The floor is not a judgement call, it is a published number: in France, purchases in the same store on the same day must come to more than €100 before there is anything to claim at all. Below that figure the question is a VAT refund worth it has no arithmetic in it. There is no refund, at any rate, for any effort.
Above the floor the figure is about €12.50 back per €100 spent, and it stays about €12.50 per €100 however much you spend, because every published fee in this niche is proportional. So the threshold you actually need is not a percentage. It is the point where the euros returned stop being worth the queues, and that point is different for a person with a four-hour layover than for a person with a fifty-minute connection.
This post gives you the figure at three purchase sizes, the division that turns it into your own threshold, and the three cases where the answer is no whatever the figure says.
The floor: below the minimum spend there is nothing to claim
French customs states the condition directly: “the amount of your purchases including all taxes (including taxes), in the same store, on the same day, must be greater than 100 euros” (French customs, Tax exemption in France for tourists — PABLO, page updated 4 June 2026). The same page sets three conditions on the person: “You must be: 1. resident in a third State on the date of purchase; 2. visiting France for less than six months; 3. be 16 years of age or older.”
Three things in that sentence do work that most write-ups skip.
“In the same store.” The minimum is per retailer, not per trip. Four €40 purchases in four shops is €160 spent and €0 reclaimable. The same €160 in one shop clears the floor. That is the single largest lever a shopper has over this arithmetic and it has to be pulled before the purchase, not after.
“On the same day.” Two visits to the same shop on Tuesday count together; Tuesday and Wednesday do not.
“Greater than.” Exactly €100.00 does not qualify. It has to be over.
France is the example because it is where this site’s worked figures live. Every country sets its own minimum, and some are much lower — that table belongs to the country posts rather than here, and I am not going to put a figure on Spain or Italy in a post I have not sourced them for. The structural point holds everywhere: the floor is a published number in the country you bought in, and no amount of arithmetic gets you under it.
Is a VAT refund worth it at €100, €300 and €1,000?
Take the floor as the smallest qualifying purchase and work up. France’s standard rate is 20%, so the tax inside the price is the gross times 20/120 — the mechanism is why a 20% rate is only 16.7% of what you paid. From that the operator takes its cut; the arithmetic below uses Privé’s published figure of a quarter of the reclaimable amount (21 June 2026), which is the middle of the four published fees and the reason for choosing it is set out in four published figures, and which one is right.
| Spent in one French shop | VAT inside it | Operator’s fee | Refund paid | As % of the spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| €100 | €16.67 | €4.17 | €12.50 | 12.5% |
| €300 | €50.00 | €12.50 | €37.50 | 12.5% |
| €500 | €83.33 | €20.83 | €62.50 | 12.5% |
| €1,000 | €166.67 | €41.67 | €125.00 | 12.5% |
The right-hand column does not move. That is the whole reason a percentage cannot answer this question: 12.5% is as true at the floor as it is at ten times the floor, and nobody hesitates over €125 the way they hesitate over €12.50. The decision is denominated in euros, not in per cent.
Note also what the table does not show, because it cannot: a second deduction if the operator converts the refund into another currency, which is 3% to 5% of it on Global Blue’s published band. On €12.50 that is under a euro. On €125 it is €3.75 to €6.25, and the conversion spread nobody counts is how to remove it.
What the claim costs, and it is not money
The claim is free. What it consumes is time, in three separate places, and none of the three has a length you can know in advance:
- At the till. The shop has to issue the export form in your name against your passport. In a busy shop in a tourist quarter this is not the transaction the staff are optimised for.
- At customs, on departure. The form has to be validated before you leave, and the goods have to be available to show if you are asked for them.
- At the refund desk, if you are taking the money at the airport rather than to a card.
There is a fourth cost that is not time: the risk that the form fails. A form that is never validated pays nothing, and the whole apparatus above returns zero. I spent four years reading forms that came back from airports and the single largest category was not fraud or error — it was people who ran out of morning. The queue that matters is the one at the gate.
One thing that is not a cost, and gets treated as one: the deadline is generous. French customs puts it at “before the end of the third month following the month in which your purchase took place.” You do not have to decide in the shop whether the claim is worth making. Take the form, and decide at the airport when you can see how much of your morning is left.
Setting your own threshold in one division
Here is the only honest way to fix a threshold, because the number depends on facts about you that no publisher has.
Take the refund figure. Divide it by the minutes you expect the claim to cost. Compare the result to what an hour of your morning at an airport is worth to you.
On €100 spent that is €12.50 against, say, forty-five minutes of queueing across the three stops — about €16 an hour, with a real chance of getting nothing if the third queue runs long. On €1,000 spent it is €125 against the same forty-five minutes, or roughly €165 an hour, which very few people decline.
Somewhere between those two the answer flips, and where it flips is yours. My own line, stated as an assumption and not as a rule anybody enforces, sits around €250 to €300 of spend on a single form — about €31 to €37 returned. Below that I take the form in the shop, because it is free, and then I look at the departures hall and usually walk past. Above it I queue.
Recompute it with your own minutes. The arithmetic is two numbers.
The three cases where the answer is no regardless of the figure
You have under ninety minutes and the goods are going into a checked bag. Customs may ask to see what you are exporting, which means the validation has to happen while the goods are still with you. A tight connection plus a bag that has already gone is how a refund becomes a missed flight, and a missed flight costs more than any figure in the table above.
You will not be leaving through the country’s own exit. The validation happens where you exit, and a route out through a third country changes the procedure. It is not always fatal, but it is never simpler, and it is not a thing to discover at the counter.
The purchase is under the store’s own minimum and you were planning to combine receipts. You cannot. The floor is per store and per day, and putting two shops’ receipts in front of a customs officer is not a shortcut, it is a rejection.
What this threshold does not decide
It does not decide whether the item was cheaper abroad in the first place. The refund is one term in a much longer expression, and on a large purchase carried into the United States it is not even the largest one — duty over the exemption and a warranty that stops at a border are both in there. The whole sum is what a VAT refund actually pays, and the threshold above sits inside it rather than replacing it.
It does not price the cash route against the card route, which has its own deduction and its own queue. That is cash at the airport against credit to the card.
And it is not a figure anybody will quote you at the counter. Every party in that hall is paid on volume of forms processed. The one person in the transaction with a reason to say “on €80, don’t bother” is you.
French minimum, eligibility conditions and deadline from French customs, “Tax exemption in France for tourists — PABLO”, page updated 4 June 2026. Operator fee at Privé’s published quarter of the reclaimable amount, 21 June 2026. Conversion band from Global Blue’s terms as reproduced by TravelUpdate, 20 March 2023. Figures checked 12 September 2026. Rules are jurisdictional and they change; this is reporting, not tax or legal advice.