(Originally published in October 2024 and updated in August 2026)
The EU-wide push toward e-invoicing began with Directive 2014/55/EU, which set the technical standard (EN 16931) for electronic invoicing and made it mandatory for business-to-government (B2G) transactions.
Since then, the EU has moved further: the VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) package, adopted in March 2025, builds on that same standard to bring mandatory digital reporting to B2B and cross-border transactions across the bloc, with EU-wide deadlines running out to 2030.
France, an early mover, is rolling out its own domestic B2B mandate ahead of that curve. Here’s where things stand as France’s reform goes live.
France’s e-invoicing reform is overseen by the Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, along with the Public Finances Directorate General (DGFiP). The reform is intended to improve the efficiency of business transactions, reduce administrative costs, and ensure better VAT compliance.
The country first transposed the EU directive in 2019 through the Business Growth and Transformation (PACTE) law. Article 91 of the 2024 amending finance law then set out the mandatory B2B timeline, and a decree and arrêté dated 27 July 2026 finalized the last regulatory details, including the platform framework and invoice formats described below.
The scale of the reform is significant: more than 7 million VAT-registered businesses in France fall within its scope, and no company is exempt because of its size. Even micro-enterprises and VAT-exempt businesses must be able to receive e-invoices and transmit e-reporting data. The government estimates the reform could generate close to €4.5 billion a year in savings for French businesses overall, largely by cutting the average cost of processing an invoice from around €17 for paper to roughly €0.40 electronically.
The French government has confirmed the following timeline, and the July 2026 decree locked both dates in with no further postponement expected:
This is the third version of the timeline. The reform was originally set for January 2023, then pushed to July 2024, before landing on the current dates. The DGFiP has also confirmed a “soft landing” enforcement approach: sanctions won’t be automatic from day one, and the administration says it will look for a genuine trajectory toward compliance before penalizing a business, at least through the end of 2026. Businesses should still treat these dates as firm and plan their transition accordingly.
A significant change in the reform is the shift away from the public invoicing portal (PPF) as a platform for issuing or receiving invoices.
Previously, the French government considered using a central platform like Chorus Pro, which currently handles invoicing for public sector transactions. Chorus Pro remains relevant for invoices submitted to public authorities, allowing suppliers to send invoices to government entities.
Under the B2B mandate, businesses instead go through certified private platforms. Note the terminology change: these were originally called PDPs (“plateformes de dématérialisation partenaires”), but the July 2026 decree officially renamed them “plateformes agréées” (PA). You’ll increasingly see them referred to as “PA” or “PA (ex-PDP)” in French sources.
More than 100 platforms are now registered with the tax administration (including banks, software publishers, and specialized providers) and that number continues to grow. Businesses will need to select a PA to comply with the new B2B rules, and the July 2026 decree also introduced formal portability rules if a business later wants to switch providers, including minimum notice periods and a guarantee that the outgoing platform keeps serving the business for 12 months after a transfer.
To facilitate the transition, the government has repositioned the PPF as a central recipient directory (annuaire) and a data concentrator for the tax administration, rather than a transmission channel. This directory routes invoices to the correct recipient’s PA and ensures proper data transmission to the tax authorities.
Businesses need to register their receiving address in this directory to be reachable. As of the weeks leading up to the September 2026 deadline, industry surveys suggested a meaningful gap between how ready businesses believed themselves to be and how many had actually completed this registration, underscoring the value of starting early.
The July 2026 arrêté also locked in the technical formats businesses can use. Three EN 16931-based formats are officially recognized, each available in a base profile and an extended “CTC-FR” profile carrying additional French-specific data:
None of the three is more “compliant” than the others, they share the same semantic core, and the choice comes down to what a business’s software supports. That said, Factur-X is worth calling out specifically: because it looks and behaves like a normal PDF invoice while carrying machine-readable data behind the scenes, it requires the least change to existing workflows.
That makes it the likely format of choice for smaller businesses, micro-entrepreneurs, and freelancers who currently just email PDF invoices and want the simplest path to compliance ahead of the September 2027 deadline. Plain PDF and paper invoices, on the other hand, will no longer be valid for in-scope B2B transactions once the mandate applies to a given business.
In addition to e-invoicing, France is implementing new e-reporting obligations, which will cover:
The deadlines mirror the e-invoicing schedule, with reporting becoming mandatory in September 2026 for larger businesses and September 2027 for smaller firms.