Mandatory B2B e-invoicing 2026: RD 238/2026 is here
by Ivor Padilla
Co-Founder & Engineering Director
Mandatory B2B e-invoicing 2026: RD 238/2026 is here
By Ivor Padilla, co-founder of Gradion · Published 10 April 2026 · Last updated: 10 April 2026 · 20 min read
For more than three years, any conversation about mandatory B2B e-invoicing in Spain ended with the same footnote: "the Create and Grow Act anticipates it, but it depends on an implementing royal decree that has still not been published". That limbo ended on 31 March 2026, when Spain's Official State Gazette (the BOE) published Real Decreto 238/2026 (Royal Decree 238/2026), de 25 de marzo, the long-awaited regulation that implements mandatory electronic invoicing between businesses and professionals and amends the Invoicing Obligations Regulation (Real Decreto 1619/2012).
The news is big, but the headlines mislead. RD 238/2026 enters into force on 20 April 2026 — ten days from the publication of this article — and yet the B2B e-invoicing obligation itself does not start running from that date. It depends on a second piece of legislation: a ministerial order that will technically develop the AEAT's public e-invoicing solution. Only once that order is published do the clocks actually start: 12 months for businesses with annual turnover above 8 million euros, 24 months for everyone else — SMEs and the self-employed included.
TL;DR: Royal Decree 238/2026 of 25 March was published in the BOE on 31 March 2026 and enters into force on 20 April 2026. It implements mandatory B2B e-invoicing and sets up a mixed system: private certified platforms plus a free public solution run by the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria (AEAT, the Spanish Tax Agency). The 12-month / 24-month obligation clocks from Ley 18/2022 (Create and Grow Act) only start once a further ministerial order is published, which had not happened as of this article's publication. No €85,000 turnover threshold, no flat-rate regime carve-out, no wholesale exemption — those are market folklore, not published law.
This guide walks through it in order: what RD 238/2026 actually says, when the obligation really bites, who is in scope and who is not (including the €85,000 rumour), which formats are admitted, how it differs from VERIFACTU, and what any Spanish firm can usefully do today at zero cost.
What has just been published: RD 238/2026 in four lines
Spain's Royal Decree 238/2026 of 25 March, implementing the mandatory electronic invoicing system between businesses and professionals and amending the Invoicing Obligations Regulation (RD 1619/2012), was published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) no. 79 on 31 March 2026.
RD 238/2026 does not create the B2B e-invoicing obligation itself — it implements it. The underlying obligation sits in Article 2 bis of Law 56/2007 on the Information Society, as rewritten by Article 12 of Law 18/2022 (the "Create and Grow Act"). For the broader context around that act, see our guide on the Create and Grow Act and what it really means for your firm in 2026.
Beyond implementing the system, RD 238/2026 also makes targeted amendments to the Invoicing Obligations Regulation (Royal Decree 1619/2012) via its first final provision, aligning the existing rules with the new e-invoicing regime without a substantive overhaul.
The preamble is blunt about the "why": the RD sits within Spain's Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, and its stated aims are to push digitalisation in the productive fabric and to cut commercial late payment, in line with Law 3/2004 on late payment. The duty to report payment status to the public system (which we come back to) is not incidental: it is the piece that turns e-invoicing into a traceability instrument for actual B2B payment times.
The real timeline: when you are actually obliged
This is the part every headline you will see this week gets wrong. RD 238/2026 "enters into force on 20 April 2026" is technically correct and practically misleading. The text of the RD becomes law on that date, but the substantive obligation — the duty to issue your invoices in structured electronic format to your business clients — does not kick in then. Two different clocks, tied together.
Under its fourth final provision, RD 238/2026 enters into force on 20 April 2026, twenty days after publication in the BOE. However, its effective application is deferred: the 12-month / 24-month obligation clocks set by the eighth final provision of Ley 18/2022 (Create and Grow Act) only start once a further ministerial order implementing the public e-invoicing solution is published.
