VAT Calculator: Add or Remove VAT, 30 Rates | Cash Book

This calculator runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and it keeps working with the connection off. It does the two sums that value added tax comes down to. Given a net price, it adds the tax and shows you what the customer pays. Given a gross figure off a receipt or a card statement, it works backwards and shows you how much of that total was tax. Thirty standard rates are built into the country list, and any rate you type by hand overrides them, which is how you handle reduced rates.

The reason a tool exists for arithmetic this small is that one half of it is counterintuitive. Adding VAT is a multiplication most people get right in their head. Taking it back out is a division, and the instinct to subtract the percentage instead produces an answer that is close enough to look correct and wrong enough to matter across a year of invoices.

How to use it

1. Type in the amount you actually have in front of you: a quoted price, a line on an invoice, the total at the bottom of a receipt. Type it as it appears. Do not round it first, because the rounding at the end is the thing you came here to get right.
2. Tell the selector what that number is. Net means VAT has not been applied yet and you want it added. Gross means the amount already includes VAT and you want it separated out. This one setting is the entire difference between the two answers, and it is where nearly every mistake starts.
3. Pick a country and the rate field fills in with that country's standard rate. Type a number into the rate field instead and the country selector flips to Custom, leaving your figure alone. Country list for ordinary standard-rate work, rate field for everything else.
4. The currency symbol is decoration. It changes the label on the three figures and nothing more. There is no exchange rate anywhere in this tool, so do not expect it to convert anything.
5. Read the three results: net before VAT, the VAT itself, the gross including VAT. In add mode the net is the number you typed, in remove mode the gross is. The note underneath restates which rate was applied, which is how a mistyped rate becomes visible instead of silent.

Adding VAT versus taking it out

The two directions are not mirror images, and the asymmetry is the whole point of the tool.

Adding VAT is straightforward. Multiply the net price by the rate to get the tax, then add it on. A net price of 100 at 20 percent is 100 multiplied by 0.20, so 20 of VAT and a gross of 120. At 19 percent the same net gives 19 and 119. At 27 percent, 27 and 127. Most people shortcut it by multiplying the net by 1.20 and reading the gross in one step.

Removing VAT is a division, and that is where the trouble lives. The gross figure already contains the tax, so it is 120 percent of the net, not 100. To get back, divide by 1.20. A gross of 120 divided by 1.20 is a net of 100, and the VAT is what is left over, 20.

Now the mistake. Subtracting 20 percent from the gross of 120 gives 96, and a VAT figure of 24. Both are wrong. The correct answers are 100 and 20. The error is 4 on a 120 receipt, a little over 3 percent, and it goes in the same direction every single time: subtracting always overstates the tax and understates the net.

Why does it happen? Because the percentage is calculated on the net, not on the gross. The 20 in the example is 20 percent of the net 100, but it is only 16.67 percent of the gross 120. That fraction, one sixth, is the VAT fraction for a 20 percent rate, and it is what you are really taking out when you reverse the sum.

The pattern repeats at every rate, and the gap widens as the rate climbs:

• At 20 percent, VAT is one sixth of the gross, about 16.67 percent.
• At 19 percent, it is 19 divided by 119, about 15.97 percent of the gross.
• At 21 percent, it is 21 divided by 121, about 17.36 percent.
• At 25 percent, it is exactly one fifth of the gross, 20 percent.
• At 27 percent, it is 27 divided by 127, about 21.26 percent.

A second worked case makes the size of the error obvious. A German receipt for 238 at 19 percent: the correct net is 238 divided by 1.19, which is exactly 200, and the VAT is 38. Subtracting 19 percent of 238 gives 45.22 of tax and a net of 192.78. That is 7.22 of imaginary tax on one receipt. Repeat it across a quarter of expenses and the figure stops being a rounding curiosity.

The calculator does the division for you, which is the point, but the arithmetic is worth holding in your head anyway, because at some stage you will be looking at a gross number with no browser open.

Two things this page will not do, both on purpose. It will not convert currencies, so the symbol next to the amount is a label and nothing else; a rate and an exchange rate in the same form is how people end up invoicing the wrong number in the wrong money. And it will not guess the mode for you. There is no clever heuristic reading the amount and deciding whether it looks net or gross. The net-gross switch is the field that decides the answer, so it stays a deliberate choice rather than something the page quietly makes on your behalf.

The rates in the list

Every rate in the country selector is a standard rate, and that qualification carries most of the weight in this section. The standard rate is the default that applies when no specific rule says otherwise. It is the rate on consultancy, electronics, furniture, clothing in most countries, restaurant bills in some, and a long tail of ordinary goods and services.

The list covers the twenty-seven EU member states plus the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway. The spread is wide. Hungary sits highest at 27 percent, Luxembourg lowest within the EU at 17 percent, and Switzerland is lower again at 8.1 percent, which is not an EU rate at all but the Swiss federal VAT. Denmark, Sweden, Croatia and Norway all sit at 25 percent, Finland a notch above at 25.5 percent, and a large cluster of countries sits between 20 and 23 percent.

Those rates were checked in September 2026, and that date is not decoration. Standard rates change, sometimes on a few months' notice. Four in this list have moved since 2024 alone: Finland, Estonia, Slovakia and Romania. A page like this one is a snapshot, and snapshots go stale.

Reduced and zero rates exist almost everywhere, and the list contains none of them. Under the EU VAT Directive member states may apply reduced rates to listed categories, and most of them do. Food, books, newspapers, medicines, passenger transport, hotel accommodation, cultural admissions, some renovation work and domestic energy commonly sit below the standard rate. Several countries run two reduced rates plus a super-reduced rate, and some apply a zero rate to particular goods. The United Kingdom pairs its 20 percent standard rate with a 5 percent reduced rate and a substantial zero-rated list covering most food and children's clothing. Ireland has 23 percent standard alongside 13.5 and 9. Germany's reduced rate is 7 percent. None of that fits in a dropdown, which is exactly why the rate field takes anything you type.

