Intra-EU VAT in Spain: when the invoice carries no VAT

Selling to a business in another European Union country usually gets summarised in one sentence: “you invoice without VAT”. The sentence is true and it is incomplete, and what is missing is exactly what costs money when it goes wrong.

Invoicing without VAT is not a property of the customer. It is an exemption, the one in article 25.Uno of the Spanish VAT Act, and an exemption has requirements¹. Since 1 March 2020 two of those requirements have stopped being formalities: the buyer has to give you a VAT number from another Member State, and you have to include the operation in form 349. The preamble of Royal Decree-Law 3/2020, which transposed the European directive behind the change, puts it in these words: “as a material and not formal condition”³.

The four situations, and they do not share a rule

The intra-EU regime covers four different things, and lumping them under one idea is where almost every mistake starts. Article 79.1 of the Regulation lists them²:

The first two rows depend on goods being transported. The last two have no transport to prove: what locates them is where the customer is. That is why a single French client you sell machinery to and also provide maintenance for will generate two separate records in form 349, one under code E and one under code S.

Selling goods: the exemption and its two material conditions

Article 25.Uno exempts supplies of goods dispatched or transported to the territory of another Member State “provided that the acquirer is a business or professional or a legal person not acting as such, holding a value added tax identification number assigned by a Member State other than the Kingdom of Spain, who has communicated that tax identification number to the seller”¹.

Read it slowly, because there are three linked demands: the customer must have a number, that number must be from another Member State, and they must have communicated it to you. A customer who exists but does not hand over their VAT number is no use to you.

And the next paragraph adds the fourth: “the application of this exemption shall be conditional on the seller having included those operations in the recapitulative statement of intra-community operations”¹.

From which follows the consequence almost no page writes down. If the operation is not in form 349, the supply is not exempt. And a supply that is not exempt is a domestic supply, carrying Spanish VAT on the whole taxable amount. On €60,000 of machinery at the standard rate that is €12,600 of tax, on an invoice that went out without VAT and that the customer has already paid. Unless the contract lets you charge it afterwards, that money comes out of your margin. Compare it with the penalty for not filing the statement, which starts at €300: the fine is the small part of this.

And if the customer will not give you the number

Then you invoice Spanish VAT. The sale goes in your form 303 like any domestic operation and appears in no form 349, because article 79.1.1.º b) of the Regulation expressly excludes from the statement supplies made “to customers who have not been assigned a value added tax identification number in any other Member State of the Community”².

That exclusion sounds like a simplification and is not. It is there because the operation was never an exempt intra-community supply, so there is nothing to tell the other Member State. The order matters: first you decide whether there is an exemption, and only then do you report.

How the transport is proved

When the tax office questions an exemption, what it asks is whether the goods left. Article 13.2 of the Regulation accepts “any means of evidence admitted in law” and refers in particular to the items of evidence in article 45 bis of Implementing Regulation (EU) 282/2011, distinguishing whether the transport was arranged by the seller, the buyer or a third party on behalf of either². In practice: keep the transport document, the CMR, the carrier’s invoice, the delivery note signed at destination, the insurance certificate. An order and an invoice do not prove a transport.

Buying goods: the reverse charge, and why it comes to zero

When you buy goods from a supplier in another Member State, they apply their own exemption and invoice you without VAT. The VAT does not disappear: it changes hands. Article 13.1.ª of the Act makes intra-community acquisitions of goods for consideration subject to Spanish VAT where they are made by businesses, professionals or legal persons not acting as such, and the transferor is a business or professional¹.

In your form 303 that becomes two entries: you charge yourself the Spanish VAT those goods would carry and deduct it in the same return. Net, zero. And here is the mistake made most often: because nothing is paid, many people conclude there is nothing to report. The neutral result belongs to the 303. In form 349 the acquisition is a record under code A, because article 79.1.2.º includes it², and because Member States cross-check these lists: if your German supplier reported the supply and you did not report the acquisition, the mismatch surfaces in the system.

Article 13.1.ª takes seven cases out of the intra-community acquisition, and they are worth recognising because they change which return the operation appears in: purchases from a seller benefiting from the small-business franchise regime in their own State; second-hand goods, works of art, antiques and collectors’ items taxed under the special regime at origin; purchases matching supplies that have to be installed or assembled in Spain; distance sales; goods subject to excise duty; acquisitions whose supply at origin was exempt under paragraphs one to eleven of article 22; and gas, electricity, heat or cooling supplied through networks¹.

Services: what decides is where the customer is

With services there is no cargo to follow. The Regulation defines an intra-community supply of services by four cumulative requirements: that under the place-of-supply rules it is not treated as supplied in Spain; that it is taxable and not exempt in another Member State; that the customer is a business or professional acting as such with its seat, a fixed establishment or its residence in that State, or a legal person not acting as a business but holding an identification number issued by that State; and that the taxable person is that customer². Those are the code S ones.

The intra-community acquisition of services is the mirror image: a service taxable and not exempt in Spain, supplied by someone established in the Community but outside Spain, for which you are the taxable person². Code I, and the same reverse charge as for goods: you charge yourself and deduct.

One practical detail the Spanish tax agency clarifies in its own FAQ: the intra-community transport of goods contracted in connection with an acquisition is also reportable, because it is a service received. In other words, a single purchase in Germany can generate two records for you, one under code A for the goods and one under code I for the carriage, where the carrier is in another Member State and invoices you without VAT.

