Belgium VAT rate
Standard rate of Belgian value added tax (taxe sur la valeur ajoutée / belasting over de toegevoegde waarde), fixed by arrêté royal n° 20 of 20 July 1970 under the Code de la TVA.
| Current value | 21 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 1996-01-01 |
| Official source | SPF Finances / FOD Financiën, 'Taux TVA' (official rate page of the Belgian tax authority), which lists 'Taux standard : 21 % (R03)'; legal instrument: arrêté royal n° 20 du 20 juillet 1970 fixant les taux de la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée et déterminant la répartition des biens et des services selon ces taux, art. 1er, taken under art. 37 of the Code de la TVA |
| Last verified | 2026-07-22 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
Standard rate 21%, re-confirmed on the SPF Finances rate page on 2026-07-22. Belgium operates FOUR bands and only the standard one is served here: 21% standard (tax-authority code R03), 12% intermediate (R02), 6% reduced (R01) and an exceptional 0% band (R00, applied to daily and weekly newspapers and certain recovered materials — distinct from exemptions under art. 44 of the Code de la TVA and from zero-rating of intra-EU supplies and exports). RATE-SETTING MECHANISM: art. 37 of the Code de la TVA empowers the King, by decree deliberated in the Council of Ministers, to fix the rates and to allocate goods and services between them; the operative text is therefore arrêté royal n° 20 and the Tableaux A (6%) and B (12%) annexed to it, not the Code itself. This matters for citation: a change in what is taxed at 6% or 12% is an amendment to AR n° 20's annexes, which happens far more often than a change to the 21% figure. EFFECTIVE-DATE CAVEAT: the 21% level has been in force since 1 January 1996 (raised from 20.5%), but the amending instrument was NOT located or loaded in this pass — the SPF Finances page cited confirms the 21% level currently in force without dating it, and the arrêté royal of 1 December 1995 (MB 16 December 1995), which does enter into force on 1 January 1996, was checked and turns out to insert temporary housing provisions (new arts. 1ter and 1quater) rather than to amend the standard rate in art. 1er. Treat the 1996-01-01 date as sourced to secondary reporting until the amending decree is identified. RECENT REDUCED-RATE MOVEMENTS (none of which touch the 21% figure served here): the loi-programme du 18 juillet 2025 (MB 29 July 2025, numac 2025005578), Chapter 6, was loaded and verified in this pass — it amends the annex to AR n° 20 to EXCLUDE from the reduced rates any operation comprising both the supply and the installation in a building of the constituent elements of a fossil-fuel central heating system (so fossil-fuel boilers installed in renovation or demolition-and-reconstruction projects move to 21%), and it restates the demolition-and-reconstruction reduced-rate regime with a 200 m² habitable-area cap for works and 175 m² for sales, owner-occupation or long-term (including 15-year social) letting conditions, prior declaration requirements and 5-to-15-year clawback rules; that chapter entered into force on the day of publication, 29 July 2025. Widely reported further 2026 reduced-rate changes — the abolition of the historic 12% rate for coal (moving coal to 21%) and a five-year 6% rate for heat pumps from 1 January 2026 — are NOT contained in that loi-programme and their enacting instrument was not identified in this pass; do not serve them as verified. Access quirks for re-verification: the JUSTEL consolidated text of AR n° 20 could not be reached by ELI URL guessing in this pass; the ejustice ELI endpoint silently returns the ELI help page for a wrong numac rather than a 404, which is easy to mistake for a successful fetch. The authoritative consolidated tax texts live in FisconetPlus (eservices.minfin.fgov.be), which is JavaScript-driven and returns an empty shell to plain fetchers. VAT BANDS (added 2026-07-27): the country's other statutory bands are now served as structured data on this series and can be priced through /v1/answers/vat by passing the band key. We publish each band and the scope the instrument itself states; we do NOT classify a particular supply into a band, which is a legal determination.
Get it programmatically
curl https://euroref.dev/v1/be/vat
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://euroref.dev/v1/be/vat/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/be/vatOther Belgium series: policy interest rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates · ECB main refinancing rate · late-payment interest rate