The catch is what happens at the other end. Import VAT, and increasingly customs duty, lands on goods at the EU border, and consumer sales, digital services and low-value parcels can pull you into registering for VAT inside the EU. "No UK VAT" is where this question starts, not where it ends.
Since the end of 2020, "do I charge my EU customer VAT?" almost never has a one-line answer. It splits four ways, goods or services, business or consumer, and each branch is taxed somewhere different. This is the map, and the places where a wrong turn is expensive.
Common mistakes & confusionsWhere post-Brexit EU sales trip exporters up
- Thinking "no UK VAT" means "no VAT to deal with". Zero-rating your export settles the UK side only. Import VAT, and now duty, still arise at the EU border, and if you agreed to deliver duty-paid, that bill is yours, not your customer's.
- Zero-rating a goods export without the evidence to back it. The export is only zero-rated if you obtain and keep proof the goods left the UK, generally within three months. No valid evidence, and HMRC can treat the sale as standard-rated and recover 20% from you after the event.
- Treating every service the same. A service to an EU business is taxed where the customer belongs, so you charge nothing and they reverse-charge. The identical service to an EU consumer is usually still UK VAT. Business or consumer changes the answer completely.
- Assuming digital sales to EU consumers carry UK VAT. Broadcasting, telecoms and e-services to EU consumers are taxed where the consumer is, not where you are. With UK access to VAT MOSS gone, that means registering through the EU's One-Stop Shop or in each country.
- Confusing the reverse charge with your own evidence duty. Your customer accounting for VAT abroad does not remove your paperwork. You still need their VAT number and proof they are in business, or the supply can default to consumer treatment, and UK VAT.
- Forgetting Northern Ireland is different. For goods, Northern Ireland stays aligned with the EU VAT area, so a movement that is an export from Great Britain is not the same from Northern Ireland. Blending the two misstates the whole transaction.
Start with one question: goods or services?
Since the end of 2020 there is no single answer to "do I charge my EU customer VAT", because the rules split before you even reach the rate. First, are you selling goods or services? Then, is your customer a business or a consumer? Those two questions give four combinations, and each one is taxed in a different place.
Get the branch right and the rest follows. Guess it, and you can end up charging VAT you should not, or missing VAT you owe somewhere else entirely. The rest of this article walks the four branches, and the points where a wrong turn actually costs money.
Goods to the EU: a zero-rated export, if you can prove it
When you send goods from Great Britain to a customer in the EU, you are making an export, and exports are zero-rated for UK VAT under section 30 of the VAT Act 1994. You charge 0%, not 20%. The word carrying the weight there is "if". Zero-rating is conditional: the goods have to physically leave the UK within the time limit, generally three months from the sale, and you have to obtain and keep valid evidence that they did, either the official export declaration and its movement reference, or the commercial shipping and transport documents. That evidence has to form a clean trail from your sale to the goods leaving.
Miss it and the relief goes with it. HMRC can treat an unsupported export as a normal UK sale and assess the 20% you never charged, after the event, out of your margin. Whether you arrange the transport or your customer collects the goods changes the detailed conditions you have to satisfy, but not that basic point. And zero-rated is not the same as outside the scope: those export sales still count towards your £90,000 UK registration threshold, so a growing export business can be pushed into UK registration by sales that carry no UK VAT at all.
The part that catches people: VAT and duty at the EU end
Zero-rating settles the UK side of the sale. It does nothing about what happens when the goods reach the EU, and that is where most of the surprises live. On arrival, the goods meet import VAT, and often customs duty, in the destination country. Who pays it depends on the terms you sold on. If you sold delivered with duties paid, the bill is yours, and you may need to register for VAT there or appoint a representative to handle it. If your customer is the importer of record, it lands on them, sometimes as an unexpected charge on the doorstep that becomes a complaint or a refused parcel.
For low-value parcels to EU consumers, the EU's Import One-Stop Shop lets you charge the right VAT at checkout and settle it through a single registration, which keeps deliveries clean. But the value limits that decide when it applies, and the customs-duty treatment of small consignments, are themselves changing across 2026, and they vary by country. This is exactly the kind of position worth mapping to your real products, price points and destinations rather than assuming last year's rule still holds.
A VAT Expert Call maps your EU sales, goods and services, business and consumer, against where VAT falls and where you might need to register.
Services to an EU business: you charge nothing, they account for it
Services follow a completely different logic from goods, and the pivot is who your customer is. For a service to an EU business, the general rule in section 7A of the VAT Act 1994 places the supply where your customer belongs, not where you are. So you charge no UK VAT, and your business customer accounts for the VAT themselves, under the reverse charge, in their own country.
That is genuinely simpler, but it is not paperwork-free. You need to be able to show the customer really is in business, normally by holding and checking their EU VAT number, and to show the service is one that follows the general rule rather than one of the exceptions. If you cannot evidence the business status, the supply can fall back to consumer treatment, and consumer treatment is where UK VAT can reappear.
Services to an EU consumer: usually UK VAT, until it is digital
Sell the same service to an EU consumer and the general rule flips: the supply is treated as made where you belong, so you charge UK VAT, exactly as you would to a customer in Manchester. For many service businesses, that is the end of the matter.
The exception that matters is digital. Broadcasting, telecommunications and electronically supplied services to EU consumers, apps, downloads, online courses, streaming, software, are taxed where the consumer is, not where you are. Since the UK lost access to the VAT Mini One-Stop Shop after Brexit, accounting for that EU VAT means registering through the EU's One-Stop Shop in a member state, or country by country. A few other services, anything tied to land, admission to physical events, and some hire, carry their own place-of-supply rules whoever the customer is. So for services, the general rule is only ever the starting point: it is the digital carve-out, and these named exceptions, that usually decide whether you owe VAT inside the EU at all.
Northern Ireland is a different country for VAT on goods
One boundary worth stating plainly. This article describes Great Britain. For goods, Northern Ireland stays aligned with the EU VAT area under the Windsor Framework, so a movement of goods between Northern Ireland and the EU is not an export in the way the same movement from Great Britain is. If you are based in, or route goods through, Northern Ireland, the goods rules above do not map straight onto your position, and the two should never be blended in one return without checking. Services broadly follow the UK-wide rules.
When you might need expert VAT advisory
The general rules are learnable in an afternoon. What they cannot tell you is where your specific sales land once you cross all four branches at once. In practice, the situations below are where a senior specialist's read meaningfully improves the outcome:
- You sell goods to EU consumers and need to decide whether to register for the EU's Import One-Stop Shop or leave the import VAT to your customers
- You supply services to a mix of EU businesses and consumers and want each stream placed on the right side of the reverse-charge line
- Your digital products sell to EU consumers and you need the One-Stop Shop registration set up in the right country and reported correctly
- You deliver goods on a duty-paid basis and want the VAT and customs cost modelled before you quote a price
- You are not confident your export evidence would survive an HMRC check
- You are an accountant onboarding a client that has been trading across the border without the VAT treatment ever pinned down
Whether you're a business owner selling across the border or an accountant untangling a client's EU position, we focus on the VAT questions where extra expertise pays off, and we work in plain English.