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Slovak e-invoicing 2027: guide for foreign firms

From 1 January 2027, VAT payers established in Slovakia must issue domestic B2B and B2G invoices as structured XML conforming to EN 16931, delivered through a certified delivery service provider on the Peppol network, and every Slovak taxable person and legal entity – including businesses that are not registered for VAT – must be able to receive such invoices. Foreign companies registered for Slovak VAT only under § 5 of the VAT Act, without an establishment in Slovakia, are not required to issue e-invoices and are not required to receive them through the delivery service. From 1 July 2030 the regime extends to cross-border transactions under Directive (EU) 2025/516 (ViDA), and both the Slovak control statement and the EC Sales List are abolished.

This page is written for readers outside Slovakia. The Slovak-language guide, including the full register of 99 providers with prices, is at e-faktúra 2027 and zoznam digitálnych poštárov.

What changes, and when

From 1 January 2027, every VAT payer established in Slovakia must issue invoices for domestic B2B and B2G supplies as structured XML conforming to European standard EN 16931. From the same date, 1 January 2027, all taxable persons and legal entities in Slovakia – including entities that are not registered for VAT – must be able to receive an invoice in that form. A PDF, a scanned document or an image is not an electronic invoice under the Slovak rules, regardless of any electronic signature attached to it.

The legal basis is Act No. 385/2025 Coll., which amends the Slovak VAT Act No. 222/2004 Coll. Section 76a of the amended VAT Act defines the certified delivery service provider and has applied since 1 January 2026. Section 85o sets the transitional domestic regime that runs from 1 January 2027 to 30 June 2030 and covers the definition of an electronic invoice, the reporting of invoice data to the Financial Directorate of the Slovak Republic, summary invoices covering at most one calendar month, and ten-year archiving in the original XML format.

Calendar year 2026 is a voluntary period. Certified providers are already exchanging live e-invoices over the Peppol network, so a company that wants to test its enterprise resource planning output, its master data and its counterparties' readiness can do so before the obligation starts on 1 January 2027.

From 1 July 2030 the second phase begins under the EU ViDA package, Directive (EU) 2025/516. Cross-border transactions come into scope with digital reporting, the Slovak transitional regime under § 85o ends on 30 June 2030, and both the Slovak control statement (kontrolný výkaz) and the EC Sales List (súhrnný výkaz) are abolished and replaced by reporting derived from the e-invoices themselves.

Who is affected, and who is not

Two distinct obligations start on 1 January 2027 and should not be conflated. The obligation to issue applies to VAT payers established in Slovakia for their domestic B2B and B2G supplies. The obligation to be able to receive is broader: it covers all taxable persons and legal entities in Slovakia, including sole traders, professionals and landlords who are not registered for VAT.

Foreign companies registered for Slovak VAT only under § 5 of the VAT Act – that is, companies that are not established in Slovakia – do not have to issue electronic invoices and do not have to receive them through the delivery service. In the first phase, which runs until 30 June 2030, the Slovak mandate is confined to domestic supplies made by VAT payers established in Slovakia.

A group structure changes the answer. If a foreign parent has a Slovak subsidiary or a fixed establishment in Slovakia that is a Slovak VAT payer, that Slovak entity is in scope for its domestic supplies from 1 January 2027 in exactly the same way as any locally owned company. Whether a particular presence constitutes an establishment is a VAT question that should be settled with a Slovak tax adviser well before December 2026, because the answer determines whether a Peppol connection is needed at all.

Even where no obligation applies, the practical position is worth weighing. Slovak counterparties will be producing EN 16931 XML from 1 January 2027 as a matter of routine, and accounts payable teams that can consume that XML avoid re-keying data that has already been structured. Being outside the mandate removes a legal duty; it does not remove the operational question of what to do with the files that arrive.

How the Slovak model works technically

Slovakia did not build a central government invoicing portal. The earlier IS EFA central platform concept was abandoned in 2024, and Act No. 385/2025 Coll. instead adopted the decentralised Peppol network, in which invoices travel directly between certified providers over the AS4 protocol. The Financial Directorate of the Slovak Republic acts as the Peppol Authority for Slovakia and issues each accredited provider a PA SK identifier in the format EFSK0000NN.

The Slovak implementation is a five-corner model. Corner one is the supplier, corner two the supplier's certified provider, corner three the buyer's certified provider and corner four the buyer. Corner five is the Financial Directorate: providers transmit Tax Data Documents to the Financial Administration's Access Point, on the supplier side when the invoice is issued and on the buyer side within five days of receipt, under § 85o of the VAT Act. A conventional four-corner Peppol Access Point with no Tax Data Document capability does not satisfy the Slovak requirement.

