E-invoicing in the UK: mandatory from April 2029

E-invoicing will be mandatory in the UK from April 2029: at the Budget of 26 November 2025 the government announced that from that date businesses must issue all VAT invoices as e-invoices, for sales to other businesses and to the public sector. Sales to consumers stay out. The model is decentralised, with invoices travelling between the service providers of the two businesses, and in June 2026 Peppol was named as the core network. The detailed roadmap is due at the Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026.

That makes the UK the first large country outside the EU with a date, and one of the few to start with everyone at once: no turnover threshold and no phasing by size. It is also a mandate without real-time reporting at the start. HMRC chose to get invoices digital first and to decide later what data it wants.

This guide splits what is confirmed from what is still open, compares the UK with the EU countries that went first, and lists what a British business can do now with its invoicing or its own software.

How the UK got here

What the confirmed points mean in practice

A PDF invoice by email will no longer count between VAT-registered businesses from April 2029. What replaces it is a data file that the customer's software reads without retyping, most likely a UBL invoice travelling over Peppol.

The UK next to the EU countries that went first

Belgium is the closest example: a decentralised Peppol model, everyone at once, and a tolerance period of three months at the start. What Belgian businesses ran into, from missing registrations to invoices made in tools that did not speak Peppol, is what British businesses will meet in 2029. The Belgian details are in e-invoicing in Belgium, and the whole European picture in e-invoicing in Europe.

What a UK business can do now

• Find out where your invoices are madeIn your accounting software, in a job management or field service tool, in a web shop, in a spreadsheet. Each of those needs a route to an e-invoice.
• Ask your software provider about PeppolMany accounting packages that sell in Belgium, the Netherlands or Australia already send over Peppol; ask when they will offer it in the UK.
• Start receivingE-invoices from EU suppliers can already reach you over Peppol, and every one you do not type over is time saved.
• Look at your own systemsA bespoke platform that issues invoices, a booking system or a subscription tool will need an export to a structured format and a connection to a service provider.
• Watch the Budget of 28 October 2026The roadmap should settle the data standard, the accreditation of providers and the penalties.

What it means for custom software

If your invoices come out of software built for you, the mandate is a development job, not a settings change. The system has to produce an invoice with the fields the standard requires, in a format such as UBL, and hand it to an accredited provider; and it has to take in the e-invoices your suppliers send. That is two to three years of runway for a change that is easy to plan and hard to rush in the last quarter.

A plan from now to April 2029

Questions to ask your software provider

• Will you send and receive over Peppol in the UK, and from when?
• Will you be an accredited service provider yourself, or work through one?
• Can invoices made in our other systems, such as our web shop or job management tool, go through you?
• What happens to supplier invoices that arrive as e-invoices: are they booked automatically?
• What will it cost per invoice or per month?

A provider that already serves Belgium, the Netherlands or Australia over Peppol has done this before; ask what they learned there.

What a UK e-invoice is likely to contain

The roadmap will set the data standard. If the UK follows the Peppol countries, as naming Peppol suggests, an e-invoice is a UBL file with fields such as these:

Most of these already appear on a VAT invoice today. The change is that each sits in a fixed field a machine reads, instead of somewhere on a page.