EUR 1,183.63 is what a UK Shopify seller with EUR 6,200 of digital sales to EU consumers is carrying today, and nearly every one of them believes the number is zero.
The belief comes from one line of law read a step too fast. Article 59c of the VAT Directive gives a EUR 10,000 EU-wide threshold to a supplier established in one member state and not established in any other. Brexit took UK sellers out of that sentence. A US seller was never in it. For them the threshold is EUR 0, and destination VAT is due on the first euro of B2C sales into the EU: a download, a course, a plugin licence, or goods in a consignment up to EUR 150.
Ask a general chatbot when you have to register for EU VAT and it hands back the EUR 10,000 line, because that is the sentence written most often on the web. It is correct for a seller in Dublin. It is the opposite of the rule for the seller in Manchester or Austin who is asking.
The second mistake costs money in the other direction. Sellers who do work it out reach for VAT added on top: 6,200 x 21% = 1,302. A tax office treats money you already took from a consumer as VAT-inclusive, so the figure is 6,200 x 21 / 121 = 1,076.03 - EUR 225.97 lower, about 17% of the bill. Add the penalty rate your own tax office applies, 10% in this example, and you get EUR 107.60 on top. Total exposure today: EUR 1,183.63.
Change one input and the answer changes completely, which is the point. Take an EU-established micro-seller instead: 8,400 EUR of EU sales so far, 1,800 EUR a month, eight months of the year sold, 19% average destination rate. Threshold 10,000 EUR. Untaxed base 0. Exposure 0. What the tool returns instead is a date - the line is crossed in September 2026, one month out. That seller does not need a bill, they need to register before the sale that breaks the threshold rather than after it.
Take a US seller shipping low-value goods who is already well past the line: 42,000 EUR sold, 5,000 EUR a month, eleven months in, 23% destination rate, 15% penalty rate. Back VAT 7,853.66 EUR, penalty 1,178.05 EUR, total exposure 9,031.71 EUR. Same nine inputs, an answer nearly eight times larger.
Two ticks take the number back to zero, and both are places where general advice gets it wrong in the seller's favour. If a marketplace is the deemed supplier on those sales - Amazon, Etsy, an app store - the platform accounts for the VAT and you do not. And if you are already registered for OSS or IOSS, the question stops being exposure and becomes rhythm: OSS returns are quarterly, and the Q4 2026 return is due 31 January 2027.
The tool itself is a browser extension, the same one zip on Chrome, Edge and Firefox, with a free web page that runs the identical calculation. Nine inputs go in, starting with where you are established. Nine figures come out: the threshold that is actually yours, the month you cross it, months until then, untaxed base, back VAT, penalty, total exposure, what the sales are counted as, and the next action in a sentence.
None of your figures leave the browser, and the calculation never asks for a key: free in the popup, free on the web page, no sign-up and no limit.
The $60 full version sits on a different axis - what you keep and what repeats. It downloads the worked result as a .csv row you can hand to an accountant, and it sets a browser alarm for each OSS quarter deadline, the last day of the month after each quarter. One licence key per person or team seat, 7-day full refund. A VAT adviser bills about $150/hour, and a cross-border threshold review is rarely one hour.
Free in your browser (the same rules): https://getreadystack.com/tools/eu-vat-oss-threshold-check-2026
Licence ($60, once, 7-day refund): https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_CMYOeDFK0VNj2Tifzp2Hm8ULNvRMMGOyi1VV33R6VYF
Top comments (0)