Belgium restores the seven-year VAT invoice retention period, retroactive to 2023
This page records one dated change. For the rules in Belgium as they stand today, see the Belgium guide →
- Jurisdiction
- Belgium
- Tax
- VAT
- Change type
- Invoice rules
- Status
- In force
- Impact
- Plan ahead
- Announced
- 18 December 2025
- Effective
- 1 January 2023
- Authority
- SPF Finances (FPS Finance), Belgium
- Systems
- ERP, Invoicing
- Verified
- Fetched from official source · high confidence
All Belgian VAT-registered businesses, for their invoice and invoice-copy archiving obligations.
Set Belgian invoice archiving rules to seven years from 1 January of the year after issue.
ERPInvoicing
Article 97 of the Belgian Law of 18 December 2025 (Moniteur belge 30 December 2025, Numac 2025009647) restores the retention period for invoices and invoice copies under article 60, §3 of the VAT Code to seven years from 1 January of the year after issue, retroactively from 1 January 2023, reversing the ten-year period set by the Law of 20 November 2022.
What changed in detail
Article 97 of the Belgian Law of 18 December 2025 (Moniteur belge, 30 December 2025, Numac 2025009647) restores the retention period for invoices and invoice copies under article 60, §3 of the VAT Code to seven years from 1 January of the year after issue. The restoration is retroactive to 1 January 2023, reversing the ten-year period that had been set by the Law of 20 November 2022.
This change has already been in force for over nine months, and its retroactive date reaches back nearly three years; it was not caught and published until this issue.
What it means
The retroactivity is the point that matters operationally: invoices issued from 2023 onward that businesses were archiving under a ten-year policy can now be treated as subject to the seven-year rule instead, which affects when older invoices can be destroyed under a document retention schedule. Businesses that built archiving systems around the ten-year rule should revisit retention schedules rather than assume the shorter period only applies going forward.
Proof
doivent être conservées pendant sept ans à compter du 1er janvier de l'année qui suit leur date d'émissionmust be retained for seven years from 1 January of the year following their date of issue
No source snapshot. The source is the Belgian tax authority's Fisconetplus legal-text database (the official coordinated historical text of VAT Code article 60), published as structured data rather than a standard web page.