The participant identifier for a Slovak entity is scheme 0245 combined with the ten-digit Slovak tax number DIČ, written as 0245:DIČ. The DIČ, not the VAT number IČ DPH, is the primary recipient identifier, and it applies to public sector bodies without a VAT number as well. In practice a Slovak VAT number is the country prefix SK followed by those same ten digits, which is a frequent source of confusion in foreign master data. An entity that has no DIČ should register for income tax in order to obtain one.

Unlike most Peppol countries, Slovakia mandates a single centralised Service Metadata Publisher. A participant is registered in that central SMP with exactly one receiving provider against its Peppol identifier, while invoices may be sent through several providers in parallel. When a contract with a receiving provider ends, deregistration from the central SMP must take place within three working days, which is the practical constraint on any provider migration.

The message format is Peppol BIS Billing 3.0, the EN 16931 compliant profile, extended by the Slovak national rules published as PASR. Both the UBL 2.1 and UN/CEFACT CII syntaxes sit within EN 16931, and a PDF visualisation may travel as an attachment to the XML rather than in place of it. Invoices must be archived for ten years in their original XML form under § 85o(15); keeping only a PDF rendering does not discharge that duty.

The provider market as of 10 August 2026

As of 17 August 2026, the Financial Administration's register contained 60 certified delivery service providers, holding PA SK identifiers EFSK000001 to EFSK000060. Of those 60 providers, 27 were registered in Slovakia and 33 in other EU member states, which makes the Slovak market unusually open to foreign service providers by comparison with mandates built around national portals.

A further 14 entities were in accreditation as of 10 August 2026, so the register continues to grow month by month. Any count of providers should therefore always be quoted with the date on which it was read; the Financial Administration replaces its published lists rather than versioning them, and older list URLs cease to resolve after an update.

Alongside certification, Slovakia operates a public selection portal known as VPDS, where certified providers may list the intermediaries that resell or embed their service. As of 10 August 2026, the VPDS portal displayed 68 named intermediaries. For a foreign software vendor or accounting platform, becoming an intermediary of an already certified provider is materially faster than obtaining certification and accreditation in its own name.

What is required of a service provider

A provider must hold a registered office or place of business in a member state of the European Union; establishment in Slovakia is not required, which is why 33 of the 60 providers certified as of 17 August 2026 are based elsewhere in the EU. The integrity requirement covers the applicant entity and its statutory representatives, so an accreditation file has to account for the individuals behind the company as well as the company itself.

The route to the register has two steps. The first is certification within OpenPeppol: signing the Service Provider Agreement and passing testbed validation, including support for status messages. The second is accreditation by the Financial Directorate of the Slovak Republic, applied for electronically, which adds the Slovak specifics – PASR national rules and automated transmission of Tax Data Documents to the Financial Administration's Access Point.

From 1 July 2027, ISO/IEC 27001 certification becomes mandatory for all Peppol Service Providers. This is an OpenPeppol requirement rather than a Slovak one, and the distinction matters when reading the documentation: the Slovak PASR specification currently marks Information Security as "Applicable: No", so a provider that meets only the Slovak rules is not thereby compliant with the network-wide obligation that starts on 1 July 2027.

Section 85o(18) contains a transitional rule with a hard deadline that applies to providers, not to their customers. During 2026 a provider is not required to demonstrate automated fulfilment of the reporting obligations, but a provider that has not demonstrated it by 15 December 2026 will be deleted from the register by the Financial Directorate on 1 January 2027 – the very day the mandate takes effect.

How to choose a provider

Start from the register rather than from marketing material. A provider that can lawfully deliver Slovak e-invoices holds a PA SK identifier in the EFSK series, and its presence in the register can be checked directly against the Financial Administration's published list. A general Peppol Access Point in another country that is not accredited in Slovakia cannot perform the Slovak Tax Data Document reporting on your behalf.

Ask specifically about § 85o(18). Because providers that fail to demonstrate automated reporting by 15 December 2026 are removed from the register on 1 January 2027, presence in the register during 2026 is not by itself evidence that the provider will still be there when the obligation starts. Ask whether Tax Data Documents are already being transmitted in production and request confirmation once the 15 December 2026 milestone has passed.

Confirm how the provider handles the central SMP registration of your 0245:DIČ identifier, and remember that only one receiving provider can be registered against a participant identifier at a time. If you already exchange Peppol documents in other countries, establish whether your incumbent provider is accredited in Slovakia, whether it can act through a Slovak certified provider, or whether you will run a separate Slovak channel – and, in the last case, how your ERP will route by country.

