EU VAT rates by commodity code

Which VAT rate applies to this product in that country, keyed to the same CN and CPA commodity codes your customs paperwork already uses.

2,667 commodity codes · 27 member states · 1,120 rate rows · rebuilt daily

# every rate for one commodity code, across the EU
curl https://humora2504.github.io/eu-vat-by-commodity-code/data/by-code/4901.json

# everything one country charges
curl https://humora2504.github.io/eu-vat-by-commodity-code/data/by-country/DE.json

# what changed since the last build
curl https://humora2504.github.io/eu-vat-by-commodity-code/data/changes.json

Published VAT tables give you a country's standard rate and its reduced rates. They do not tell you which goods each reduced rate covers, and that is the part that costs money. Two countries can both have a 10% reduced rate that applies to entirely different things. Undercharge VAT and you cannot recover it from the customer: the shortfall comes out of your margin, with interest.

The European Commission publishes this mapping in its Taxes in Europe Database. It is not published anywhere as open, machine-readable data. Now it is.

{
  "code": "4901 99 00",
  "entries": [
    { "member_state": "FR", "country": "France", "rate_value": "2.1",
      "rate_class": "REDUCED", "category_description": "Newspapers",
      "code_description": "Other",
      "comment": "Article 298 septies of the general tax code" }
  ]
}

The comment is the member state's own legal note, verbatim, not a summary.

data/changes.json lists every rate added, removed or changed since the last build, and every commodity code reclassified, with the count of codes affected:

{ "type": "rate_changed", "member_state": "DE", "old_value": "7.0",
  "new_value": "8.0", "affected_code_count": 84 }

That is the part worth watching. A rate moving is easy to notice. Eighty-four commodity codes quietly moving between categories is not.

The data is the European Commission's, licensed CC BY 4.0 under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU. You may already use it commercially, for free, today. We reshaped it into JSON and pages and added nothing of our own.

Attribution to use: © European Union, source: DG TAXUD TEDB

The scripts here are MIT.

Not tax advice. Not a substitute for your own verification. Rates change; the situation date is in every file. If a filing depends on it, check with your tax authority.

python3 scripts/fetch.py        # pull from TEDB
python3 scripts/build.py        # JSON + pages
python3 scripts/changefeed.py   # diff against the last build
python3 scripts/test.py         # 12 assertions

One thing that will cost you an afternoon if you try this yourself: TEDB's SOAP endpoint requires the SOAPAction header set to exactly urn:ec.europa.eu:taxud:tedb:services:v1:VatRetrievalService/RetrieveVatRates. Without it you get a bare 404 with an empty body, which reads like a wrong URL rather than a wrong header. Also, Greece is EL, not GR.

Nothing here is paywalled and nothing will be. If you want a change feed filtered to only the commodity codes you actually sell, that is a paid plan.