Tax-Free Shopping, Country by Country: What Each Desk Requires

Tax free shopping is one mechanism with a different front door in every country. The mechanism is the same everywhere: a shop sells you goods without charging its own value-added tax, on the condition that you take them out of the tax area and prove it. What changes at the border is the minimum you have to spend before anyone will start the paperwork, what the paperwork is called, and whether the proof is a rubber stamp, a barcode at a kiosk, or a record the shop never sees.

The minimum is where most trips go wrong, because it is not a rounded number and it is not the same twice. France requires more than €100 in one shop on one day. Italy requires more than €70 per invoice, and that figure replaced €154.94 as recently as February 2024. Spain requires nothing at all. Germany starts at €50.01. Great Britain stopped refunding anybody in 2021.

I processed these forms for four years, and the single most common reason one paid nothing was not fraud and not a wrong figure — it was a traveller who had the goods in a checked bag by the time they found the desk. That is the verdict at the top of this page and it holds in every country below: the validation has to happen while the goods are still with you. Everything else on this page is recoverable. That is not.

What tax-free shopping is, in one sentence

It is a refund of the seller’s VAT to a traveller who exports the goods, not a discount and not a duty-free purchase.

Two consequences follow, and both cost people money. First, the rate is not the saving: VAT sits inside the price on the tag, so a 20% rate is 16.7% of what you handed over — the arithmetic is why 20% VAT is only 16.7% of what you paid. Second, this is a different mechanism from the shop past passport control, which sells at a price with no tax in it rather than refunding tax you already paid; the two sums behave differently and duty-free shop or tax-free refund separates them.

The four things every desk asks for

Across every country I have read forms from, the requirements reduce to four. A desk that turns you away is almost always turning you away over one of these.

1. That you are not resident in the tax area. France states it as being “resident in a third State on the date of purchase”, at least 16 years old, and passing through for fewer than six months. Italy’s statute asks that the buyer be domiciled or resident outside the EU and that the passport details appear on the invoice itself.
2. That the spend clears the minimum, measured the way that country measures it — per shop per day in France and Germany, per invoice in Italy, not at all in Spain.
3. That the goods are for personal or family use, and that they are goods. No scheme here refunds tax on a service, a meal or a hotel night.
4. That the export is proved before you leave, by a customs visa — ink or electronic — and that the goods can be produced if an officer asks.

Nothing on that list is negotiable at the counter, and three of the four are settled in the shop rather than at the airport. The shop is where this either works or does not.

The minimum spend, country by country

Each figure below is what that country’s own tax or customs authority states, with its date. Where a country has changed the number recently the old one is in the table too, because half the pages on this subject still quote it.

The right-hand column is the ceiling, not the refund. It is the tax inside the price and it is what you would receive if nobody took a cut, which never happens. What an operator takes out of it is four published figures, and which one is right, and the figure that actually lands is in what a VAT refund actually pays.

Three things about that table are worth more than the numbers in it.

“Per shop, per day” is the lever. Four €40 purchases in four French shops is €160 spent and nothing reclaimable. The same €160 in one shop clears the floor. That decision is made before you buy and cannot be fixed afterwards by putting receipts in front of an officer.

“Over” means over. Exactly €100.00 does not qualify in France. Italy’s statute says the value must be higher than €70, which is why you see €70.01 written everywhere.

Spain having no minimum is not a rounding of a small minimum. It abolished one, which means a single €15 purchase is eligible in Madrid and ineligible in every other country in this table. Whether it is worth the queue is a different question, and below what figure a refund is not worth claiming answers it in euros rather than per cent.

How the validation happens: kiosk, stamp, or neither

This is the part that differs most and the part travellers prepare for least.

France: a bordereau and a barcode. The shop issues a bordereau de vente à l’exportation — an export sales form — carrying the PABLO logo and a barcode, signed by the seller and by you. At departure you scan that barcode at a kiosk with an optical reader near customs, and the screen returns “OK Bordereau validé.” French customs is explicit that this screen is the customs visa; there is no stamp to collect afterwards. A customs officer’s stamp remains the alternative procedure where a kiosk cannot read the form.

Italy: OTELLO, and no ink at all. Italy runs the visa through OTELLO — Online Tax Refund at Exit: Light Lane Optimization — which digitises the customs stamp on a tax-free invoice. The record is electronic from the shop’s till to the exit. The deadline it runs on is the subject of its own post below.

Germany: a form and a physical stamp. The shop issues an Ausfuhrbescheinigung — export papers — and German customs confirms the export at the point of departure from the EU. This is the classic version of the procedure, with an officer and a stamp, and it is the one where arriving at the desk with the goods already checked in fails hardest.

