A VAT refund in France on €600 spent in one shop is about €75, paid weeks after you fly, and it is €0.00 if you reach the departures hall without having scanned the form. The refund is not the hard part. The sequence is.
France runs the most machine-dependent version of this procedure in Europe. The shop generates an export form carrying a barcode; a kiosk reads the barcode and puts the words “OK Bordereau validé” on a screen; that screen is the customs visa. There is no stamp to collect afterwards and nobody to appeal to later. A form that was never scanned is not a delayed refund, it is no refund.
Below: who qualifies, what the €100 minimum actually measures, what the shop has to hand you, what the kiosk does, the deadline, what France excludes, and the sum on €600. For how France’s floor and procedure sit against Italy’s, Germany’s and Spain’s, the comparison is in what each country's desk requires.
Who qualifies for a VAT refund in France
French customs sets three conditions on the person, and they are checked in the shop rather than at the airport. You must be:
- Resident in a third State — a country outside the EU — on the date of purchase.
- At least 16 years old.
- Passing through France for fewer than six months.
You also need a valid passport or equivalent identity document, in the shop, at the moment of purchase. Not a photograph of one. The form is issued against the document, and a shop that cannot see it cannot issue the form.
Residence, not nationality, is what the condition turns on. A French passport holder resident in Canada qualifies; an American on a two-year posting to Lyon does not. This catches more people than the minimum does, and it is not something a refund desk can override.
The minimum is €100, and three words in it do the work
French customs states it as: the amount of your purchases including all taxes, in the same store, on the same day, must be greater than 100 euros.
The figure has been €100 since 1 January 2021, under the order of 23 July 2020. Before that it was €175.01, and pages still quoting €175 are describing a France that stopped existing five years ago. If you are reading a guide that has not noticed, do not trust the rest of it either.
Three words in that sentence are where the money is.
“Same store.” The minimum is per retailer, not per trip and not per brand. Four €40 purchases in four shops is €160 spent and nothing reclaimable. The same €160 in one shop clears the floor. This is the only real lever a shopper has over the arithmetic, and it has to be pulled before paying.
“Same day.” Two visits to one shop on Tuesday count together. Tuesday and Wednesday do not.
“Greater than.” €100.00 exactly does not qualify. It has to be over.
The ceiling that minimum unlocks is modest, because France’s 20% standard rate is 20% of the pre-tax price and therefore 16.7% of the price on the tag — the mechanism is why 20% VAT is only 16.7% of what you paid. At the floor itself the refund is about €12.50, which is the subject of below what figure a refund is not worth claiming.
The bordereau: what the shop has to issue
The document is a bordereau de vente à l’exportation — an export sales form. Since 1 January 2014 retailers have had to issue it through the PABLO application, so the thing you are handed carries the PABLO logo and a barcode. It must be signed by the seller and by you.
What to check before leaving the counter, because none of it can be corrected at the airport:
- The barcode and the PABLO logo are on it. Without them there is nothing for a kiosk to read.
- Your name and passport details are right. A transposed number is a form that validates against nobody.
- Both signatures are there. Yours included — this is the one people forget, because the staff hand it over mid-transaction.
- The goods on the form are the goods in the bag. If an officer asks to see what you are exporting, the form is what they are comparing against.
- Which refund route the shop has chosen for you. The shop, not you, decides whether the paperwork runs through Global Blue, Planet, Privé or its own counter — Global Blue or Planet, and when it matters is why that choice is already made by the time you are asked.
The PABLO kiosk and “OK Bordereau validé”
At departure, you scan the barcode at a kiosk fitted with an optical reader, sited near customs. The screen returns “OK Bordereau validé” — form validated — and French customs is explicit that this display serves as the customs stamp, confirming the export.
Two things follow that are easy to get wrong.
There is no second step with an officer. Travellers trained on the German or older French procedure go looking for a counter and a stamp after the kiosk, and there isn’t one. The screen is the visa.
