You run your company from London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, and France has just entered your order book: a French customer wants your goods, a Paris client asks for your services, or your online store starts shipping to Lyon and Bordeaux. The purchase order is ready, but one line keeps coming back from the French side: your VAT number. Value added tax (VAT, known in France as TVA, taxe sur la valeur ajoutée) is the tax your business collects on sales and reclaims on purchases, and in France it follows strict territorial rules that apply to you even though you live abroad. Get the registration wrong and your invoices are defective, your customer cannot recover the tax, and penalties accumulate silently. Get it right and French VAT becomes a neutral pass-through: you charge it, you deduct it, you transfer the difference to the Treasury, and your French turnover flows without friction. This guide explains, for a foreign founder or finance team with no French tax background, when your activity creates a French VAT liability, which tax office registers you when you have no French establishment, what the fiscal representative requirement means for non-EU businesses, how monthly returns work from abroad, and what fines and challenges to expect. Every decisive rule below is tied to the French Tax Code (Code général des impôts, CGI) as published on Légifrance, with the exact official text. If you are also setting up the company itself, our founders guide to bank account, Kbis, VAT and first hire covers the incorporation sequence in which VAT registration is only one step.

I. When your foreign business needs a French VAT number and which door to knock on

French VAT does not depend on where you live or where your company is incorporated. It depends on where the transaction is deemed to take place. Before asking how to register, you must therefore answer a prior question: does France consider your sales to happen on its territory? If the answer is yes, a second question follows: which French tax office gives you a number when you have no office, no warehouse and no staff in France? This first part works through both questions in order, because approaching the wrong office or registering when the reverse charge already protects you wastes months.

A. Taxable transactions in France: where the VAT is due when you live abroad

The starting principle is broad. Article 256 of the CGI provides that “les livraisons de biens et les prestations de services effectuées à titre onéreux par un assujetti agissant en tant que tel” are subject to VAT (Article 256, CGI, Légifrance). In plain English: any supply of goods or services for consideration by a taxable person acting as such falls within VAT. A taxable person (assujetti) is any business carrying on an economic activity, whatever its legal form and wherever it is established. Your Delaware LLC, your UK limited company and your Dubai-based entity are all capable of being assujettis for French VAT purposes the moment they make taxable transactions located in France.

For goods, the place-of-supply rules of Article 258 of the CGI decide. As a first approximation, the place of a supply of movable tangible goods is deemed to be in France where the goods are located in France at the time of dispatch or transport to the buyer, at the time of assembly or installation by or on behalf of the seller, or at the time they are placed at the buyer’s disposal where there is no transport (Article 258, CGI, Légifrance). Three everyday situations follow directly. First, you hold stock in a French warehouse, including stock stored with a French logistics provider or an Amazon-style fulfilment centre, and you sell from that stock: the goods are in France when placed at the buyer’s disposal, so French VAT applies. Second, you install equipment at a French customer’s site: the installation rule localises the supply in France. Third, you ship goods from another EU country to a French customer in the course of intra-EU distance sales: Article 258 A of the CGI then provides a derogation under which “le lieu de livraison de biens expédiés ou transportés à partir de la France à destination d’un autre Etat membre dans le cadre de ventes à distance intracommunautaires est réputé ne pas se situer en France lorsque” certain conditions are met (Article 258 A, CGI, Légifrance), and the mirror mechanism taxes your distance sales to French consumers in France once your EU-wide distance-selling volume crosses the applicable threshold, with the EU one-stop shop available to declare them centrally instead of registering in every country. The practical lesson for an e-commerce founder abroad is that storing goods in France almost always forces a French registration, while pure cross-border distance selling may be handled through the one-stop shop until the facts change.

For services, Article 259 of the CGI draws the decisive distinction between business customers and private consumers. Where the customer is itself a taxable person, the place of the service is where that customer is established: its registered office (siège de son activité économique), its fixed establishment (stable establishment, établissement stable) receiving the services, or failing those, its domicile (Article 259, CGI, Légifrance). In business-to-business (B2B) services, you therefore invoice a French business customer without French VAT and the customer accounts for the tax itself under the reverse charge described below. Where the customer is a private individual, the default rule looks instead at where you, the supplier, are established — but that default is hollowed out by a long list of exceptions, and most digital, consulting, marketing or intermediation services supplied to French consumers end up taxable in France. Consultants living abroad who coach, advise or design for French private clients, software vendors selling subscriptions to French households, and platforms taking commissions on French consumer transactions all regularly discover that their services are French-taxable B2C supplies. The common and expensive mistake is to assume that because you are established outside France, your services are outside French VAT. Article 259 says the opposite for most B2C cases: follow the customer, not the supplier.

