Reclaiming foreign VAT on road freight expenses

When your trucks cross borders, they leave a trail of VAT behind them. Diesel, tolls, tunnels, repairs and more are all bought in countries where your business may not be VAT-registered, and the VAT on many of those expenses is recoverable. For a fleet running international goods transport, that recovered VAT is real cash, but it sits in foreign tax systems until you go and claim it.

The recovery is governed by EU refund procedures, and it is not uniform. What you can reclaim, and how, depends heavily on which country you spent the money in and where your business is established. This guide walks through the two main routes, what typically sits in the recoverable basket, and why you should never assume the same rules apply everywhere.

What VAT you can reclaim

A road carrier running international goods transport can often reclaim VAT it pays on business expenses in an EU country where it is not VAT-registered. Eligibility is usually framed around qualifying heavy vehicles, with thresholds commonly discussed around vehicles of at least 3.5 tonnes, though you should confirm the exact threshold for each country rather than assuming one figure travels.

The potentially reclaimable basket is broad. It can include diesel, tolls, lubricants, diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), tunnel and bridge charges, parking, repairs and vehicle washing, and in some cases hotels, catering and the periodic technical inspection. The word to hold onto is potentially: which of these is actually recoverable is decided country by country, and several categories carry restrictions.

Why it varies country by country

There is no single EU-wide list of recoverable expenses. Each member state sets its own rules on which categories qualify and to what extent, so the same receipt can be fully recoverable in one country, partly recoverable in another and blocked in a third. Hotels and catering are a common example: they are frequently capped or excluded, even where diesel and tolls are recoverable in full.

This is why presenting the basket as uniformly recoverable everywhere is a mistake that costs money, either through rejected claims or through VAT you leave on the table because you assumed it was blocked when it was not. Treat each country as its own ruleset, check the current position for that state, and where the amounts justify it, lean on a VAT-reclaim agent or adviser who tracks those differences for a living.

The 8th and 13th Directive routes

Which procedure you use depends on where your business is established. Carriers established in the EU reclaim VAT incurred in other member states through the EU 8th Directive procedure (Directive 2008/9/EC), generally filed electronically through your home country's portal, which forwards the claim to the country of refund. Carriers established outside the EU use the 13th Directive route (86/560/EEC), and that route may depend on a reciprocity arrangement between that country and your country of establishment, so it is not available everywhere by default.

Both routes have filing windows, minimum claim amounts and documentation requirements, and both take time. Refunds come back well after the expense was incurred, so as with fuel duty, treat recoverable foreign VAT as a receivable you are financing in the meantime, not as cash already in the bank.

Records that support a claim

A foreign VAT claim lives or dies on its documentation. You need valid invoices in the right form, categorised by expense type and by the country where the VAT was incurred, and tied to the qualifying vehicles. If spend from several operating entities or country desks is jumbled together, assembling a claim becomes slow and error-prone, and queries from a foreign tax authority are far harder to answer.

The fix is to categorise spend as it happens and keep it separated by entity. Tagging each toll, fuel stop and repair to a country and a vehicle means a claim is an export rather than a forensic reconstruction at year end. It also lets you forecast the VAT you are owed across all the countries you run in, which feeds the reserve you hold against the recovery lag. A VAT-reclaim agent will ask for exactly this structured, per-entity evidence.

How Altery fits

Altery does not file VAT refunds or give tax advice, and recoverability differs by country and changes over time, so confirm the current rules with the relevant tax authority or a qualified VAT adviser. Where Altery helps is around a refund that comes back in euros, months after you spent the money, often from several countries at once. A multi-currency account holding EUR alongside USD and GBP gives you a clean place to receive cross-border VAT refunds without routing them through an unrelated currency and losing margin to FX on the way in.

Because each claim arrives on a lag, ring-fenced reserves let you set aside an amount sized to the VAT you expect back, so the wait does not erode your working capital. FX happens on your timeline rather than at the day's rate when funds land. And if you operate through several entities, multi-entity management with real-time balances and clean, categorised per-entity records keeps each entity's foreign spend separated, which is precisely the structured evidence a refund filing, or the agent preparing it, needs. Altery is not a bank; this is general information, not tax advice.

Frequently asked questions