VAT Rates by Country: Live Table + API

Why "VAT rates by country" is a terrible one-number lookup

Developers building billing systems, tax engines, e-commerce platforms or cross-border SaaS tools all eventually reach the same conclusion: there is no such thing as the VAT rate for a country. Every serious VAT regime layers at least a standard rate, one or two reduced rates, a zero-rated list and an exempt list. France has four bands (20%, 10%, 5.5%, 2.1%). Ireland has four (23%, 13.5%, 9%, 4.8%). India's GST has five (28%, 18%, 12%, 5%, 0%). Brazil has separate federal, state and municipal taxes layered in ways that defeat a single-cell answer. The table below is the honest version of that question — standard rate you're most likely to charge, plus the reduced bands you'll need to know about.

The EU-member rows in the table are pulled live from the European Commission's Taxes in Europe Database (TEDB), updated every time the Commission re-publishes — typically when a member state passes a rate change. The non-EU rows — that's 90 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Oceania — are static, curated against each jurisdiction's own tax authority and cross-checked against PwC Tax Summaries and KPMG's global rate survey. Static data on this scale is honest; a scraper that breaks quietly is not.

VAT vs US sales tax — the developer confusion

Almost every US engineer who has to ship an international billing system eventually hits the wall of "wait, these aren't the same thing?" They aren't. US sales tax and European VAT collect revenue from consumption, but the mechanics are different enough that the code you wrote for one will be wrong for the other.

Sales tax (US) is collected only at the final retail sale. If a widget is sold wholesale to a reseller, no sales tax changes hands — the reseller issues an exemption certificate, and tax is only collected when the reseller sells to the end consumer. Rates are set by state and local jurisdiction (Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon have no sales tax; California runs ~7.25% state plus local). Since South Dakota v. Wayfair (2018), remote sellers with significant nexus in a state must register and collect.

VAT is collected at every stage of the supply chain. Your supplier charges you VAT on inputs; you charge VAT on outputs; you remit the difference to the tax authority. The burden is on the end consumer (because businesses reclaim what they paid), but the money flows through government accounts at every stage — which is why VAT is administratively heavier but also harder to dodge. Every B2B invoice in an EU member state is a VAT event, even if the net VAT liability is zero.

The practical implications for developers: in a US sales-tax system, you can get away with calculating tax only on the final customer-facing invoice. In a VAT system, your accounting engine has to track input VAT and output VAT separately, compute the net liability per VAT return period, and handle refunds for net-negative periods (which happens for exporters and VAT-registered startups with lots of capex). Don't port a sales-tax module to EU markets without a rewrite.

Brazil is its own category — ICMS is a state VAT, IPI is a federal excise on manufactured goods, PIS and COFINS are federal social-contribution taxes on revenue that function like a gross-receipts tax layered on top. The 2023 reform consolidates these into IBS (state) and CBS (federal) through 2033; until then, Brazil in the table is the standard ICMS rate and the notes flag the surrounding stack.

Programmatic access

UniRateAPI exposes EU VAT rates via the /api/vat-rates endpoint — the same source feeding this page, returned as JSON. Non-EU rates are not available via the API; use the table above as the canonical source and refresh your copy quarterly.

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://api.unirateapi.com/api/vat-rates",
    params={"country": "DE", "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
    timeout=5,
)
print(r.json())  # -> {"country_code":"DE","vat_rate":19.0, ...}

const url = new URL("https://api.unirateapi.com/api/vat-rates");
url.searchParams.set("country", "FR");
url.searchParams.set("api_key", "YOUR_API_KEY");

const res = await fetch(url);
const data = await res.json();
console.log(data.vat_rate);

curl "https://api.unirateapi.com/api/vat-rates?country=IT&api_key=YOUR_API_KEY"

The endpoint accepts two-letter ISO 3166 country codes for the 29 EU-scope entries (EU-27 plus UK and Northern Ireland). For a non-EU jurisdiction the table above is the authoritative source — standard rates outside the EU change a handful of times a decade and a daily API is overkill; pin the value in your config and re-check at your quarterly compliance review. If you need the customer's VAT rate in a checkout flow, combine the country-to-currency lookup from our currency-codes reference with this table in code.