The digital invoicing system of the Treasury has three years of delays and three extensions. The latest postpones it to October 2028, one year and ten months after the previously scheduled date.
The new digital invoicing system of the Treasury, known as Verifactu, will not come into effect until October 2028. The latest extension, executed by the Tax Agency, comes after three years of accumulated delays and three deadline extensions, as reported by diariodeibiza.es.
The initial schedule set the implementation date between 1 January and 1 July 2025. With the new date, the system will be implemented one year and ten months later than established in the last modification. The Treasury justified the extension by the need to align the calendars of Verifactu and electronic invoicing for SMEs and freelancers.
"This is something we have been requesting and have claimed in recent weeks, because it makes no sense for a new regulation, a new invoicing system like Verifactu to come into effect, and then the following year, another new system like electronic invoicing has to be applied," said the president of ATA, Lorenzo Amor.
The Association of Self-Employed Workers (ATA) welcomed the Treasury's decision to postpone the system until 2028. The organization had been advocating for the delay to prevent freelancers from having to adapt to two systems in consecutive years.
The origin of Verifactu lies in the Law on Prevention and Combatting Tax Fraud, approved in 2021. This regulation modified the General Tax Law to ensure the integrity, preservation, accessibility, and traceability of companies' invoicing. The concept of a system for issuing verifiable invoices was not created until December 2023, and the final technical conditions were established in October 2024.
The original regulation stipulated that companies must have their systems adapted by 1 January 2025 and freelancers by 1 July 2025. In April 2025, a survey by the consultancy Sage showed that only 31% of companies were using software compliant with the new requirements. 10.72% were fully informed and in the process of adapting; 48.38% had heard of the system but needed more information, and 34.8% were uninformed.
In that same month of April 2025, the Treasury executed the first extension: one more year, until 1 January 2026 for companies and 1 July 2026 for freelancers. Before the year ended, anticipating the foreseeable non-compliance with the new deadlines, the Government approved a second one-year extension, setting 1 January and 1 July 2027 for companies and freelancers, respectively. The third and final extension, already in 2026, has pushed the implementation date to October 2028.
The latest extension occurred on Monday, coinciding with the advance of the general elections called by the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. The Treasury argued that the order with the technical requirements was published too late and that it was advisable to give more leeway to entrepreneurs and freelancers.
With the current schedule, companies and freelancers will not have to implement Verifactu until October 2028, a deadline that is contingent on no new regulatory modifications or changes in the electronic invoicing schedule.
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