Invoir
  1. Home
  2. Guides
  3. France e-invoicing reform

France's B2B e-invoicing reform: September 2026 and September 2027

France has moved invoices between businesses to structured e-invoices exchanged through approved platforms, with the tax authority receiving the data. The first phase started on 1 September 2026. Dates and rules below are from the DGFiP's pages on impots.gouv.fr unless another source is linked.

Updated 19 October 2026

Timeline

  1. 1 September 2026: all businesses receive; large and mid-sized ones issueEvery business subject to VAT in France must be able to receive e-invoices. Large companies (GE) and intermediate-sized companies (ETI) must issue all their B2B invoices electronically and start e-reporting.
  2. 1 September 2027: small and micro businesses issueSMEs (PME) and micro-enterprises must issue e-invoices and e-report too.

Company size follows the INSEE categories (décret n° 2008-1354): a PME has fewer than 250 employees and either at most €50 million turnover or a balance sheet of at most €43 million; an ETI has fewer than 5,000 employees and at most €1.5 billion turnover or €2 billion balance sheet; anything larger is a GE.

Who is affected

All businesses subject to VAT in France, whatever their turnover or tax regime, including businesses under the franchise en base, freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs. A business that issues no invoices is still affected: it must be able to receive. The e-invoicing obligation covers B2B transactions between businesses established in France and subject to French VAT.

Two obligations: e-invoicing and e-reporting

Approved platforms

Invoices between French businesses must pass through a plateforme agréée (approved platform, previously called PDP): a private company approved by the State, which issues and receives the invoices and sends the required data to the tax authority. Each business chooses its own platform; it does not have to be the one its supplier or customer uses. The DGFiP publishes the list of approved platforms.

For software vendors this means: your product creates the invoice file and hands it to your customer's platform, usually over the platform's API. It does not email the PDF to the buyer any more. Plain PDFs, scanned paper and invoices sent by email no longer comply.

Formats

The reform's minimum set of formats (the socle), which every platform must accept, has three members: UBL, CII and the mixed format, a PDF with the structured data embedded, which is Factur-X (FNFE-MPE). All three follow the European standard EN 16931. The formats and profiles are defined in the AFNOR standard XP Z12-012, to which the DGFiP's external specifications (version 3.2, 30 April 2026) refer.

For new integrations, Factur-X with the EN 16931 profile is the pragmatic choice: the customer can read it, the platform can process it, and the same file is a valid ZUGFeRD for German customers. See the format comparison.

Public sector

Invoices to French public bodies already go through Chorus Pro, the public-sector portal, and keep doing so. The reform is about invoices between businesses.

What to do now, as a developer

  1. If your customers are large or mid-sized French companies, they are in scope today: their invoices must reach an approved platform.
  2. For SME customers, the deadline is 1 September 2027; they can already receive through their platform.
  3. Produce Factur-X (or UBL/CII) and validate every file against the EN 16931 rules before handing it to the platform. Platforms reject invalid files; see Validate a Factur-X file.
  4. Integrate with the platforms your customers choose. Invoir generates and validates; it is not an approved platform.

Check a file in your browser, or over the API. The free validator runs the official rules (KoSIT, CEN and Peppol Schematron, Mustang, veraPDF) and lists every error with its rule ID. Nothing is stored. The same check is one HTTP call with a free API key: 25 documents a month, no credit card.

Open the free validator Get a free API key

Sources

More guides