The RD's preamble, pointing to the eighth final provision of Ley 18/2022, sets out two phases: twelve months after the ministerial order enters into force, the obligation becomes enforceable for businesses and professionals whose annual turnover in the previous year exceeded €8 million.
At twenty-four months after the ministerial order enters into force, the obligation extends to everyone else — SMEs and self-employed included. In practical terms: if the ministerial order were published today, SMEs and self-employed professionals would be on the hook from April 2028.
As of the date of this article, the ministerial order that is due to develop and run the AEAT's public e-invoicing solution — the one foreseen in Article 11(1) of RD 238/2026 — has not yet been published. It is that order, not the RD itself, that starts the 12- and 24-month obligation clocks set by Ley 18/2022. For the current schedule, the authoritative source remains the RD in the BOE and AEAT's electronic office.
Put all that together and the operational calendar looks like this:
| Date / event | Who it binds | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 31 March 2026 | Everyone (notice) | RD 238/2026 published in the BOE |
| 20 April 2026 | Everyone (in theory) | RD 238/2026 formally in force — text is law, but duties are suspended |
| Future: ministerial order published | Everyone (notice) | The 12- and 24-month clocks start ticking |
| Order + 12 months | Turnover > €8M | Mandatory e-invoicing kicks in |
| Order + 24 months | SMEs, self-employed, everyone else | Mandatory e-invoicing kicks in |
If your client keeps asking whether "e-invoicing is mandatory from tomorrow", the answer is: no. The ministerial order has to come first, and then you still get at least a year before the obligation actually bites — and two if you are below the €8 million line.
What RD 238/2026 requires: the mixed system
The headline architecture of the regulation is a mixed system. Many competitor guides simplify this to "there will be a public AEAT platform" — that is not quite right. There are two tracks, and they are designed to coexist.
The RD sets up a mixed system. On one side, the public e-invoicing solution run by the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT) — its use is voluntary, as both the preamble and the enabling provision in Ley 7/2024 make clear. On the other, private e-invoicing exchange platforms that businesses can hire freely. Using a private platform does not disconnect you from the public one: the platform must send a faithful copy of every invoice to the AEAT's solution.
Article 11(10) of RD 238/2026 states that access to the public solution and its various uses are free of charge for users. No subscription, no licence fee payable to the AEAT: any firm or self-employed worker who wants to comply without hiring a private provider can do so through the public solution once it is up and running.
Article 2(b) of the RD defines a "faithful copy" (copia fiel) of an e-invoice as one that carries the same semantic information as the original, expressed in the public solution's reference syntax and meeting the minimum requirements of the Invoicing Regulation (RD 1619/2012, articles 6 and 7.2). Whenever a business uses a private exchange platform, that platform must send a faithful copy of every invoice to the public solution — not a PDF, not a proprietary XML, but the equivalent structured data in the public syntax.
The RD imposes a hard interconnection duty on private platform operators: they must connect with any other private platform when a client asks them to, and accept every interconnection request they receive. This fleshes out the interoperability requirement in Ley 18/2022 and ensures no firm gets locked into a single vendor's walled garden when its counterparties are on a different platform.
One more piece is needed to make sense of RD 238/2026: the legal authority for the public solution itself does not come from the Create and Grow Act but from the twelfth final provision of Ley 7/2024 of 20 December, which added it to Ley 56/2007. That provision tasks the AEAT with developing and running the public solution, sets confidentiality guarantees and expressly subjects the related personal data processing to the GDPR and Spain's LOPD-GDD.
Practically, then, any Spanish firm has two broad compliance routes once the obligation bites:
- Use the AEAT's public solution directly. Free, no contract with any third party, and it sits within a regulatory envelope that the RD itself ties to GDPR and the Spanish data-protection law.
