reclaim VAT hotel France

Hotel accommodation in France falls under lodging

VAT on a hotel stay in France for business purposes is eligible for refund under Directive 2008/9/EC, in the same way as other foreign business expenses. Lodging is one of the cost categories into which foreign VAT is classified when submitting a refund request, alongside for example fuel, tolls and trade fair participation. The requirement is always that it concerns a business stay and that the invoice is issued in the name of the business.

What counts towards it depends on how the invoice is structured. A hotel bill often contains more than just the room rate — think of breakfast, parking or minibar — and those items may be treated differently for refund purposes than the accommodation itself. France, like other Member States, has its own rules on which cost categories are refunded in full, in part or not at all; these are described per country and differ from what is customary in the Netherlands. For the precise application to a specific invoice — for example when a business dinner is included in the hotel bill — the assessment is made to measure, and that forms part of the classification process in the portal, not of this summary.

What the Requirements list per country says

That lodging as a separate cost category is claimed back follows from the system of Directive 2008/9/EC, which governs the submission and classification of costs