Russia freezes the small-business VAT exemption threshold at RUB 20 million
This change is proposed and is not law. The rules below describe what would change if it is adopted.
- Jurisdiction
- 🇷🇺 Russia
- Tax
- VAT
- Change type
- Threshold
- Status
- Proposed
- Impact
- Plan ahead
- Announced
- 4 July 2026
- Effective
- 1 January 2027
- Authority
- State Duma of the Russian Federation
- Systems
- Tax engine, ERP, Reporting
- Verified
- Corroborated against official id · medium confidence
Russian small businesses on the simplified tax system (USN) relying on the Article 145 VAT exemption.
No immediate action — confirm final Federation Council/presidential signature before updating 2027 threshold-monitoring assumptions for RUB 20m vs RUB 15m.
Tax engineERPReporting
Russia's State Duma approved amendments to Article 145 of the Tax Code (Bill No. 1256655-8) freezing the VAT-exemption revenue threshold for small businesses on the simplified tax system (USN) at RUB 20 million through 2028, superseding the previously scheduled step-down to RUB 15 million in 2027; under the new schedule the threshold drops to RUB 15 million in 2029 and RUB 10 million in 2030.
What changed in detail
Bill No. 1256655-8 became law. It was adopted by the State Duma on 24 June 2026, approved by the Federation Council on 1 July 2026, and signed by the President on 4 July 2026 as Federal Law No. 228-FZ, amending Article 145 of the Tax Code. Article 2 provides that it takes effect on the day of official publication — not 1 January 2027.
On the general schedule, the VAT exemption revenue threshold for small businesses on the simplified tax system is held at RUB 20 million for 2025 to 2028, stepping to RUB 15 million in 2029 and RUB 10 million in 2030. The schedule it replaced stepped down considerably faster.
What it means
This record previously said the opposite — that the bill was “not law” and that nothing had changed — and used that to warn against treating bill-stage figures as enacted. The warning was sound and the record was the thing it warned about: the law had been signed sixteen days before the fact was even captured, and nobody checked past the Duma vote.
The practical position is that the RUB 20 million figure is now the rule rather than a planning signal, and it holds three years longer than the schedule it replaced. The band of businesses that would have had to register in 2026 or 2027 under the old step-down stays exempt. If you carried both numbers pending a signature, you can stop: the signature happened.