Two timing rules complete the picture before you register. Article 269 of the CGI fixes the chargeable event (fait générateur): as a rule, the tax becomes chargeable when the supply, the intra-EU acquisition or the service is carried out, with specific timing for successive statements of account and instalments (Article 269, CGI, Légifrance). You cannot postpone French VAT by invoicing late or by collecting cash later: the liability attaches to the transaction itself. And Article 283 of the CGI organises the reverse charge (autoliquidation): where a supply mentioned in the territoriality rules is made by a business established outside France, “la taxe est acquittée par l’acquéreur, le destinataire ou le preneur qui agit en tant qu’assujetti” holding an identification number (Article 283, CGI, Légifrance). In B2B cases, then, your French business customer pays the VAT to the Treasury instead of you, provided it is identified for VAT. That mechanism is your friend: it means a foreign company selling exclusively to French VAT-registered businesses often needs no French VAT number at all for those sales, only a valid customer number checked on the EU VIES database. But the reverse charge never covers B2C sales, goods located in France, or installation work: in those cases the liability stays with you, and registration becomes unavoidable.

B. Getting identified: SIREN, VAT-only numbers, and the non-EU fiscal representative

Once a French-taxable transaction exists, French law imposes a fast identification duty. Article 286 of the CGI requires every person liable for VAT to file, “dans les quinze jours du commencement de ses opérations”, a declaration with the office designated by order, in the form supplied by the administration (Article 286, CGI, Légifrance). Fifteen days from the start of operations: that is the statutory clock, and it runs from your first French-taxable transaction, not from the day you feel ready. The same article adds the bookkeeping spine of the regime: professional information on the administration’s forms, and where the business does not keep accounts capable of determining turnover, a numbered day book recording each transaction with its date, description and price, kept with supporting documents under the retention rules of the tax procedure code.

Identification itself is governed by Article 286 ter of the CGI: “est identifié par un numéro individuel : 1° tout assujetti qui effectue des livraisons de biens ou des prestations de services lui ouvrant droit à déduction” (Article 286 ter, CGI, Légifrance). Your individual number is your French VAT number, prefixed FR, and it must appear on your commercial documents: invoices, quotes, and on administrative documents such as the VAT return. How you obtain it depends on whether you have a French establishment. If you incorporate a French subsidiary or register a branch, the company receives a SIREN number (the nine-digit national business identifier issued at registration through the Guichet unique, the single online business formalities portal that replaced the old commercial court registries’ direct filings) and its Kbis extract (the official certificate of registration issued by the commercial court registry, the greffe, proving the company’s legal existence), and the local corporate tax office (SIE, service des impôts des entreprises) automatically transmits the intra-EU VAT number to the business upon registration — as the official service-public guidance confirms, the SIE forwards the number automatically at the time of registration (service-public.fr, intra-EU VAT number). If instead you remain a foreign company with no establishment in France but you carry out taxable transactions here, you apply for a VAT-only identification to the tax office dedicated to foreign businesses without a French stable establishment: the SIEE (service des impôts des entreprises étrangères), within the non-residents tax directorate (DINR, direction des impôts des non-résidents), based at 10 rue du Centre, TSA 20011, 93465 Noisy-le-Grand. That Paris-region address matters for the geography of your file: even if your customers are in Marseille or Nantes, your registration, your correspondence and any dispute about identification sit with the Noisy-le-Grand office, and the official impots.gouv.fr page listing the competent services for foreign companies without a French establishment tells you exactly which desk handles your case.

Companies established outside the European Union face one more gatekeeper. Article 289 A of the CGI provides that where a person not established in the EU is liable for VAT or must complete declarative formalities, “elle est tenue de faire accréditer auprès du service des impôts un représentant assujetti établi en France qui s’engage à remplir les formalités incombant à cette personne et, en cas d’opérations imposables, à acquitter la taxe à sa place” (Article 289 A, CGI, Légifrance). In practice, a US, UK-post-Brexit, Swiss, Emirati or Asian company must appoint a fiscal representative (représentant fiscal): a VAT-registered person established in France — typically a specialised firm — accredited with the tax office, which files on your behalf and pays the tax in your place, usually against a financial guarantee. Fail to appoint one and the law shifts the bill to your customer: failing accreditation, the VAT and any related penalties are owed by the recipient of the taxable transaction. The sanction is therefore commercial as well as fiscal: no serious French customer will accept an invoice that makes it the taxpayer. Exemptions exist for businesses established in non-EU states that have a mutual assistance instrument with France comparable to the EU recovery and cooperation framework, the list being set by ministerial order, and the official service-public guidance warns bluntly that the VAT number of a non-EU business can be invalidated where it breaches the representation duty (service-public.fr, intra-EU VAT number). EU-established companies escape the representative but not the registration: a German, Spanish or Irish company with French-taxable operations registers directly, files directly, and designates only a correspondence address. One related relief deserves mention for small starters: businesses established in France whose turnover stays below the statutory ceilings benefit from the basic exemption (franchise en base), which dispenses them from charging VAT (Article 293 B of the CGI, Article 293 B, CGI, Légifrance). That shelter is reserved to businesses established in France and never covers a foreign company’s French-taxable transactions, so do not build your pricing on it.

