The VAT number in Cyprus decides the rate on your invoice

**A plumber in Paphos — an υδραυλικός with two vans — refurbishes the bathrooms of an old block and invoices 6,400 euro at 5 per cent, because the building is plainly old enough. He never asked for a ΦΠΑ number. The flats belong to a letting company that is registered, which means the supply fell under Article 11B and should have carried no ΦΠΑ at all. He has collected 320 euro that was never his, his customer cannot deduct it, and failing to apply the reverse charge is charged at 200 euro per VAT return, up to 4,000 euro.**

Every one of those consequences turns on a question that takes ten seconds to ask and that he did not ask.

Three treatments, and the customer picks

Read the table top to bottom and the ordering of the questions falls out of it. The registration question comes first. If the customer is a taxable person, the reverse charge decides the invoice and the age of the building never comes into it. Only when the answer is no does the 5-or-19 question begin — and that one is a fact about the customer's building, set out in Cyprus VAT on renovation: 5% or 19%, and what changed in 2026.

Getting the order the wrong way round is the common failure, because the age of the building is visible on site and the customer's registration is not.

The number is a fact about the customer, not about the job

A trade business decides this once per customer and then stops deciding it. Whether the man who called you is a taxable person does not change between the quote and the final invoice, and it does not change because this particular job is small.

What does change is who you are actually invoicing. A homeowner who asks you to invoice "the company" has moved the supply across the line in the table, whatever was agreed at the kitchen table. A management committee — the kind of επιτροπή that owns a block's common parts — may or may not be registered, and the answer is not guessable from the name on the door.

So the question is asked when the customer is taken on: what is your ΦΠΑ number, please. Not "are you VAT registered", which invites a yes from somebody who has a tax identification number and thinks it is the same thing. It is not: a Cypriot ΦΠΑ registration number is CY, eight digits and a closing letter, and anything that does not have that shape is not one.

Checking it, and keeping the answer

Validate the number rather than filing it. The Commission's VIES service confirms whether a number is valid in the member state that issued it, on the day you ask, and a registered Cypriot business can also hand you its registration certificate.

Then keep the answer with its date. VIES answers for today. The case that matters is a number that was valid when you priced the job in March and cancelled before you invoiced in June — and there the only thing between you and the tax is the record of when you asked.

This is the part a document system should take off you, and the part where it should not pretend. In Zirko the treatment sits on the customer record: the reverse-charge customer produces a reverse-charge invoice, with his ΦΠΑ number and the statutory note on the face of it and no VAT line at all rather than a zero one, and it does so without anyone remembering to change a template. What Zirko does not do is validate the number against VIES — a check that ran at some unrecorded moment is worse than no check, because it looks like evidence.

What the invoice has to carry

The particulars of a Cypriot invoice sit in the Tenth Schedule (Article 43) of the VAT Law: date of issue, a unique sequential number, the supplier's full name and address, the customer's full name and address, a description of the quantity and type of what was supplied, the date of the transaction where it differs from the invoice date, the unit price excluding tax, the rate applied, the VAT amount payable and its breakdown by rate — and the customer's VAT identification number where the customer is liable for the tax on the transaction.

That last item is worth reading twice, because it names the Article 11B case exactly. Under the reverse charge the customer is the person liable, so his ΦΠΑ number is not a nicety on the document. It is the particular that explains why there is no tax on it.

Two smaller rules travel with the list. An invoice may be prepared in any currency, but the ΦΠΑ amount has to be stated in euro. And below 85 euro a simplified invoice is allowed, carrying only the date, your ΦΠΑ number, the type of goods or services and the tax amount or the information to work it out — a call-out and a washer, not a bathroom.

In Greek, or translatable into it

Invoices in Cyprus are to be issued in Greek, and where another language is used the Commissioner of Taxation may require a Greek translation within thirty days. The boundary belongs with the rule: it is a power, not an automatic offence, and a great deal of Cypriot work is invoiced in English without anything happening.

The practical answer is not to translate everything. It is to make sure the two things an authority actually reads are in the form it uses: ΦΠΑ rather than VAT on the tax line, and the registration number in the CY form. Both fit on an otherwise English document and cost nothing. When Zirko renders a Cypriot invoice, the tax line reads ΦΠΑ with the rate beside it for exactly that reason — the rest of the sheet can be in whatever language the customer reads.

What it costs when the number is wrong

Two separate bills, and they do not cancel out.

The tax you charged is tax you owe. Money stated as ΦΠΑ on a document is payable to the Τμήμα Φορολογίας whether or not it should have been charged. The customer, meanwhile, gets no input tax from an invoice that should not have carried any, so he is out of pocket as well — and he will ask you for it back.

The penalty is separate and counts returns, not jobs. Failure to apply the reverse charge provisions carries 200 euro per VAT return, capped at 4,000 euro overall. A mistake repeated quietly across eight quarters is eight penalties, not one. The mechanics of the charge itself are in Cyprus VAT reverse charge in construction: Article 11B, and whether you should be registered at all is the question before all of these — Cyprus VAT registration: 15,600 euro, and 30 days.

Five things to settle before the first invoice to a new customer

1. Ask for the ΦΠΑ number in writing, in the CY form. Not "are you VAT registered". The shape of the answer is the answer.
2. Validate it and save the result with its date. VIES takes under a minute and answers for the day you ask, which is why the date is the part worth keeping.
3. Decide the treatment once, against the customer, not against the job. Taxable person means Article 11B for building work, full stop. Only a customer who is not one brings 5 % or 19 % into it.
4. Put ΦΠΑ and the number on the document, whatever language the rest is in. Those are the two things a Cypriot authority reads, and they fit on an English page.
5. Re-ask when the name on the invoice changes. The homeowner who says "invoice the company instead" has just moved the supply to a different row of the table, and nobody will tell you that except the change of name.

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Position as at 24 September 2026. This article describes the law and is not tax advice. The conditions for the 5 % rate were tightened on 1 September 2026 and the Tenth Schedule particulars move with the EU invoicing rules; before an invoice template is fixed for a year, read the current Schedule rather than last year's template.

What Zirko does here: the treatment follows the customer record, so a reverse-charge customer gets a reverse-charge invoice with the note and the number on its face and no tax line at all — and the Cypriot rendering writes ΦΠΑ, not VAT. What Zirko does not do is find out whether your customer is registered. That is a question you ask him, and an answer you keep with the date you got it.