- Use a certified private platform. Hire a commercial vendor; they in turn are bound to forward a faithful UBL copy of every invoice to the AEAT and must interconnect with other platforms on demand.
Neither option is inherently better than the other — the right call depends on transaction volume, the existing ERP and who actually operates the firm's accounting flow.
Who is actually in scope (and the €85,000 myth)
The actual subjective scope set by RD 238/2026 is this: it covers B2B operations where the recipient has its place of business, a permanent establishment or habitual residence in Spain. Outside the scope fall operations where a simplified invoice can be issued under Article 4 of RD 1619/2012 — save for those listed in Article 7.2 of that same regulation. On top of that, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise may exclude further operations, temporarily or permanently, "in view of the sound economic functioning of the relevant sector".
What is not in the BOE: contrary to much of the guidance circulating in April 2026, RD 238/2026 does not create exemptions based on annual turnover (no €85,000 threshold), nor for the Spanish flat-rate (módulos) regime, nor for farming or wholesale businesses. Those carve-outs are market folklore — they do not appear in the published text.
That second paragraph is doing a lot of work, so let me be explicit about why. In the run-up to the RD, a range of Spanish and foreign guides began to circulate the idea that the regulation would "exempt" self-employed workers under €85,000 of turnover, exempt the Spanish flat-rate (módulos) regime, exempt the farming sector and exempt wholesale businesses. I have read at least a dozen of those pieces in the past week. None of those exemptions appear in the published text of RD 238/2026. The rumour has been mistaken for the rule.
Article 4(1)(a) of RD 1619/2012 allows, as a general rule, a simplified invoice to be issued where the amount does not exceed €400 including VAT. Read together with RD 238/2026: a B2B invoice below that threshold is not caught by the e-invoicing obligation, though nothing stops a business from issuing one electronically anyway.
Paragraph 2 of Article 4 raises the simplified-invoice ceiling to €3,000 including VAT in the classic "till-receipt" sectors listed in the regulation — retail sales, hospitality and food service, passenger transport, hairdressing and the like. When one of those cases applies, the operation falls outside the mandatory e-invoicing scope of RD 238/2026.
The RD itself keeps a political safety valve open: the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise may exclude — temporarily or permanently — additional operations from the obligation where that is justified by the sound economic functioning of the sector. Future carve-outs are likely to come through this channel, not by way of the text in force today.
So if a client asks "am I exempt because I make less than €85,000 a year?", the right answer for now is no. The only real way to stay outside the obligation is (i) because the specific invoice qualifies for the simplified-invoice regime under RD 1619/2012 (in the €400 or €3,000 carve-outs above), or (ii) because at some point the Ministry issues a formal sectoral exclusion — which, by definition, has not happened yet. Anything else is wishful thinking dressed up as legal advice.
Which formats are admitted: UBL, Facturae, EDIFACT and Peppol
UBL (Universal Business Language) is locked in as the reference syntax of Spain's public e-invoicing system, per the RD's preamble. The reason: it meets European standard EN16931 and is the more widely used of the two syntaxes admitted by EU Directive 2014/55/EU — the one governing e-invoicing in public procurement. That choice matters in practice: a Spanish business already invoicing European public bodies in UBL is most of the way there.
Alongside UBL, the RD admits three additional formats: Facturae, thanks to its consolidated use in invoicing to Spanish public administrations; EDIFACT, because of its strong footprint in specific sectors (automotive, logistics, distribution); and, within private exchange platforms, Peppol BIS messages, valid insofar as they use UBL syntax and comply with EN16931. The practical takeaway for firms: if your current software already issues Facturae to public authorities, you are halfway there.
Two details that catch people out. First, the fact that four formats are admitted does not mean the firm gets to pick one and call it a day: inside a private platform the issuer can use any admitted format, but the faithful copy that goes to the AEAT must have semantic correspondence with the public solution's reference syntax (i.e. UBL). Second, the RD does not pin a Facturae or Peppol BIS version — which means any firm betting on a specific version today should build the connector on the assumption that the ministerial order will specify version numbers later.