II. Living with French VAT from abroad: returns, refunds, audits and fines

Registration is the entrance ticket, not the performance. Once identified, your foreign company enters a permanent cycle of returns, payments, invoices and possible refunds, all managed remotely through a French professional online account, with the SIEE or your SIE watching the calendar. This second part follows that cycle from the monthly return to the tax audit, so that a finance team in another time zone can organise itself before the first deadline rather than after the first penalty notice. It closes with the Paris and Île-de-France specifics, because even a fully remote VAT position has a physical anchor in the French administration.

A. Declaring and paying from abroad: the monthly return, invoices, and getting your VAT back

The heartbeat of the regime is the VAT return (déclaration de TVA, known by its forms CA3 for the normal real regime and CA12 for the simplified regime). Article 287 of the CGI states that “tout redevable de la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée identifié conformément aux dispositions combinées des articles 286 ter et 286 ter A est tenu de remettre au service des impôts dont il dépend et dans le délai fixé par arrêté une déclaration conforme au modèle prescrit par l’administration” (Article 287, CGI, Légifrance). Businesses under the normal real regime file monthly: “les redevables soumis au régime réel normal d’imposition déposent mensuellement la déclaration” showing total transactions and the detail of taxable ones, and the tax due is paid each month (Article 287, CGI, Légifrance). For a foreign company, three consequences follow. First, the return is filed electronically through the professional account on impots.gouv.fr, in French, in euros, with operations converted at the applicable rate: organise a standing monthly slot with whoever holds your credentials, because a return filed late is a late return even if the tax is paid. Second, the normal real regime is the default landing zone for foreign-registered businesses with significant French turnover; smaller volumes may qualify for simplified rhythms, but the classification is the administration’s, argued on figures, not chosen by preference. Third, the return is where input VAT is deducted: French VAT you paid to French suppliers, on the warehouse lease, the logistics invoices, the trade-fair stand or the professional fees, is set against the VAT you collected, and only the balance is transferred. Where deductible VAT exceeds collected VAT, the excess becomes a VAT credit (crédit de TVA) carried forward or, on request and above the applicable floor, refunded (remboursement). Exporters and businesses making mostly zero-rated intra-EU supplies are structurally in credit and live on refunds, which the administration pays after verification: keep every supplier invoice, because a refund file is examined invoice by invoice and the official impots.gouv.fr guidance on VAT refunds frames the procedure your representative or adviser will operate. Businesses established in another EU country that paid French VAT occasionally, without needing a French registration, use the separate EU electronic refund procedure rather than a French return, but that route closes the moment you hold a French number: one situation, one channel, never both at once.

Invoicing discipline is the second pillar, and it is enforced against you exactly as against a French company. Article 289 of the CGI requires that “tout assujetti est tenu de s’assurer qu’une facture est émise, par lui-même, ou en son nom et pour son compte, par son client ou par un tiers” for supplies to another taxable person or non-taxable legal person that are not exempt (Article 289, CGI, Légifrance). Your French invoices must therefore carry the mandatory particulars: your FR VAT number and the customer’s VAT number, checked beforehand on the VIES register (the EU’s public VAT-number validation system, whose service-public guidance is available in English), the rate applied, the tax amount, and where the reverse charge applies, the express words showing the customer accounts for the tax. A missing customer number is not a clerical detail: without it you cannot prove the conditions of an exempt intra-EU supply or a valid reverse charge, and the administration will reclassify the transaction as French-taxed at your expense. France’s structured e-invoicing reform (facturation électronique) now overlays these content rules with a transmission format: large senders first, then the whole economy on a published timetable, with e-reporting (transmission of transaction data) for operations with private individuals and cross-border flows. A foreign company invoicing French customers from an overseas ERP must therefore confirm with its provider that French-compliant structured formats, the mandatory mentions, and the e-reporting of B2C and international data are actually emitted — a PDF attached to an email no longer suffices where the reform applies. Finally, mind the statute-of-limitations asymmetry built into the calendar: you deduct input VAT within the applicable time limits while the administration reassesses over its own recovery period, so a late-discovered supplier invoice can be worthless while a late-discovered omission remains punishable. File completely each month and reconcile quarterly with your home-country accounts; the cheapest audit is the one your own reconciliation already survived.

