The question of whether anything changes this year in reclaiming VAT from Germany is really two questions at once. Does the right itself to reclaim foreign VAT change? No: that right is set out in Directive 2008/9 and that framework does not change from year to year. Does the practical side change — which documents Germany requires, how a request must be submitted exactly, which threshold amounts apply? That is the level at which changes can occur, and where it really matters for you as an entrepreneur.
The German tax authority publishes the requirements that a VAT refund request must meet, and that requirements list is updated periodically. For you, this does not mean you have to learn a completely new process every year, but it does mean that a procedure that worked fine last year may have been adjusted on a detail this year. Think of the type of supporting document that belongs to a particular expense category, or an adjustment in how the tax authority's portal submits a request to Germany.
What is stable and what can shift
The foundation does not change: the right to reclaim foreign VAT for Dutch entrepreneurs, the route via a single digital portal, and the final submission date set out in the directive. These are the fixed points on which you can build if you want to determine per situation what applies to you.
What can shift is at the implementation level. Germany can, for example, become stricter or more lenient in the substantiation it expects for a particular expense category, or in the form in which a request must be submitted digitally. That kind of adjustment is usually not in the directive itself, but in the publications of the German tax authority and in the requirements list that the Dutch tax authority maintains per refund country. For an entrepreneur who does this one or two times a year themselves, it is difficult to keep up with — precisely because it is not an announcement with great fanfare, but an adjustment in a technical document.
For whom this matters most
This is most relevant for entrepreneurs who reuse their own template or procedure from a previous year without checking whether something has been adjusted. An installation company that submitted fuel receipts from Germany for the first time last year and this year submits the same list of receipts in the same way runs the risk of overlooking an amended requirement. The same applies to an office manager who collects the administration of trade fair visits and hotel stays in the same way each year.
This is explicitly not about tax technicalities, but about practical, verifiable details: which supporting document goes with it, in what form is it submitted, and what amount applies as the threshold. For the tax questions that may lie behind it — for example, whether a specific cost item is eligible at all — this falls outside the executing role and a VAT specialist is the appropriate point of contact for that.
How you check the current status
The most reliable way to see whether anything has changed is to consult the source itself: the requirements list of the Dutch tax authority per refund country and the publications of the German tax authority. Because those documents can be updated without notice, it is useful to look not only at what is stated, but also when it was last checked. On the page where it says where our information comes from you see for each source the date it was consulted — this is deliberately not a snapshot that disappears somewhere behind a login, but something that remains verifiable for everyone.
If you are not sure whether your own situation is affected by an adjustment, a first step is simply to determine again how much foreign VAT is at stake for you this year. With a few questions you see directly an indication in euros of what foreign VAT is available for you to settle this year, regardless of whether something in the details has changed along the way.
Whether anything concrete changes for your business this year depends on which expense categories you submit and how you've handled this so far. If you're unsure, check the current requirements or let the process run through a method that is continuously checked against them. A good starting point is the overview of questions that other entrepreneurs have already asked, or take the free quick-scan immediately to see where you stand this year.