Obligations many guides forget: reporting statuses and PDF twinning
One of the less-discussed but most operationally important parts of the RD is in articles 10 and 12: invoice recipients will have to tell the issuer whether they accept or reject each invoice (with the date) and when they have paid it in full (with the effective payment date). On top of that, the full-payment notice must also be sent to the AEAT's public solution, regardless of whether the invoice was issued through the public solution or a private platform. In plain English: receiving an invoice is no longer a passive act — the recipient owes a status back.
That last point is the one that quietly turns the firm's receiving flow from "save the XML and post the entry" into a real round-trip. Every invoice arriving at the firm triggers at least one outbound event (payment confirmation) back to the AEAT, and potentially two more (commercial acceptance or rejection). The plumbing for that is not optional.
The second transitional provision adds a deeply practical wrinkle: during the first twelve months after the RD starts to apply to large firms (annual turnover > €8M), those firms must ship a PDF copy with every e-invoice to guarantee it is legible — unless the recipient voluntarily agrees to receive the invoice in its native format. The reason is obvious: during that year, the recipients (SMEs and self-employed) are not yet obliged to accept e-invoices, and they still need to be able to read the thing.
This transitional is good news for your firm as a recipient in the first phase: for a year, every e-invoice from a large supplier arrives with its PDF twin, so your back office can carry on reading the document as usual. But it also tells you something about the deeper timetable: the legislator is assuming that during that twelve-month window the smaller firms start preparing to accept the native format, not just the PDF.
The misunderstanding everyone makes: e-invoicing is not VERIFACTU
VERIFACTU and mandatory e-invoicing are not the same thing. VERIFACTU sits in Royal Decree 1007/2023, implements Article 29(2)(j) of the General Tax Law, and targets the invoicing software used by businesses — its purpose is tax-driven and anti-fraud (traceability, stamping out sales-suppression software). RD 238/2026, by contrast, regulates the format and channel for exchanging the invoice between businesses, with the goal of digitalisation and cutting late payment. Two different laws, two different purposes, two different timetables. They coexist.
Visually, think of them as two layers your invoice has to pass through once both regimes are fully in force:
| Layer | Regulation | What it governs | Status in April 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fiscal integrity of the record | Real Decreto 1007/2023 (VERIFACTU) | How invoicing software stamps and logs each invoice so the AEAT can verify it | In force with a staggered rollout — see our guía completa de VERIFACTU (Spanish) for the detail |
| B2B format and exchange channel | Real Decreto 238/2026 + Ley 56/2007 (as amended by Ley 18/2022) | Structured format of the invoice between businesses, status reporting and platform interoperability | Published 31 March 2026, in force 20 April 2026, substantive duties deferred until ministerial order + 12/24 months |
Both layers are mandatory once in force, and neither replaces the other. Software that complies with VERIFACTU will not automatically comply with RD 238/2026 (it will be missing the structured format and the status round-trip), and vice versa.
How RD 238/2026 actually lands on your firm
A professional services firm does not face this regulation once: it faces it in three different roles at the same time. Keep them separate in your head and the planning becomes much easier.
(a) As an issuer of your own invoices. Your firm invoices fees to its business clients. Once the obligation kicks in — after the ministerial order plus the relevant 12- or 24-month window — you will have to issue those invoices in an admitted structured format and feed the corresponding statuses back. Most professional services firms fall below the €8 million turnover line, so the applicable window is the 24-month one.
(b) As an adviser to your clients. Your corporate and self-employed clients will also be obliged, on the same calendar as you. A serious part of the value you can add to them in the year before the obligation bites is helping them choose between the public solution and a private platform, cleaning up their fiscal data and adapting the internal flow. If you have not figured it out for your own firm, you cannot help theirs.
