The VAT Threshold in Ireland: What Crossing It Does to Every Price on Your Website

On 1 July the VAT rate on food, catering and hairdressing in Ireland fell from 13.5% to 9%. The Department of Finance put the notice out the day before. Thousands of businesses woke up to a tax cut and a job of work in the same morning, because every price they had published was built on the old number.

Most had the till sorted by lunchtime. The website took longer. Some are still wrong.

That is the bit missing from the Budget coverage. A VAT change is not only an accounts event. It is a content event, and it arrives on a fixed date whether the person who can edit your site is available or not. It reaches an owner-operator in one of two ways: a rate moves underneath you, or your turnover crosses a line and you become an accountable person for the first time. What follows covers both, and the part that surprises people most is not the tax. It is how long the website takes to catch up.

What changed on 1 July, and who it landed on

The Department of Finance confirmed the 9% rate for food and catering services and for hairdressing, effective 1 July 2026. Two details in that notice matter more than the headline. It does not apply to hotel accommodation, though it does apply to food and catering provided by hotels. And unlike the pandemic-era reductions, this one has no sunset clause: the Tánaiste and Minister for Finance described it as establishing the rate "on a permanent basis".

The scale is worth sitting with. The Department's own note says over 99% of the businesses in these sectors are small or medium, and more than half are microenterprises with fewer than ten employees. Round it however you like, the population affected is overwhelmingly the family business and the owner-operator rather than the chain.

So the practical consequence. If you run a café, a takeaway, a salon or a catering operation, every menu page, price list and service page on your site that was priced off 13.5% became a stale page that morning. Nobody enforces that against you directly. Your customer just sees a number that does not match the one on the door, decides which one is real, and either queries it at the counter or quietly goes elsewhere.

The four numbers that decide whether you are in

Rate changes are the visible trigger. Registration is the one that catches growing businesses, and there is not one threshold. There are four, and two of them are watched by almost nobody.

Threshold	Applies to	Where it catches people
€42,500	Traders supplying services only	Consultancies and trades that never sell a physical thing
€85,000	Traders supplying goods, or mixed traders where 90% or more of turnover is goods	Retail and supply businesses having one strong year
€10,000	Mail-order and intra-Community distance sales, plus cross-border digital services	Any shop that ships to consumers in other member states
€41,000	Acquisitions of goods from other member states	Buying stock from EU suppliers rather than selling

These figures come from Revenue's own guidance and have applied since 1 January 2025, when Finance Act 2024 lifted the two main thresholds from €40,000 and €80,000.

€42,500, services only

This is the low bar, and it is the one most people are surprised by. If you sell your time and expertise and nothing physical, you are working against €42,500, not €85,000. For a solo consultant or a trade billing labour, that is a plausible single good year rather than a distant milestone.

€85,000, goods

Goods traders work against €85,000. So do mixed traders where 90% or more of turnover comes from goods, which covers most shops that also do a bit of fitting or delivery. If your goods and services split is closer to even, get that ratio checked before you assume which number applies to you.

€10,000, selling to consumers in other EU countries

This one has almost nothing to do with your domestic turnover. Revenue applies a €10,000 threshold to mail-order and intra-Community distance sales of goods, and to cross-border telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services supplied into other member states. It is a combined figure across all those countries. A small business posting orders to customers in France and Germany can trip it while domestic turnover is nowhere near €85,000, which is exactly how a shop that added international delivery last spring ends up with obligations it never went looking for.

€41,000, buying from other EU countries

The last one runs in the opposite direction. It applies to acquisitions of goods from other member states, so it is triggered by your purchasing rather than your sales. A business importing stock from EU suppliers can become obliged to register on the strength of what it buys.

The moment Revenue says you become accountable

Here is where the timing gets uncomfortable, and I would rather you read the actual wording than my summary of it. Revenue's tax and duty manual states that "traders are obliged to register from the moment their turnover exceeds the relevant VAT registration threshold" and that "a trader is regarded as an accountable person immediately on completing a transaction that exceeds the threshold".

Revenue's own worked example makes it concrete. A small manufacturer has sales of €84,000 between January and the end of September. It then makes a single sale worth €1,500. Revenue treats it as required to register from the date of that €1,500 transaction.

Not the following quarter. Not once the paperwork lands. From that sale.

