Why the destination-country rate applies under OSS

When your cumulative cross-border B2C sales to consumers in other EU countries exceed €10,000 per year (net, summed across every EU country and every channel — your own webshop plus bol.com, Amazon, WooCommerce and the rest), the OSS scheme takes over. From that point you no longer charge the Dutch 21% to everyone. You charge the VAT rate of your customer's country.

This is the destination principle (bestemmingslandbeginsel): VAT belongs to the country where the consumer is located. A parcel sent to a buyer in Germany is taxed at the German rate; the same product sent to France is taxed at the French rate. The product didn't change — the destination did.

Practically, this means the same item in your shop can carry a different VAT rate depending on where it ships. Under €10k you keep using the home-country (NL) rate via your normal domestic BTW return; above €10k, every sale to another EU country switches to that country's rate and is declared via OSS.

Two important boundaries: OSS is B2C only. A B2B sale to a buyer with a valid EU VAT number is reverse-charge and goes on the ICP/EC Sales List, not OSS. And sales to non-EU consumers (for example the US or UK) are outside OSS scope and are zero-rated as exports. The rate table below only matters for your B2C sales inside the EU.

Standard rate vs reduced rate — and why you need both

Every EU country has a standard VAT rate that applies to most goods and services, and almost all of them also have one or more reduced rates for specific categories — typically things like books, newspapers, food, medicines and certain other goods. The standard rate is the default; the reduced rate is the exception you have to qualify for.

The catch for cross-border sellers is that both the rate levels and the qualifying categories differ per country. A printed book might be 9% in the Netherlands, 7% in Germany and 5.5% in France. Food, children's items and e-books each have their own treatment that doesn't line up neatly between member states.

For OSS this matters because your return is built per country and per rate. If you sell standard-rated electronics and reduced-rated books to the same German customer, that single order is declared at both the German standard rate (19%) and the German reduced rate (7%). You can't average them and you can't apply the Dutch rate — you need the exact destination figures.

So before you sell into a country, you need two numbers for it from the table below: the standard rate (for most products) and the reduced rate (for the categories that qualify). Knowing only the standard rate is not enough once any of your products fall into a reduced category.

The complete EU VAT rate table 2026

Below are the 2026 standard and reduced VAT rates for all 27 EU member states. Where a country shows two reduced figures it operates more than one reduced rate; Denmark applies no reduced rate at all (shown as "—"). Use the standard rate for most physical goods and the reduced rate only where the destination country's rules say a category qualifies.

These are the figures to use for your 2026 OSS calculations. Rates do change — countries adjust them in their budgets — so re-check before a new quarter if you sell into many markets, and treat any single reduced figure here as the headline reduced rate (several countries also operate super-reduced or additional reduced rates for narrow categories).

Note the spread: from Luxembourg's 17% standard rate to Hungary's 27%, there's a ten-point difference. That has real margin implications if you price inclusive of VAT across the EU — the same shelf price yields different net revenue depending on the destination.

How to pick the right rate per product

Start from a simple default: most physical goods are standard-rated in the destination country. Electronics, homeware, clothing for adults, accessories — for the large majority of webshop products you apply the destination country's standard rate from the table above and you're done.

The exceptions are the categories that some countries reduce: printed books and newspapers, foodstuffs, medicines, certain children's goods, and a handful of others. If a product of yours falls into one of these, you can't assume it's reduced everywhere — you have to check the destination country's reduced-rate list. A category that's reduced in the Netherlands may be standard-rated elsewhere, or reduced at a different percentage.

Be especially careful with edge cases that trip up cross-border sellers: e-books versus printed books, food supplements versus ordinary food, and bundled products that mix a standard-rated and a reduced-rated item. When an order combines both, each line keeps its own rate and both appear on the OSS return for that country.

When you genuinely can't tell whether a product qualifies for a reduced rate in a particular country, don't guess — consult a BTW adviser / tax advisor. A wrong reduced-rate classification repeated across thousands of orders is far more expensive to unwind than one upfront check.

Automating destination-rate VAT with Winkel Factuur

Maintaining 27 countries' standard and reduced rates by hand, applying the right one per order, and then splitting everything per country and per rate for the OSS return is exactly the kind of repetitive, error-prone work software should handle.

Winkel Factuur applies the destination-country rate automatically per order across all your connected sales channels, so a sale to Germany gets the German rate and a sale to France the French rate without manual lookups. It aggregates the figures across every store and marketplace you've connected, so the cumulative €10k threshold and your per-country totals reflect your whole business, not one channel.

On the VAT reports page there's an OSS-rapport tab: pick a year and quarter and you get a per-destination-country table with the per-rate breakdown — net turnover and VAT for each rate used in each country — plus a live €10k threshold indicator measured on net turnover, and CSV/JSON export of those per-country, per-rate figures ready for the OSS return. Alongside it sits a separate ICP report for your B2B intra-EU sales and a Dutch BTW return summary.

Winkel Factuur is a tool to prepare these figures accurately; it does not file on your behalf or replace professional advice on classification. For anything genuinely uncertain about a product's rate treatment, still raise it with a tax advisor.