What gets reported, when, and in how many records

Form 349 carries, for each counterparty, its identification details and the total taxable amount of the operations with it, in euros and by reference to the tax point date where the consideration was in another currency².

The rule that decides how many records you have is in the annex to the Order: several operations with the same counterparty in the same period “must be accumulated by operation code so as to report a single record for each operation code and period”, and triangular operations take a separate record even where that counterparty already has one⁴. So a customer you sell to, buy from and supply a service to is three records, not one.

The filing frequency, and the threshold that only looks at what you sell

Monthly is the general rule: article 10.1 of the Order states it first, and the quarterly option in article 10.2 is the exception⁴. It applies only where neither in the quarter being examined nor in each of the four preceding natural quarters the amount passed €50,000 excluding VAT.

What matters is what goes into that amount, and article 81.2.2.º of the Regulation is the precise text: “the supplies of goods that must be reported in the recapitulative statement and the intra-community services supplied”². Both magnitudes are outbound. An acquisition is not a supply and a service received is not a service supplied, so codes A and I do not count. A workshop importing two million euros of German machinery and selling nothing into the EU files form 349 quarterly for life, however firmly almost any summary of this form tells it otherwise.

And breaking the threshold once costs more than it looks. Because article 10.2 looks four quarters back, the quarter that broke it stays inside that window for the four that follow: you cannot return to quarterly filing before the fifth quarter after it, about fifteen months.

The two deadlines that get written down wrongly

The due date is the first twenty calendar days of the following month, with two exceptions the Order gathers into one sentence⁴. July may be filed throughout August and the first twenty days of September; and August is due within those same twenty days under the general rule, so a monthly filer presents two statements for two different months on one day. The tax agency’s calendar publishes them together, under a single heading: “Julio y agosto”⁸.

The second is the last period of the year, December or the fourth quarter, which gets thirty calendar days of January rather than twenty. Article 30.5 of Act 39/2015 then acts on both: a day falling on a Saturday, Sunday or holiday moves to the next working day⁷. In 2026, 20 September is a Sunday, so July and August fall due on the 21st, which is exactly what the agency publishes. In 2027, 30 January is a Saturday, so the last period of 2026 leaves January and falls due on 1 February.

A worked example with real numbers

A Spanish company sells machinery to a French customer and invoices €18,000 in January, €18,000 in February and €18,000 in March. In the four preceding quarters it never passed €50,000.

The cumulative total is €18,000 at the end of January, €36,000 at the end of February and €54,000 at the end of March. The threshold breaks in the third month. The Order only spells out the first-month and second-month cases, and with the crossing in the third the months elapsed since the beginning of the quarter are all three, while the twenty days that follow are the same window the quarterly statement would have used: it files a single statement covering all three months, due on 20 April 2026, exactly as if nothing had changed. What changes is the following quarters, because it cannot return to quarterly filing before quarter 2 of 2027.

Move one figure. Had the same €54,000 been invoiced as €30,000 in January and €30,000 in February, the threshold would break in the second month: it would file one statement covering January and February together, carrying the “X” truncated-quarter mark at position 186 of the type 1 record⁵, by 20 March, and another for March by 20 April.

Now suppose that in either scenario a €60,000 supply to that same customer is forgotten. The penalty for three missing records, at the floor of the fourth paragraph of article 198.1, is €300⁶. The VAT at risk from losing the article 25.Uno exemption is €12,600. Forty-two times more, and on an invoice already collected without VAT.

If you got it wrong: rectify, and do it before they ask

The rectification does not go to the period it corrects. Article 80.3 of the Regulation puts it “in the recapitulative statement of the declaration period in which it was notified to the recipient of the goods or services”², and the annex to the Order provides a dedicated rectification record, carrying the original operation’s code and a reference to the year and period being corrected⁴.

On the penalty, two things get confused often. The scale that applies to this form is the fourth paragraph of article 198.1, twenty euros per item or set of items relating to one same person, with a floor of €300 and a ceiling of €20,000, because the 349 reports third parties and so discharges the duty in articles 93 and 94 of the General Tax Act⁶. And filing late on your own initiative halves both the penalty and its two limits, so the floor drops to €150⁶. What does not apply here is the 30 per cent reduction for agreeing with the assessment: article 188.1 grants it only to penalties “imposed under articles 191 to 197”, and these are not among them⁶.

One point the Spanish rules leave open is worth knowing about. Article 25.Uno conditions the exemption on form 349 “under the conditions established by regulation”, and those conditions have never been enacted: article 13 of the Regulation, which is where proving this exemption is governed, does not mention the recapitulative statement². So exactly how a statement filed late restores the exemption is not settled in the regulation. What the rules do offer are the two routes above, rectifying and filing before being asked, and neither is a reason to leave it pending.

One more thing: annual filing no longer exists

Until 2020, article 81 of the Regulation let anyone under €35,000 of operations and €15,000 of exempt supplies file the recapitulative statement once a year. Paragraphs 4 and 5 that allowed it were repealed by Royal Decree-Law 3/2020², and the preamble of that decree explains why, with a piece of reasoning that ties both ends of this page together: once inclusion in form 349 became a substantive requirement of the exemption, it was necessary “for compliance with this requirement to sit close in time to the date of the operation”³. An annual statement would have left a material condition of the exemption unconfirmed for a whole year.

If you find a guide offering you the annual option, you are reading something written before March 2020, and probably also before the change that makes your VAT-free invoice depend on this form.