Consider a hardware and fencing supplier outside Portlaoise having its best year since it opened. It ticks past €85,000 in the middle of October on one pallet order, and nobody notices for six weeks, because the person who would notice is out on deliveries and the bookkeeping is a Sunday-night job. Meanwhile the website is doing what it has always done: quoting prices with no VAT in them, because there never was any VAT in them.

Every order that arrives in those six weeks is one where the VAT is now yours to hand over and was never yours to collect. On a €400 order at the standard rate, €74.80 of that money belongs to Revenue. You cannot ring a customer in December and ask for it. The margin is simply gone, and it is gone on every order in the gap, which is the real cost of a website that lags behind a decision you have already made.

Revenue's position on backdating and on how you correct that gap is a conversation for your accountant, not for a blog post. What is not negotiable is the direction of travel: the obligation starts at the transaction, so the website needs to be corrected in days, not at the next convenient moment.

What the law actually requires on the page itself

Once you are registered, two separate obligations land on the site, and they are more specific than most owners expect.

The first comes from the Irish eCommerce Regulations of 2003, which implement the EU eCommerce Directive. Where a service provider undertakes an activity subject to VAT, the regulations require the VAT registration number to be provided "in a manner which is easily, directly and permanently accessible". Permanently accessible means a stable place a visitor can always find, typically your footer or a business details page, not a line buried in a checkout confirmation.

The same regulation goes further on prices. Where a service refers to prices, those prices "are to be indicated clearly and unambiguously and, in particular, must indicate whether they are inclusive of tax and delivery costs". Failing to comply with those requirements is stated to be an offence. That is a stronger footing than most people assume they are standing on, and it is one reason what you show alongside the price matters as much as the price itself.

The second obligation comes from consumer law. The CCPC is unambiguous: "prices shown to consumers must include all applicable taxes, such as VAT. There should be no hidden charges." The 2002 price indication regulations define the selling price and unit price as the final price including VAT and all other taxes. There is one carve-out worth knowing, and it is narrow. Wholesalers selling exclusively to other businesses may display prices excluding VAT. Selling to both consumers and trade does not qualify you. If a member of the public can buy from your site, the headline number they see has to be the number they pay.

Absorb it or add it, and the arithmetic nobody does on paper

Registration is not only a compliance event. It is a pricing decision, and most owners make it by default rather than on purpose.

Say you have been charging €100 for something. You can hold the customer price at €100, in which case €18.70 of every sale goes to Revenue and you keep €81.30 for work that used to pay €100. Or you move to €123 and protect the margin, and the customer absorbs the increase. Or you land somewhere between the two and split the difference by segment. All three are defensible. Doing nothing, and discovering in January which one you accidentally chose, is not.

There is a second-order effect that catches people out too. If you raise prices across the board, old quotes, cached search snippets and any PDF price list you emailed last month are all now inconsistent with the site. A customer who arrives holding the old figure is a conversation you have to have at the counter, and there are rules about which price you are actually bound by when the site is wrong. Worth reading before you find out the hard way.

Who actually changes the numbers, and how long that takes

This is the part I care about, because it is the part that is genuinely a hosting question rather than a tax one.

I told a customer once that a site-wide price change was a ten-minute job. On our platform it was. On theirs it was a change request to an agency, a quote, and the guts of a fortnight before anything moved. I had answered the question I knew the answer to rather than the one they had asked. I do not answer it now without asking who built the site and who holds the login.

That distinction decides everything about how a VAT change feels. Where the owner has full access to their own content, a rate change is an afternoon. Where the site is held by a third party billing €75 to €150 an hour for content changes, the same job is a purchase order, a wait, and a bill for work you could have done yourself. The tax was identical in both cases. The exposure was not, because exposure is measured in the days your published prices are wrong.

A hosting platform cannot tell you what rate to charge. What it can do is make sure the delay between deciding and deploying is measured in minutes. That is most of what everything included for a flat €60 a year, with full WordPress access from day one, is actually buying you here: no gatekeeper between a decision and the page that reflects it. Log in, change the numbers, push the change, verify it on the live site. A site you built yourself with an AI builder is a site you can reprice yourself, which is a small thing right up until the morning a rate moves.

The bulk find-and-replace you should not run

One honest limitation, because being able to change every price quickly is not the same as knowing which prices to change.

The July change is a good illustration. The 9% rate covers food and catering services and hairdressing. It does not cover hotel accommodation, and alcohol, soft drinks and bottled water stay at the standard rate. A pub that runs a global replace across its whole menu will cheerfully apply the wrong rate to its entire drinks list and will not find out until someone reconciles a return.

