Mandates
Every country wants a different thing.
One says Peppol and nothing else, one runs a state clearing house with its own XML, one has made receiving mandatory for everybody while issuing waits three more years. These are the dates, read off the European Commission's own factsheets on 2026-08-17, with the part each country gets misreported on.
| Country | Status | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Belgium | In force | B2B mandatory since 1 January 2026, over Peppol, no national CIUS. |
| Germany | Phasing in | Receiving mandatory since January 2025; issuing phases in through 2027 and 2028. |
| Italy | In force | The oldest B2B mandate in the EU: in force since January 2019, through SdI. |
| Poland | In force | B2B live through KSeF: large taxpayers from 1 February 2026, everyone from 1 April 2026. |
| Romania | In force | B2B mandatory since 1 January 2024 through RO e-Factura, with a five-day filing window. |
| France | Phasing in | Receiving mandatory for everyone on 1 September 2026, issuing phased across 2026 and 2027. Covered in its own guide. |
Countries listed here without a page
A country gets a page when somebody has verified its dates against a primary source and written the entry. Not before. The failure mode of generating these pages from a list is not thin content, it is publishing tax law that is wrong, and a compliance page that is confidently out of date is worse than no page at all.
- Spain. Law 18/2022 sets compliance periods counted from technical regulations rather than a fixed calendar date, and the usual summaries confuse the exchange mandate with VERIFACTU, which is a billing-software certification regime and a different obligation. No page until that can be written accurately.
The pattern underneath
Three shapes recur, and knowing which one you are facing decides most of the work. Belgium is a network mandate: send over Peppol, in the Peppol profile, no national extension. Italy, Poland and Romania are clearing house mandates: the invoice passes through the state, which validates it and can reject it, sometimes on a clock. Germany is neither yet, and is decentralised: no national platform for business to business, several accepted formats, and the obligation split so that receiving arrived years before issuing.
What survives across all of them is the document. EN 16931 is the semantic standard every one of these builds on, even Italy, whose national format predates it. That is why InvoiceForge builds and checks the document rather than pretending to transmit it: the document is the part that is common, and the network is the part that is not.
We are not affiliated with the European Commission, OpenPeppol, or any tax authority. Dates come from the Commission's eInvoicing country factsheets, cross-checked against national portals where one publishes the enabling law.