Spain: DIVA. Spain’s refund process for travellers is electronic through the Agencia Tributaria’s DIVA system, validated at a terminal on departure.

The pattern is one worth carrying: the newer the system, the more the proof depends on a machine reading a code that the shop generated correctly. A kiosk cannot exercise judgement about a form that was filled in wrong. An officer sometimes can. Electronic validation is faster and less forgiving in the same stroke.

The deadline is three months, and it is not the only clock

The export deadline is the one rule that is close to uniform. France requires the goods to be presented to customs “before the end of the third month following that in which your purchase took place.” Italy’s statute sets the same window — out of the EU by the end of the third month following the month of the transaction. Germany’s export window is three months as well.

That is generous, and it has a practical use: 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.

But in Italy there is a second clock that has nothing to do with you leaving, and it catches shops rather than shoppers. Where the shop sold you the goods with no VAT charged at all, Italy’s statute requires the validated invoice to come back to the seller, bearing the passport details and the customs visa, by the fourth month following the transaction — and if it does not, the seller has to regularise the VAT itself within a month of that deadline. That is why an Italian shop may decline to hand over the tax at the till and route you through a refund operator instead. It is not obstruction. It is the shop declining to carry your paperwork risk.

Outside the EU the window can be much shorter. Switzerland, which is not in the EU and runs its own scheme, gives 30 days rather than three months. Do not carry an EU assumption across a Swiss border.

The countries where there is no refund at all

Two negative answers, both of which this site would rather state plainly than bury.

Great Britain refunds nothing. The VAT Retail Export Scheme was withdrawn from 1 January 2021, along with the concession that let airport shops zero-rate sales to departing passengers. Northern Ireland is the exception, under its own rules. What survives in Great Britain is having the retailer ship the goods directly to an address outside the UK, which can be zero-rated — a different transaction with a different bill, not a refund you collect at Heathrow.

The United States has no national scheme, for the structural reason that there is no federal VAT to refund. Sales tax is levied by states, a small number of which run their own visitor refund arrangements, and those are narrow. Every page that promises an American tourist a VAT refund is either selling something or confusing the US with the EU.

I am not going to put figures on either of those here. They each get a post of their own in the list below, where the arithmetic can be shown rather than summarised.

What the refund is worth once the desk is behind you

Clearing the desk is not the end of the sum, and on a large purchase it is not the biggest term in it.

• The operator’s cut comes out of the ceiling figure in the table, not out of the price.
• The conversion spread removes 3% to 5% more if the refund is paid in a currency other than the form’s — the conversion spread nobody counts is how to avoid it, and cash at the airport against credit to the card prices the choice at the counter.
• Duty on the way home can wipe the refund out entirely on a purchase over your own country’s exemption, which is a separate bill with a separate form.
• A warranty that stops at a border is a real cost on electronics, and no refund figure anywhere accounts for it.

Which is the whole reason this site exists: every page that ranks for tax free shopping is published by somebody paid when you claim, and none of them carries the terms that argue against claiming.

The verdict, restated as a sequence

In order, and the order is the point:

1. In the shop, before you pay: ask for the export form, with your passport out. Concentrate the spend in one shop where the minimum demands it.
2. Before you pack: keep the goods and the form in hand luggage.
3. At the airport, before check-in: find the customs kiosk or desk. Validate. In France, get to “OK Bordereau validé” on the screen.
4. Only then: the refund counter, or the envelope, or the card.

Step 3 before step 4 is the only ordering that works, and step 2 before step 3 is the one people get wrong. A form with no validation is worth nothing in any country on this page, and no amount of correspondence afterwards creates a customs visa that was never issued.

Each country’s own walkthrough follows as it publishes — the minimum, the form, where the desk actually is in that airport, and the deadline that voids the claim:

Minimum, eligibility, deadline, excluded goods and the PABLO procedure for France from French customs, “La détaxe en France pour les touristes — PABLO”. Italy’s threshold, export deadline and invoice-return rule from art. 38-quater, DPR 26 October 1972 no. 633, as amended by art. 1 comma 77 of Law 30 December 2023 no. 213 (Budget Law 2024), effective for sales from 1 February 2024; OTELLO as described by the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli. Germany’s €50.01 threshold, Ausfuhrbescheinigung and three-month window as stated by German federal and state government guidance for travellers from non-EU states. Spain’s DIVA system and absence of a minimum per the Agencia Tributaria. The withdrawal of the UK VAT Retail Export Scheme from 1 January 2021 per HM Revenue & Customs, Revenue and Customs Brief 21 (2020). Swiss 30-day window per Switzerland Tourism’s published guidance. VAT rates are the standard rates in force in each country. All checked 4 October 2026. Rules are jurisdictional and they change; this is reporting, not tax or legal advice.

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