(c) As the operator of an invoice intake flow. Every day your firm receives invoices from clients' suppliers — utilities, rent, professional fees, purchases. Today they arrive as PDFs or paper. Once the regime is in force, they arrive in UBL, Facturae or EDIFACT, and each one carries an obligation to send a payment status back to the AEAT. That intake flow feeds directly into the quarterly Spanish VAT return, which we cover in our guide to modelo 303 in 2026. Of the three scenarios, (c) carries the most operational risk — and, like the rest of the firm's paperwork, it is a close neighbour of the document-management flow we discuss in our guide on gestión documental for professional firms.
What you can do today, at zero cost
You do not need to wait for the ministerial order to start cutting the risk. Half of the work of preparing for mandatory e-invoicing is free — it costs time and discipline, not money. These are the steps that make sense today, before anyone has bought new software:
- Segment your clients B2B vs B2C. The RD only catches B2B operations. Knowing who is in and who is out stops you running around when the clock finally starts ticking.
- Audit your current invoicing software. Does it already emit Facturae for public administration work? Does it support UBL? Get that answer from the vendor in writing — not a verbal "yes, we are working on it".
- Check where your firm sits against the €8M line. This is the line that decides whether you are on the 12-month or the 24-month window. For most professional services firms the answer is clearly one side or the other; the few that hover around the threshold need to document the calculation under Article 121 of the Spanish VAT Act.
- Ask your software vendor for a written adaptation plan. When do they plan to certify as a private platform, or connect to the AEAT public solution? In which release? With which supported formats? A written answer beats a sales call.
- Map your top suppliers that already issue electronically. Large utilities, telcos and corporate landlords already issue structured invoices to the public sector and to each other. Pilot the intake flow with those first — it is your best zero-cost proof of concept.
- Define the single intake channel. One mailbox, one client portal, one webhook into the ERP. Deciding this before the ministerial order lands saves you from restructuring an accounting process under calendar pressure.
- Train the admin team. The partners will not process the XML: the back office will. Make sure everyone understands the difference between Facturae and UBL, what invoice statuses are, and how the work will change.
None of these require a euro of spend. All of them compound: by the time the ministerial order lands, the firm has a plan, not a panic.
Frequently asked questions on mandatory B2B e-invoicing
When does mandatory B2B e-invoicing actually enter into force in Spain?
RD 238/2026 formally enters into force on 20 April 2026, but its substantive duties are suspended. The 12-month (turnover > €8M) and 24-month (everyone else) clocks set by the eighth final provision of Ley 18/2022 only start ticking once a further ministerial order — the one that develops the AEAT's public e-invoicing solution — is published. As of this article's publication, that order has not been published. So the earliest realistic dates for the obligation to bite are well into 2027 for large firms and 2028 for SMEs and the self-employed.
Is it true that self-employed professionals under €85,000 a year are exempt?
No. That threshold does not appear in the text of RD 238/2026. The only exclusions from the scope are the ones built into the Invoicing Obligations Regulation (RD 1619/2012) for simplified invoices — a €400 general ceiling and a €3,000 ceiling for traditional till-receipt sectors like retail, hospitality and passenger transport — plus any future sectoral carve-outs the Ministry of Economy chooses to set. There is no general exemption by turnover, no exemption for the Spanish flat-rate módulos regime, no exemption for farming or wholesale businesses. Those are market folklore.
Do I have to pay for a private platform, or can I use the AEAT's public solution for free?
Article 11(10) of RD 238/2026 makes the public solution free of charge for users. You can comply entirely through the AEAT's public solution once it is operational, at zero cost. Hiring a private certified platform is optional and makes sense mainly for firms that need deep integration with an existing ERP or specific connectivity with counterparties.
Which format does the e-invoice have to be in?
