The short version
Today, the €10,000 cross-border threshold counts all your distance sales to consumers in other EU countries. From 1 January 2027, under the ViDA package, it will only count distance sales dispatched from your own home member state. Sales you ship from stock held in another EU country — a fulfilment warehouse abroad, for example — will stop counting toward the €10,000.
If you dispatch everything from a single EU country (the usual case for a solo founder, freelancer, or small shop), this change doesn't affect your calculation at all. The threshold, the year-based cumulative test, and the home-vs-destination VAT treatment all stay exactly as they are today.
The rule today, and from 2027
The mechanic of the threshold isn't changing — only which sales you add up when you measure it against €10,000:
| Now (through 2026) | From 1 January 2027 | |
|---|---|---|
| What counts toward €10,000 | All cross-border B2C distance sales of goods and TBE services, wherever they're dispatched from | Only cross-border B2C distance sales dispatched from your own home member state |
| The threshold figure | €10,000 combined, EU-wide | €10,000 combined, EU-wide (unchanged) |
| Below the threshold | Charge home-country VAT | Charge home-country VAT (unchanged) |
| Once you cross it | Destination-country VAT via OSS | Destination-country VAT via OSS (unchanged) |
| Sales shipped from foreign stock | Count toward the €10,000 | No longer count toward the €10,000 |
In other words: the threshold is being narrowed, not widened. Fewer sales count toward it, so a seller who dispatches partly from foreign warehouses could find themselves under the €10,000 line in 2027 even with the same turnover.
Who this actually affects
The change only bites if where you dispatch from is mixed. Two groups:
Not affected: single-country sellers
If all your cross-border sales are dispatched from the one EU country you're established in, every sale already originates in your home member state — so the "only count home-dispatched sales" rule counts exactly the same sales it does today. Nothing to change, nothing to recompute. This is most small sellers, and it's the case the calculator models.
Affected: sellers dispatching from foreign stock
If you hold inventory in more than one EU country and ship to consumers from those foreign warehouses — the classic example is a multi-country Amazon FBA setup — then from 2027 those foreign-dispatched sales drop out of the €10,000 count. That doesn't necessarily make life simpler: holding stock in another member state usually creates a VAT registration obligation there regardless of the €10,000 threshold, which is its own question. If this is you, this is a good moment to talk to an accountant rather than lean on a threshold calculator — including this one, which deliberately doesn't model multi-country establishments.
What is not changing
It's worth being clear about what stays the same, because a lot of what you'll read about ViDA is about other parts of a large package (e-invoicing, platform rules, single VAT registration) that don't touch the small-seller threshold:
- The €10,000 figure itself — same number, still one combined EU-wide total, not per-country.
- The year-based cumulative test — you still check both last calendar year's total and this year's running total; it's not becoming a rolling or real-time monitoring rule.
- The home-country-below, destination-country-above VAT treatment, still declared through OSS once you cross.
- The edge cases: excise goods (alcohol, tobacco) still get no threshold at all, non-euro sellers still use their fixed national-currency figure, and Northern Ireland still runs its own separate UK/HMRC threshold. See the decision guide for those.
Status and timing
The change comes from the EU's VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) package, Directive 2025/516. The distance-selling threshold scoping was originally floated for 2026 and lands on 1 January 2027 after the package's ratification timeline slipped. As with any tax change, confirm the final effective date and wording against primary sources close to the time — but the direction (home-dispatch-only scoping) is corroborated across multiple independent tax-advisory outlets (vatcalc.com, VATupdate).
Want to know where you stand right now? The calculator tracks the €10,000 threshold under today's rules — and if you dispatch from a single EU country, exactly what will keep mattering in 2027.
Keep reading
- The €10,000 threshold calculator — enter your transactions, see exactly where (if anywhere) you cross.
- Do I need to register for EU OSS? — a six-question decision guide.
- 3 worked examples of how the running total plays out, transaction by transaction.
- Embed the calculator on your own VAT/tax writeup with one line of HTML.
Disclaimer
This explainer and the calculator are a self-check aid, not tax advice or a filing system. The 1 January 2027 change described here comes from the ViDA package (Directive 2025/516) as reported by multiple independent tax-advisory outlets; it is not a reading of the primary legislation, and effective dates and wording can move — verify against the EU Commission's OSS guidance or an accountant before acting. This tool doesn't model VAT-registered establishments in multiple member states (including sellers holding stock in more than one EU country, e.g. multi-country Amazon FBA) — the exact group most affected by this change.