Territorial exceptions are the other reason a dropdown lies. Madeira and the Azores use lower rates than mainland Portugal, the Canary Islands operate a separate tax rather than Spanish VAT, and several Greek islands have historically applied reduced rates. What the list gives you is the mainland default.

So confirm the rate against the official table before you invoice anyone. The European Commission publishes the rates applied across member states, HMRC publishes the UK rates by category, and every national tax authority publishes its own. The sources at the foot of this page link to the ones worth bookmarking. Arithmetic you can trust, rates you should verify.

Where the calculator stops being enough

The sum is simple. The rules around it are not, and a calculator that pretended otherwise would be dangerous.

Category rules come first. Knowing that a country's reduced rate is 9 percent tells you nothing about whether the thing you are selling qualifies for it. The classifications are detailed, occasionally strange, and litigated often enough to have produced actual case law about biscuits. If the rate on your product is not obviously the standard one, the official category list is the only place to settle it.

Then the reverse charge. When a business in one EU member state sells services to a VAT-registered business in another, the supply is usually not taxed by the seller at all. The customer accounts for the VAT in their own country, and the invoice goes out with no VAT on it and an explicit note saying why. Typing the customer's rate into this page and charging it is the wrong answer, and their accountant will say so.

Digital services to consumers work differently again. Sell to private individuals in other EU countries and you charge the rate where the customer lives, not where you are. The One Stop Shop scheme exists so you can do that without registering in every country, filing a single return that distributes the tax. This calculator can hand you the Italian rate or the Polish rate. The registration, the evidence of customer location and the return itself all live somewhere else.

Registration thresholds catch people out most often. You cannot charge VAT until you are registered, and you may be required to register once turnover crosses a threshold. Those thresholds are national, they differ a great deal, and the EU has a small business scheme that interacts with them. For a freelance practice that is growing quickly, missing one is both common and expensive.

None of this is tax advice. Nothing on this page knows your circumstances, your country of establishment, your customers or your trade. For anything that ends in a filing, ask an accountant. That call costs less than a corrected return.

Four totals, taken apart

A freelance designer in France quotes 1,200 for a project and needs the figure the client actually pays. Mode to Net, pick France, rate fills in at 20 percent. VAT is 1,200 multiplied by 0.20, so 240, and the gross is 1,440. The invoice carries all three lines: net 1,200, VAT at 20 percent 240, total 1,440.

Going the other way, a receipt from a German supplier shows one total, 238, with no breakdown at all. Mode to Gross, pick Germany, rate fills in at 19 percent. Dividing 238 by 1.19 gives a net of 200.00 and VAT of 38.00. The instinctive wrong answer, 19 percent of 238, would have been 45.22 of VAT and a net of 192.78, overstating the reclaimable tax by 7.22.

Mixed receipts are where people come unstuck. A UK supermarket receipt totals 84.60, of which forty pounds is groceries and zero-rated. The remaining 44.60 is cleaning products and a kettle, standard-rated at 20 percent. Only that part goes through the tool: 44.60 divided by 1.20 is a net of 37.17 and VAT of 7.43. The zero-rated 40.00 contributes nothing, so the VAT on the whole receipt is 7.43. Run the full 84.60 through at 20 percent and you get 14.10, nearly double. Split by rate first. Always.

The Hungarian case shows the subtraction error at its worst, because Hungary has the highest rate in the list. A gross invoice of 12,700 at 27 percent divides by 1.27 to a net of 10,000 and VAT of 2,700. Take 27 percent off the 12,700 instead and you are left with 9,271, claiming 3,429 of tax. That is 729 of VAT that does not exist.

The other tools

The subscription cost calculator works on the same gross figures this one takes apart, because the price you see on a subscription is almost always VAT-inclusive for consumers and almost always exclusive on a business plan. The bill split calculator divides a gross restaurant total between people, which is the right order of operations: split what was actually charged, not a reconstructed net. The hours of work calculator reprices a purchase in your own time, and it wants the gross figure too. For invoices going out rather than in, the IBAN validator checks the account number at the bottom of the page, and SEPA explains what happens after the client presses send.

Tracking VAT-inclusive spending in Cash Book

What a calculator settles in ten seconds still has to be recorded somewhere, and what gets recorded is usually the gross figure, because that is what left the account.

Cash Book logs exactly that. Point the camera at a receipt and receipt scanning reads the lines into transactions with the amount, the merchant and a date. Say what you spent out loud and voice logging does the same in a few seconds. Either way the number that lands in the app is the total you paid, VAT included, which is the honest record of what the money did. The app does not split tax out of a total, does not maintain a VAT account, and does not file returns. It is an expense tracker, not accounting software, and the line is worth being clear about.

Within those limits it is genuinely useful for VAT-inclusive spending. Tags and categories let you keep business purchases separate from personal ones, so the gross total for a quarter is one filtered view rather than an evening of scrolling. Insights shows those totals by month and by tag with the change against the previous month. If you need the tax on a specific purchase, extract it here and type it into the transaction's note field, which is the closest the app gets to a VAT column.

For the habits underneath all this, how to scan receipts into an expense tracker covers photographing a receipt before it goes through the wash, how to track expenses on iPhone is the wider routine, and how to track subscriptions and recurring bills deals with the recurring VAT-inclusive charges that never produce a paper receipt at all. How to track cash spending covers the market stall and the taxi, where the receipt may be a scrap of thermal paper or nothing.

Use the calculator for the arithmetic, the official rate tables for the rate, an accountant for the filing, and the app for the record of what you actually paid.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.