Four formats are admitted by the RD: UBL (the public solution's reference syntax), Facturae (already widely used for public-administration invoicing in Spain), EDIFACT (common in automotive, logistics and distribution) and Peppol BIS (within private exchange platforms, as it uses UBL under the hood and complies with EN16931). The faithful copy that must be sent to the AEAT has to have semantic correspondence with UBL, regardless of which format the issuer used.
Does RD 238/2026 replace VERIFACTU?
No. They are two different regulations with two different purposes. VERIFACTU (RD 1007/2023) governs how invoicing software stamps each invoice for the tax authority; RD 238/2026 governs the format and channel for exchanging the invoice between businesses. Both will be mandatory in their respective scopes and both have to be complied with — neither replaces the other.
What is the difference between the Create and Grow Act and RD 238/2026?
The Create and Grow Act (Ley 18/2022) is the piece of primary legislation that extends the mandatory e-invoicing obligation to all B2B relationships, by amending Article 2 bis of Ley 56/2007. RD 238/2026 is the implementing regulation that develops it — the technical rulebook for how the system actually works. For more context on the Act itself, see our dedicated guide on Ley Crea y Crece and your firm.
Do I have to issue e-invoices to individual (B2C) customers?
No. RD 238/2026 only covers B2B operations — invoices where the recipient is a business or a professional with a place of business, permanent establishment or habitual residence in Spain. Invoices to natural persons acting as end consumers (B2C) are out of scope, and the RD does not change that.
What happens with small invoices and till receipts?
Operations that can be documented with a simplified invoice under Article 4 of RD 1619/2012 fall outside the mandatory e-invoicing regime. That means a general rule of €400 including VAT for any operation, and a raised ceiling of €3,000 including VAT in the traditional till-receipt sectors listed in paragraph 2 of that article — retail sales, hospitality, passenger transport, hairdressing and a handful of others.
How we are tackling this at Gradion
In the firms we have worked with so far, the starting worry is always the same: "what software do I buy to issue in Facturae or UBL?". And yet, in the pilots we have run to date, the bottleneck has never been on the issuing side. Every modern invoicing program — Spanish or European — either already exports Facturae or is one release away from doing so. The issuing side is more or less a solved problem.
What is hard, and where firms will feel the real pain when the ministerial order finally lands, is the receiving side. Once the regime bites, each invoice the firm receives will arrive in structured format, and each one comes with an obligation to send a payment status back to the AEAT's public solution. The firm's existing intake process — "open the PDF, read it, post the entry, file it" — is built around the assumption that a human reads the document. When that document is a UBL or Facturae XML, most of the process stops working.
To get a sense of scale: according to the Central Directory of Companies (DIRCE) published by Spain's statistical office INE, as of the date of this article Spain's productive base comprises more than 3.3 million active businesses, the overwhelming majority of them SMEs and self-employed. That is roughly the universe of actors who will, phase by phase, operate under this regime once the clocks start.
Our specific observation for this post is narrower than the general "intake is harder than issuing" line we wrote in the Ley Crea y Crece guide, and it is specific to what RD 238/2026 has just introduced: the real challenge of this RD is not the invoice that arrives — it is the round-trip that has to leave. RD 238/2026 turns receipt into a two-way event: every invoice the firm receives triggers an obligation to send a payment status back to the AEAT's public solution (articles 10 and 12), on top of whatever the back office normally does with the document. The receiving side is therefore built on a pipeline that parses the XML, extracts the relevant fields, matches the invoice against a supplier catalogue, validates it against the firm's accounting and emits the status round-trip with the right timestamp. That pipeline is not solved by Facturae alone, not solved by the public solution, and not solved by buying a new invoicing program. It is solved by an intake-plus-status flow that has been proven end-to-end before the ministerial order arrives. A ten-day pilot in a mid-sized firm leaves us, even before the regulation fully applies, with a single intake channel, automatic classification by supplier and concept, accounting reconciliation with human intervention only on the doubtful cases, and the outbound status plumbing wired up to the same flow. The day the order is published, the firm already has both halves of the round-trip in place.
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