesses use other countries’ exemptions — the cross-border half, covered below.

If you are weighing Spain against Portugal, this belongs in the calculation alongside the tax and contribution figures in our Portugal vs Spain comparison.

What the threshold actually counts

Here is the part that reorders everything. None of these thresholds counts your revenue. Each counts a specific, narrower thing — supplies whose place of supply is that country.

The statutory wording is explicit about it. Portugal’s CIVA art. 53.º sets the exemption by reference to annual turnover “em território nacional”. Estonia’s rule bites when supply “the place of creation of which is Estonia” exceeds €40,000 from the start of the calendar year. Georgia’s Tax Code counts VAT-taxable transactions, and services supplied to a business located abroad have their place of supply outside Georgia — outside the scope, and therefore outside the threshold.

For B2B services inside the EU, the place of supply is where the customer is established, and the customer accounts for the VAT under the reverse charge. So consider a designer registered in Portugal billing €60,000 a year to companies in Germany and the Netherlands. Their invoicing is four times the Portuguese threshold. Their Portuguese-scope turnover is zero.

That does not make them invisible. Reverse-charged B2B sales carry their own obligations — verifying each client’s VAT number in VIES, and filing the quarterly recapitulative statement even when the tax due is nil. We work through those in how to invoice international clients. But it does mean that the number most freelancers watch is often not the number that will catch them.

Where the threshold is the right thing to watch is B2C: selling to consumers, where the place of supply is generally the supplier’s own country, and to domestic business clients.

The second layer, since 2025

From 1 January 2025 the EU’s SME scheme lets a small business established in one Member State use another Member State’s exemption, which was previously impossible — an exemption used to stop at the border. Eligibility depends on two ceilings at once: the national threshold of the country where you want the exemption, and a Union annual turnover of EUR 100 000 across the whole EU, which must not be exceeded either.

The compliance shape is a single registration, quarterly reporting, and simplified invoices. This is the scheme Spain has not implemented, which is why a Spanish freelancer currently cannot use, say, Portugal’s €15,000 exemption on Portuguese-scope sales while a Portuguese freelancer can use another Member State’s.

Crossing is a date, not a year

Thresholds are not assessed once a year at leisure. Each of these systems ties registration to the moment of crossing, and the deadlines are short.

• Estonia — the obligation arises on the day the €40,000 is exceeded, and the application is due within three working days. Registration is backdated to the day of crossing, not the day of applying.
• UAE — registration is required if taxable supplies and imports exceeded AED 375,000 over the previous 12 months or are expected to exceed it within the next 30 days, with 30 days to file the application.
• Singapore — two tests. Retrospective: check at the end of the calendar year whether taxable turnover passed S$1 million. Prospective: if at any point you can reasonably expect to exceed S$1 million in the next 12 months, apply within 30 days of forming that expectation. Since 1 July 2025, businesses caught by the prospective test are registered two months from the date of the forecast rather than immediately.
• Portugal — the exemption is judged on the previous calendar year’s turnover, so a year that ends above €15,000 ends the exemption for the following one.
• Netherlands — the €2,200 registration threshold ends the moment turnover passes it within a calendar year, not at year end. The KOR runs on a different clock again: its €20,000 limit is tested against both the year you register for it and the year before.

The prospective tests are the ones people miss. In the UAE and Singapore, a signed contract can create the obligation before a single invoice is paid.

What registering actually changes

Crossing a threshold is usually described as a cost, and for a B2C freelancer it is: your prices either rise by the rate or your margin absorbs it, and in Estonia the rate is 24%, in Portugal 23%, in Spain 21%.

For a B2B freelancer it is close to neutral, and sometimes positive. Business clients reclaim the VAT you charge them, so it does not change what they pay in substance — while registration lets you reclaim the VAT on your own laptop, software, coworking desk and accountant. That is the reason the UAE publishes a voluntary threshold at half the mandatory one: below AED 375,000, registering can be worth doing on purpose.

Registration also has a signalling effect nobody puts in a table. A VAT number is the difference between looking like a business and looking like a person with an invoice template, and in some markets clients ask for one before they ask for a quote.

What this table is not

These are the general registration thresholds for a resident supplier of services. They are not the whole system. Distance-selling rules, digital services to consumers in other EU countries, the import of goods, and non-resident suppliers all have their own thresholds — frequently zero — and none of them is modelled here. The UAE, for instance, requires a non-resident making taxable supplies in the UAE to register regardless of value where no one else is accounting for the tax.

Nor does being under a threshold always mean you should stay under it. Estonia’s €40,000 is a decision point for an e-resident company rather than a limit — the tradeoffs are in our Estonia e-Residency taxes guide, and the running cost of the structure is in the Estonia company cost calculator. The Dutch KOR is the same kind of choice: opting out of BTW costs you the input VAT on your laptop and your accountant, which for a B2B freelancer can easily exceed the administrative saving. What a Dutch freelancer pays on the income side is in the Netherlands ZZP tax calculator and the Netherlands taxes guide.

Thresholds verified against the official sources listed below on the dates shown. Currency conversions are indicative and move daily; the legal thresholds do not.