Croatia VAT Calculator (PDV) — 2026 Rates

Croatia charges 25% PDV on most of what it sells — a rate matched inside the EU only by Denmark and Sweden, and exceeded only by Hungary and Finland. Getting a Croatian price right therefore means getting the band right, because the gap between the top and bottom rate is twenty percentage points.

Where Croatia's 25% sits

The rate rose from 23% to 25% on 1 March 2012 as part of the post-crisis consolidation and has not moved since. Across the EU only Hungary (27%) and Finland (25.5%) charge more; Denmark and Sweden are level at 25%. The practical consequence is that a Croatian quote given without stating whether it includes PDV is ambiguous by a full fifth of its value, and that the classification of borderline food and publishing supplies is contested harder here than in a country whose spread is only ten points.

The one-fifth shortcut

A 25% rate has an arithmetic property no other common European rate shares: because 25% of the net is the same as 20% of the gross, the tax is exactly one fifth of the gross and one quarter of the net. That makes any Croatian till receipt checkable without a calculator.

The 13% and 5% bands have no such shortcut — divide by 1.13 and 1.05 respectively.

Fiskalizacija 2.0: the 2026 e-invoicing mandate

The Croatian Parliament adopted a new Fiscalization Act on 11 June 2025, replacing the old cash-sales fiscalisation law. It entered into force on 1 September 2025 and became applicable on 1 January 2026, turning Croatia into a full continuous-transaction-control jurisdiction with no grace period. From that date every VAT-registered business established in Croatia must:

• Issue and receive structured electronic invoices for domestic B2B and B2G supplies, in an EN 16931-compliant XML under the Croatian CIUS profile, carrying a qualified electronic signature
• Transmit the invoice data to the Tax Administration in real time
• Confirm or reject inbound invoices, and report payments, within the statutory windows
• Fiscalise all B2C payments, bank transfers now included — B2C invoices themselves may still be issued on paper

Cross-border invoices remain outside the mandate and may still go out on paper. The state supplied two free tools so the smallest businesses were not forced to buy software: FiskAplikacija, a portal where issuers track invoice status and recipient confirmations, and MIKROeRAČUN, a free invoicing application for micro-businesses.

The launch was unusually smooth for a big-bang mandate. In the first fortnight of January 2026 the Tax Administration counted 303,285 taxpayers registered as issuers and recipients, 2.55 million e-invoices processed and 33 accredited information intermediaries live. It also confirmed that unintentional, technically induced formatting errors during the implementation period — a badly formatted delivery date, for instance — do not automatically create a tax liability and are not being penalised.

What arrives on 1 January 2027

The 2026 obligation is asymmetric. Companies, craftspeople, freelancers, state administration bodies and budget users that are not in the VAT system already have to be able to receive e-invoices — which is why the state shipped a free receiving application for the smallest taxpayers. What arrives on 1 January 2027 is the obligation to issue them, completing the phase-out of paper for domestic supplies. Small associations and non-registered sole traders that were given an extra year should be treating 2026 as preparation time rather than exemption.

The two reduced bands — and the split-rate bill

The 13% band is hospitality and utilities: accommodation, restaurant and catering food service, public water supply, electricity, household waste collection, periodicals other than dailies, and children's car seats. The 5% band is staples and health: bread, milk, fresh meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, animal feed, books in printed and electronic form, medicines prescribed under the state health scheme, medical devices, daily newspapers and scientific journals, and cinema and event tickets.

The band that catches people out is hospitality, because the reduced rate attaches to the preparation and serving of food, not to everything crossing the bar. Alcoholic drinks stay at 25%. A single Croatian restaurant bill therefore routinely carries two rates, and no amount of dividing the total will recover the correct split — you have to separate the food lines from the drink lines first, which is exactly what Croatian point-of-sale systems are built to do.

Energy at 5% until 31 March 2027

Natural gas, district heating from terminal stations, and firewood, pellets, briquettes and wood chips carry 5% rather than their natural 13%. This is a temporary anti-inflation measure that has been rolled forward repeatedly since 2022; an amendment to the VAT Act published in the Official Gazette on 27 March 2026 extended it to 31 March 2027. Unless it is extended again, those supplies revert to 13% from 1 April 2027 — a date worth putting in a pricing calendar now.

Registration and returns

A Croatian-established business enters the VAT system once its taxable supplies exceed €60,000 in the current or the previous calendar year. That threshold rose from €40,000 on 1 January 2025 under amendments published in Narodne novine 152/2024, a change the Finance Ministry estimated would take roughly 7,500 businesses out of the VAT net. Registration below the threshold is voluntary and unlocks input-tax recovery; the application goes to the competent regional office of the Porezna uprava, and the practical rule is to file at least eight days before trading starts. Businesses not established in Croatia have no threshold and register before their first taxable supply.

The filing deadline changed in 2026. For tax periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026, the PDV return and the recapitulative statements for intra-Community supplies and acquisitions are due on the last day of the month following the period, rather than the 20th. Payment was already due on the last day, so filing and payment now land on the same date — a genuine administrative easing that arrived as part of the same legislative package as Fiskalizacija 2.0. The default tax period is a calendar month; quarterly periods remain available to small domestic businesses with no intra-EU transactions, while non-established businesses file monthly regardless of size.

The euro, three years on

Croatia joined the euro area on 1 January 2023 at the fixed conversion rate of 1 EUR = 7.53450 HRK, and the kuna ceased to be legal tender. Everything in the PDV system has been denominated in euro since — rates, the €60,000 registration threshold, invoice totals, returns. This matters when you are reading older material: Croatian VAT guidance written before 2023 quotes kuna figures that no longer correspond to anything, and the quarterly-filing turnover test is still described in some sources by its legacy HRK 800,000 value.

Croatian VAT calculation formulas

The calculator applies these equations. Swap 1.25 for 1.13 or 1.05 to work at a reduced band.

Add 25% PDV (net to gross)

Remove 25% PDV (gross to net)

Croatian VAT compliance dates to diarise

Comparing Croatia against its neighbours? Our European VAT rates by country table lists every standard and reduced band in one place, and the OSS and IOSS guide covers what you owe when you sell into Croatia from another member state.