For ERP and accounting teams, the integration questions are usually decisive: whether the provider offers an API rather than only a web application, whether it maps your existing output to EN 16931 with the PASR national rules applied, whether it validates before transmission and surfaces rejections back into your system, and how it handles credit notes, summary invoices covering at most one calendar month, and attachments. Retention also needs an owner, since the ten-year obligation under § 85o(15) applies to the original XML.

Finally, treat contractual availability as a compliance control, not a comfort item. Under the Financial Administration's published guidance, a penalty does not arise where the taxpayer proves that data was not transmitted because of a failure by its contracted certified provider and the data is sent without undue delay once the outage is resolved – which is only usable in practice if your contract, your monitoring and your incident evidence make such a failure demonstrable.

What it costs

Published Slovak price lists, read on 10 August 2026 and converted to a common basis of 30 sent invoices per month, run from €0 for free tiers aimed at very low volumes to roughly €5 to €12 per month for a simple standalone application. Transaction pricing at the document level is more common among international providers, where €0.05 to €0.50 per document is the usual range. Integration and EDI projects for larger organisations are quoted individually and fall outside any published tariff.

Prices are quoted excluding VAT and change frequently as the market fills out, so any figure should be checked against the provider's current price list before it is used in a budget. Note also that a headline monthly fee often covers sending only, with receiving either included up to a stated volume or charged per document above it; comparing headline fees without the volume terms tends to mislead.

For a foreign group, the provider fee is rarely the largest line. The dominant cost is usually internal: mapping ERP output to EN 16931 with the PASR national rules, cleaning counterparty master data so that every Slovak trading partner carries a correct ten-digit DIČ, and adapting accounts payable to receive structured XML. Budgeting for that work in 2026 is what makes the 1 January 2027 date manageable.

Penalties and enforcement

Under the Financial Administration's published information, a breach of the e-invoicing obligations carries a penalty of up to €10,000, rising to up to €100,000 for a repeated breach. These are upper limits, and the amount actually imposed reflects the seriousness and circumstances of the breach. Penalties attach principally to failing to report invoice data, or reporting it incorrectly or late.

A penalty does not arise for an obvious error that is promptly corrected, nor where the taxpayer proves that the data was not transmitted because of a failure by its contracted certified delivery service provider and the data is sent without undue delay after the outage is resolved.

There is also an indirect exposure that is easy to miss. An invoice that is not structured XML conforming to EN 16931 is not an electronic invoice at all, so a supplier who issues only a PDF for a domestic B2B supply after 1 January 2027 has not discharged the obligation to issue an invoice and the corresponding data never reaches the Financial Administration.

What to do before 1 January 2027

Determine first whether you are in scope. If your only Slovak footprint is a VAT registration under § 5 of the VAT Act with no establishment in Slovakia, the issuing and receiving obligations do not apply to you; if you have a Slovak subsidiary or a fixed establishment that is a VAT payer, that entity is in scope for domestic supplies from 1 January 2027.

Confirm the Peppol identifier for each in-scope Slovak entity, in the form 0245 followed by the ten-digit DIČ, and make sure the DIČ rather than the VAT number is what your ERP holds. Select a certified provider from the register, contract for both sending and receiving, and have the entity registered in the central SMP with a single receiving provider.

Use the voluntary period during 2026 to run live traffic rather than only test files, and revisit your provider's status after 15 December 2026, the date by which providers must have demonstrated automated fulfilment of the reporting obligations under § 85o(18) or be deleted from the register on 1 January 2027. Set the retention process for ten years of original XML at the same time, and keep 1 July 2027 in view for the ISO/IEC 27001 obligation on service providers and 1 July 2030 for the cross-border phase under Directive (EU) 2025/516.

About this page

epostari.sk is published by Verteco digital services, s. r. o. (Slovak company ID 53 412 834), which is itself a certified delivery service provider entered in the Financial Administration's register under PA SK ID EFSK000031 and which operates the Verteco Peppol Portal. That relationship is disclosed on every comparison the portal publishes: the operator's own service and the intermediaries running on its certified solution are labelled as such, and rankings follow a single published methodology applied identically to all providers.

Facts on this page are taken from Act No. 385/2025 Coll. and the amended VAT Act No. 222/2004 Coll., from the Financial Administration's published guidance and registers, and from OpenPeppol and PASR documentation, and are stated with the date on which they were verified. Figures describing the provider market reflect the register as read on 10 August 2026 and change as new providers are accredited.

This page is informational and does not constitute legal or tax advice. Questions of establishment, place of supply and scope should be settled with a Slovak tax adviser or with the Financial Administration. Corrections and updates are welcome at redakcia@epostari.sk.