Does ViDA mean I only need one EU VAT registration?

For many sellers, close to it, from 1 July 2028. The Union OSS is extended to domestic B2C supplies made by a taxable person not established in the member state of consumption, and a new special scheme covers transfers of your own goods between member states. Neither is compulsory, and neither covers B2B supplies that fall outside the reverse charge.

Is call-off stock being abolished?

Yes, in stages. Under Directive (EU) 2025/516 no goods may be dispatched into a call-off stock arrangement after 30 June 2028, and Article 17a ceases to apply entirely on 30 June 2029, which gives arrangements already running the usual twelve months to unwind.

Does ViDA make IOSS mandatory?

No. The adopted package leaves IOSS optional and makes technical improvements to it from 1 January 2027. Compulsion in the import channel is coming from the customs reform instead, through the deemed-importer rule for platforms and distance sellers.

ViDA’s quiet half: the VAT registrations that disappear in 2028, and the one that replaces them

VAT in the Digital Age is usually discussed as an e-invoicing reform, and e-invoicing is the part that arrives last: digital reporting for cross-border business-to-business transactions starts on 1 July 2030, with national real-time reporting systems required to converge on it by 1 January 2035. For a merchant shipping goods, the date that matters is two years earlier, and it goes in the opposite direction from everything else this site tracks. It removes registrations rather than adding them.

The plumbing for it was published three weeks ago. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1869, of 27 July 2026, rewrites the detailed rules for the special schemes — how a business identifies itself, registers, and files — with most of it applying from 1 July 2028 and one interim piece from 1 January 2027.

What changes on 1 July 2028

Three things in Directive (EU) 2025/516 land together.

The Union OSS extends to domestic B2C supplies. Today OSS covers distance sales across a border. From 2028 it also covers domestic supplies of goods to consumers made by a taxable person who is not established in the member state of consumption. The classic trigger for a foreign VAT registration — holding stock in a warehouse in another member state and selling locally from it — stops requiring one.

A new special scheme covers transfers of your own goods. Moving your own stock from a warehouse in one member state to a warehouse in another is a deemed supply and an acquisition, and it is the reason so many small sellers hold registrations they otherwise would not need. The new scheme lets a business report those movements on a single return and be identified for VAT in the member state of identification only. It is optional.

The reverse charge becomes mandatory in a defined case. Under the amended Article 194, where a supply is made by a person not established in the member state where the VAT is due, and the customer is already identified for VAT there, the customer accounts for the tax. That removes another common reason to register.

Call-off stock is being retired

The call-off stock simplification in Article 17a goes, in two steps that are easy to misread:

30 June 2028 — the last day goods may be dispatched or transported into a call-off stock arrangement.
30 June 2029 — Article 17a ceases to apply at all, which gives arrangements started before the first date the usual twelve-month window to be sold or returned.

Anything still sitting in call-off stock after June 2029 falls back to ordinary rules, and the new transfers-of-own-goods scheme is what it is expected to fall back into.

What this does not do

It does not create a single EU VAT number. It reduces the reasons a registration is triggered; it does not merge the registrations you hold for other reasons, and B2B supplies outside the reverse charge case are untouched.

It does not make IOSS mandatory. That proposal did not survive into the adopted text, and the import channel is being tightened from the customs side instead — through the deemed-importer rule and the handling fee rather than through the VAT directive.

And it does not help with extended producer responsibility. EPR registration and the authorised representative mandate are environmental obligations with their own national registers, untouched by anything in ViDA. A seller can end up in 2028 with one VAT registration and twenty-seven EPR ones, which is a fair summary of how unevenly “single market” has been applied across the two regimes.

The sequence, to 2035

Date	What
1 Jan 2027	OSS and IOSS clarifications; e-charging supplies into OSS
1 Jul 2028	Single VAT registration; transfers of own goods; mandatory reverse charge
30 Jun 2028	No new call-off stock arrangements
30 Jun 2029	Article 17a ceases to apply
1 Jul 2030	Digital reporting and e-invoicing for cross-border B2B
1 Jan 2035	National real-time reporting systems align with the EU scheme

Two years is not long for a change that alters where a business is registered. The useful work in 2026 and 2027 is knowing which of your current registrations exist only because of stock movements or local sales from foreign warehouses — those are the ones 2028 is designed to remove.

ViDA's quiet half: the VAT registrations that disappear in 2028, and the one that replaces them

What changes on 1 July 2028

Call-off stock is being retired

What this does not do

The sequence, to 2035

Sources

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