The kiosk exercises no judgement. France runs two visa procedures in parallel — the electronic PABLO visa, and a customs officer’s stamp — and the officer route exists partly for forms a reader cannot process. But a kiosk that rejects a form will not explain why, and finding an officer with twenty minutes left before a gate closes is not a plan.
So: go to the kiosk before you check a bag, not after. Every failure mode on this page is survivable except being separated from the goods before the export is proved.
The deadline: the end of the third month
French customs puts the window at: the goods must be presented to customs before the end of the third month following that in which the purchase took place.
Bought on 3 October, you have until 31 January. That is deliberately generous and it has one good use — you do not have to decide in the shop whether the claim is worth making. Take the form, which costs nothing, and decide at the airport once you can see how much of your morning is left.
What the window does not extend is the physical requirement. The goods have to leave with you, on your person or in your luggage, and be available to show. A three-month deadline is not permission to ship the item home and validate the form on a later trip.
What France will not refund
French customs excludes a defined list, and it is longer than people expect: manufactured tobacco, petroleum products, weapons, cultural goods, means of private transport, and goods requiring a special permit such as items under the Washington Convention.
Note what that list does to two common plans. A car, a boat or a motorcycle is out — “means of private transport” is not a loophole about engine size. And an antique or an artwork can fall under cultural goods, which is the opposite of the intuition that an expensive one-off purchase is the best candidate for a refund.
Services are out everywhere by the nature of the scheme: no restaurant bill, no hotel night, no museum ticket, no train fare.
What €600 in one Paris shop actually nets
The ladder at the top of this page, in words.
| Line | Figure |
|---|---|
| Spent, one shop, one day | €600.00 |
| Clears the €100 minimum | yes |
| VAT inside the price at 20% (×20/120) | €100.00 |
| Operator’s fee, a quarter of the reclaimable amount | −€25.00 |
| Refund paid | €75.00 |
€75.00 is 12.5% of what you spent, and that percentage does not move with the purchase size — every published fee in this niche is proportional, which is why the decision is denominated in euros and not in per cent. The fee figure used here is Privé’s published share of the reclaimable amount as of 21 June 2026, which is the middle of four conflicting published figures; four published figures, and which one is right sets out why that one and not the others, and what every refund calculator leaves out is why the operators’ own calculators show you a larger number than this.
Two deductions are not in the table because they depend on choices made at the counter rather than on France. If the refund is converted into another currency, 3% to 5% of it goes — the conversion spread nobody counts. And taking it as cash at the airport is priced differently from taking it to a card, which is cash at the airport against credit to the card.
Where it goes wrong
The four I read most often, in the order they cost people money:
The goods were already checked in. Nothing recovers this if an officer asks to see them. Validate first.
The €100 was spread across shops. Discovered at the kiosk, fixable only on a future trip.
The form was never signed by the traveller. A counter-signature takes four seconds in the shop and is not available in the departures hall.
The exit was through another country. If you leave the EU from Frankfurt rather than Paris, the validation happens where you exit, under that country’s procedure. It is not fatal, but it is never simpler, and it is not a thing to learn at a kiosk.
The honest summary of France: a low minimum, a generous deadline, a fast machine, and no forgiveness at all for a form presented out of sequence. Italy’s version of the same procedure has a second deadline that falls on the shop rather than on you — Italy: OTELLO, the stamp, and the deadline.
Minimum spend, the €175.01 figure it replaced and the order of 23 July 2020, eligibility conditions, the bordereau de vente à l’exportation and its PABLO logo and barcode, the mandatory issue through PABLO since 1 January 2014, the kiosk procedure and the “OK Bordereau validé” display, the three-month export deadline and the list of excluded goods are all from French customs, “La détaxe en France pour les touristes — PABLO”. Operator fee at Privé’s published share of the reclaimable amount, 21 June 2026. Conversion band from Global Blue’s terms as reproduced by TravelUpdate, 20 March 2023. Checked 4 October 2026. Rules are jurisdictional and they change; this is reporting, not tax or legal advice.
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