Speed removes the delay. It does not remove the judgement. Get the rate map from your accountant first, on paper, line by line. Then make the change in ten minutes instead of ten days.

Where a purpose-built store genuinely wins

If you are running a catalogue in the thousands, shipping to consumers across several member states, and dealing with different VAT treatments per country and per product class, a dedicated commerce platform with a built-in tax engine is genuinely the better tool. Rate tables that update themselves and apply per destination will beat any manual repricing pass, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

That is a real workload with real complexity. It is also not the business most people reading this are running. For a shop, a salon, a trade or a practice with a price list rather than a tax matrix, the ability to edit your own pages beats an engine you are paying for and will never fully use.

The repricing pass, in five steps

Confirm. Get the correct rate for each line of what you sell from your accountant, in writing, before touching anything.

Inventory. List every place a price appears: product pages, service pages, the menu, the FAQ, downloadable price lists, and any figure sitting in an image rather than in text.

Stage. Make the changes in a staging environment rather than on the production site, so a half-finished pass is never what a customer sees.

Deploy. Push the corrected prices live in one go, and update your VAT number and any tax-inclusive wording at the same time.

Verify. Open the live site as a customer would, on a phone, and check three or four pages against the list. Cached pages and PDFs are where old numbers survive.

Conclusion

Two things move your prices without asking your permission. A rate can change on a date set in a Budget, and your own turnover can cross a line on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a good year. Neither of them waits for the person who edits your website to be free.

The tax questions belong to your accountant, and they are worth paying for. The publishing question is yours. Knowing which threshold applies to you, roughly where you sit against it today, and how many hours it would take to reprice your entire site is a short piece of homework that turns a scramble into a task. Most owners have never done it, and it takes an evening.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the VAT registration threshold in Ireland?

Since 1 January 2025 the thresholds are €85,000 for traders supplying goods and €42,500 for traders supplying services only, according to Revenue. Mixed traders use the €85,000 figure where 90% or more of turnover comes from goods. Separate thresholds of €10,000 and €41,000 apply to cross-border distance sales and to acquisitions from other member states.

Do I have to register for VAT the moment I go over the threshold?

Yes. Revenue's guidance states that traders are obliged to register from the moment their turnover exceeds the relevant threshold, and that a trader becomes an accountable person immediately on completing the transaction that takes them over. Revenue's own worked example registers the business from the date of that transaction, not from the start of the next period. How you then account for the gap is a question for your accountant.

Do prices on my website have to include VAT?

For consumers, yes. The CCPC states that prices shown to consumers must include all applicable taxes, such as VAT, with no hidden charges. Wholesalers selling exclusively to other businesses may display prices excluding VAT. If a member of the public can buy from your site, show the VAT-inclusive figure as the headline price.

Do I have to put my VAT number on my website?

If you trade online and your activity is subject to VAT, the 2003 eCommerce Regulations require your VAT registration number to be easily, directly and permanently accessible to people using your site. The same regulation requires prices to indicate whether they are inclusive of tax and delivery costs, and failing to comply is stated to be an offence.

What VAT rate applies to food and hairdressing in Ireland since July 2026?

The Department of Finance confirmed a 9% rate on food and catering services and on hairdressing from 1 July 2026, with no sunset clause attached. It does not cover hotel accommodation, though it does cover food and catering provided by hotels. Alcohol, soft drinks and bottled water remain at the standard rate, which is the detail most likely to trip up a bulk price update.

I sell online to customers in other EU countries. Does the €85,000 threshold still apply?

Not to those sales. Revenue applies a separate €10,000 threshold to mail-order and intra-Community distance sales of goods and to cross-border telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services. That figure is combined across all member states, so a modest amount of cross-border trade can trigger obligations long before your domestic turnover is anywhere near the main threshold.

Sources

Revenue, What are the VAT thresholds?

Revenue Tax and Duty Manual, EU VAT SME Scheme: Domestic Layer

Department of Finance, Government Marks Reduction of VAT Rate to 9% for Food Businesses and Hairdressers

S.I. No. 68/2003, European Communities (Directive 2000/31/EC) Regulations 2003

S.I. No. 639/2002, European Communities (Requirements to Indicate Product Prices) Regulations 2002

CCPC, Product pricing obligations for Irish businesses