Lithuania VAT Calculator (PVM) — 2026 Rates

Lithuania's standard PVM rate is 21% and has not changed since 2009. Its reduced rate structure, on the other hand, was taken apart and rebuilt on 1 January 2026 — and the country has been collecting invoice-level data from every VAT-registered business since 2016, which makes getting the new rates right rather more consequential than usual.

The 9% band was not adjusted — it was abolished

Law XV-287, adopted by the Seimas on 17 June 2025 and signed the following month as part of the 2026 budget package, removed Lithuania's 9% reduced rate entirely from 1 January 2026 and redistributed its contents across three different rates on the same day.

Accommodation, restaurant and catering services, passenger transport on regular routes, and admission to cultural and sports events moved up to a newly created 12% band. Books, non-periodical publications, periodicals, medicines and medical aid devices moved down to 5%. District heating, hot water and firewood moved all the way to the 21% standard rate. That is a nine-point swing between the two extremes, applied on one date, to supplies that had shared a rate for years.

The practical implication is that there is no shortcut. A price list, a till system or a long-term contract that still assumes 9% is wrong in one of three directions, and remembering that a supply used to be at 9% is actively misleading — it narrows the answer to three possibilities rather than one. Each category has to be looked up.

Why heating went up while books went down

The reshuffle was a budget measure with a defence-funding motive, and the directions differ because Parliament was making a distributional choice rather than applying a single principle. Heating, hot water and firewood were the largest slice of the old 9% band by value, and moving them to 21% raises the most revenue; the stated intention is to handle the impact on lower-income households through the compensation and heating-allowance system rather than through the VAT rate. Hospitality and culture took a smaller three-point rise. Books, the press and medicines moved in the opposite direction to 5%, using an option the EU VAT Directive reserves for a short list of socially significant supplies.

The 12% band on a restaurant bill

Restaurant and catering services, including takeaway food, are at 12%. Alcoholic drinks are excluded and remain at 21%. A single dinner ticket therefore routinely carries two rates — the food at 12%, the wine at 21% — and the split has to be made on the line, not estimated on the total. The same pattern applies to a hotel folio: the room night at 12%, the bar at 21%.

Admission to cultural and sports events and institutions sits in the same 12% band, as does passenger transport on regular routes together with the passenger's luggage. Note the qualifier on transport: it is regular-route services that qualify, which is a narrower category than transport in general.

i.MAS: the tax inspectorate sees the invoices first

Lithuania has run continuous, invoice-level VAT reporting since October 2016 — earlier than most of the EU and years before the current wave of e-invoicing mandates. The system is called i.MAS, and its invoice module i.SAF applies to every VAT-registered entity without exception.

Each month you upload an XML register of all sales and purchase invoices issued and received. There is no minimum value, no exclusion for B2C, and no exclusion for cross-border transactions; the register is meant to be complete. It is due by the 20th of the following month. The FR0600 VAT return follows five days later, on the 25th.

That ordering is deliberate rather than administrative. By the time your return arrives, the State Tax Inspectorate already holds the underlying invoice data from both sides of every domestic transaction and can match one against the other. A discrepancy between what you declared and what your counterparties reported is visible without an audit being opened. Reconciliation, in other words, is not a year-end exercise in Lithuania — if your i.SAF and your FR0600 disagree, VMI generally knows before you do.

Two further modules complete the picture. i.VAZ captures consignment notes for road transport of goods inside Lithuania in near real time, which closes the gap between what an invoice says and what physically moved. i.SAF-T is a full standard audit file that resident companies above the €300,000 turnover threshold must be able to produce on request during an inspection — it is not a routine filing, but the obligation to be able to generate it is continuous.

Two registration thresholds, and the one that catches importers

The €45,000 figure is the one everybody quotes: a Lithuanian-established business must register for PVM once its taxable turnover exceeds €45,000 over any 12 consecutive months. It is a rolling test, not a calendar-year one.

The second threshold is the one that surprises people, because it is measured on purchases rather than sales. A business or non-taxable legal person acquiring goods from other EU member states must register once those intra-EU acquisitions exceed €14,000 in a calendar year, regardless of its own turnover. A small Lithuanian retailer buying stock from Poland or Germany can therefore hit a registration obligation while its sales are nowhere near €45,000 — and because the trigger sits on the buying side, it tends to be noticed late.

Businesses with no establishment in Lithuania have no threshold in either direction and register before their first taxable supply. Voluntary registration below the thresholds is available and is usually sensible where input VAT is material, since registration is what makes that VAT recoverable in the first place.

E-invoicing: SABIS today, a B2B mandate on the horizon

Lithuania was early to public-sector e-invoicing and comparatively unhurried about the private sector. Contracting authorities have been required to receive and process structured e-invoices since 1 July 2017, and since 2024 that traffic has run through SABIS — Sąskaitų administravimo bendroji informacinė sistema, operated by the National Centre for Shared Services — which replaced E.sąskaita outright, with no transition period. SABIS connects to the Peppol network and supports Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 and CII under the European standard EN 16931, and invoices can reach it through the portal, an API integration or a Peppol access point.

Between businesses, e-invoicing remains voluntary. A PDF or paper invoice that meets the content requirements of the VAT Law is still perfectly valid. That will change: a domestic B2B mandate is being scoped with 2028 as the working target, and the EU's VAT in the Digital Age package independently requires structured e-invoicing and digital reporting for intra-EU B2B transactions from 1 July 2030.

The interesting wrinkle is that i.SAF already forces every invoice into a structured monthly file. Lithuanian businesses are therefore further along the digital-reporting path than the absence of a B2B mandate suggests — the structured data exists, it simply travels to the tax authority on a monthly cycle rather than to the customer in real time. Closing that gap is what a 2028 mandate would actually be doing.

Invoice detail matters more here than in most member states

A Lithuanian PVM invoice carries the content the VAT Directive requires: a sequential number, the date of issue and the date of supply where they differ, the names, addresses and PVM identification numbers of both parties, a description of the goods or services with quantity, the unit price excluding VAT, the taxable amount broken down by rate, the rate itself and the VAT amount, and the total payable. Where a supply is reverse-charged, exempt or zero-rated, the invoice has to say so and cite the basis.

None of that is unusual. What is unusual is the consequence of getting it wrong. Because i.SAF lifts these fields into a monthly register that both parties file independently, an inconsistent invoice number, a mistyped counterparty PVM code or a taxable amount that does not agree between the seller's and the buyer's records surfaces as a matching exception at the tax inspectorate rather than as a note in a year-end audit file. In a country with periodic reconciliation these are bookkeeping annoyances; in Lithuania they are the primary signal the system is built to detect.

Lithuanian VAT formulas

Express the rate as a decimal — 21% is 0.21, 12% is 0.12, 5% is 0.05 — and the two directions are the same equation rearranged.

Add 21% PVM (net → gross)

Remove 21% PVM (gross → net)

For a mixed restaurant bill, split the lines before dividing: food at 12% goes through ÷ 1.12 and the alcohol at 21% through ÷ 1.21. Applying a single blended divisor to the total misstates both figures, and because i.SAF reports the invoice line data anyway, the error is visible to VMI rather than buried in a total.