B. What goes wrong from abroad: audits, penalties, invalidation, and how to challenge

Distance does not shield you from control; it compounds it, because a foreign file with refunds, reverse charges and a representative is by definition selected for attention. The SIEE reviews returns remotely, requests invoices by secure messaging, and can trigger a full audit of your French operations. Where the administration finds errors, the penalty scale of Article 1729 of the CGI applies: “les inexactitudes ou les omissions relevées dans une déclaration ou un acte comportant l’indication d’éléments à retenir pour l’assiette ou la liquidation de l’impôt” attract a surcharge of 40% for deliberate failure (manquement délibéré) and 80% for abuse of law (abus de droit) (Article 1729, CGI, Légifrance). Those rates apply on top of late-payment interest, and they apply to you exactly as to a domestic company: ignorance of French invoicing mentions or of the place-of-supply rules is never a defence, and the deliberate-failure rate is routinely applied where a company with French turnover never registered at all. Parallel fixed fines punish missing statements: Article 1788 A of the CGI provides that it “entraîne l’application d’une amende de 750 €” to fail to produce the statements required by Article 289 B of the CGI within the time limit, and that “l’amende est portée à 1 500 € à défaut de production de la déclaration dans les trente jours d’une mise en demeure” (Article 1788 A, CGI, Légifrance). Article 289 B covers the European sales listings (état récapitulatif, the EC sales list / DEB-ECE reporting of intra-EU supplies of goods and services): a foreign company moving goods between EU countries through French stock typically owes these listings in addition to the CA3, and each missing or late listing is fined separately, so a year of neglected listings multiplies into thousands of euros before any VAT principal is even discussed.

Beyond money, the administration holds two structural weapons aimed specifically at foreign files. First, the invalidation of the VAT number: as noted above, a non-EU business that drops its fiscal representative can see its number invalidated, which publicly signals to every customer checking VIES that the supplier is unreliable and freezes the customer’s own deductions. Second, joint liability down the chain: your French customer that accepted your invoice without checking your number, or paid while you had no representative, can be pursued for the tax under the recipient-liability rule of Article 289 A recalled above. Commercially, this reverses the negotiation: French purchasing departments increasingly condition payment on a valid VIES entry and a representative’s details on the invoice, and losing that line stops the business faster than any fine. Where you disagree with an assessment, the French system offers the standard two-stage path: an administrative claim (réclamation contentieuse) to the tax office that issued the notice, then appeal to the administrative court (tribunal administratif) if the reply is negative or late. No special foreign-company track exists, and the deadlines printed on each notice are strict, so the operational rule from abroad is simple: calendar every notice the day it arrives in the professional mailbox, answer within the stated period with invoices and contracts attached, and never let a representative’s departure leave the mailbox unwatched. For founders based in Paris or the Île-de-France, the geography is unusually convenient: the SIEE sits at Noisy-le-Grand in Seine-Saint-Denis, east of Paris, so a morning visit with the file, the representative and the missing invoices can unblock in one meeting what months of correspondence would not. If you instead operate through a French subsidiary or branch with premises in Paris, your SIE is the one for the district of the establishment, your registration and Kbis run through the Paris commercial court registry, and any commercial dispute with a French customer over unpaid VAT-bearing invoices goes to the Paris commercial court (tribunal de commerce) or the competent civil court — a reminder that VAT registration is only one thread of a presence whose company-law, lease and employment threads our other guides address.

Conclusion

French VAT reaches your foreign company the moment your transactions are localised in France: goods in a French warehouse, services to French consumers, installation on French soil. From that moment, the fifteen-day identification clock of Article 286 runs, the monthly CA3 cycle of Article 287 begins, and every invoice must carry verified numbers under Article 289. Non-EU businesses add the fiscal representative of Article 289 A, without which the number can be invalidated and the customer pursued. The reverse charge of Article 283 shelters pure B2B services to identified French customers, but nothing else, and the penalty scale of Articles 1729 and 1788 A prices negligence from 750 euros per missing statement to 80% surcharges. Organised from abroad, the regime is manageable: one registration with the right office, one monthly routine, one invoice template checked against VIES, one representative who actually files. Do that before the first French invoice, not after the first French notice, and VAT becomes what it should be for a growing foreign business: invisible.