Step-by-step guides · self-employed
Verifactu for the self-employed: July 2027
If you're self-employed in Spain, your Verifactu date is 1 July 2027. Who is excluded, what about Word and Excel, and what to ask your software.
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This isn’t tax advice: it’s a guide to understanding what the rule says. Your specific case needs to be looked at by an adviser.
What has happened
The Verifactu dates have changed twice. The original rule set July 2025; Royal Decree 254/2025 moved it to January and July 2026; and Royal Decree-Law 15/2025, of 2 December, moved it again to 2027. That last change came inside a rule mostly about local-authority investment, so many people missed it and keep publishing the old calendar. This is what Spain's official gazette (BOE) says today:
Dates in force as of 16 October 2026
When the system has to be ready
Royal Decree 1007/2023, fourth final provision, consolidated text
If you're self-employed as an individual, your date is July. Never January.
Why it matters to you
Because the obligation isn't to “use Verifactu”: it's that the program you invoice with leaves a record of each invoice that can't be altered or deleted, chained to the previous one. There are two ways to comply, and in practice what you choose is which software you buy:
- Verifactu: the program sends each record to the Tax Agency automatically and immediately. In return it's presumed compliant “by design” and is spared signing each record and keeping an event log. It's the simple route.
- Non-verifiable system: it sends nothing, but the program must electronically sign each record and keep an event log. It's just as legal.
The QR code on the invoice is mandatory in both. And choosing Verifactu isn't an on/off switch: the choice counts as made when you start sending and lasts at least until the end of that calendar year.
What you can do
1. Check whether it applies to you
According to the Tax Agency, it applies to you if four conditions are all met: you don't invoice only by hand, you don't keep your VAT books through the SII (the immediate information supply system, rare for a small self-employed person), your tax address isn't in the Basque Country or Navarre, which have their own systems, and you don't have a Tax Agency decision that expressly exempts you.
Being on “módulos” doesn't exempt you by itself. Under the simplified VAT scheme that usually goes with módulos you don't always have to issue invoices, and the Tax Agency says that, as a rule, the regulation then doesn't affect you. But it does as soon as you issue invoices with software: the ones you're required to issue, for example when the client is a business, a self-employed person or a public body, and the ones you issue voluntarily.
Word and Excel have an official answer. If you only use them to type the details, issue and print the invoice and keep it, the Tax Agency says the regulation doesn't affect you. It does if the spreadsheet does more with that data, for example a macro that builds your invoice register. A simple list of invoices with their totals doesn't count.
2. Ask your invoicing software provider
Whether it will be adapted in time and whether it will charge you extra. That conversation is what decides whether you switch.
3. Consider the Tax Agency’s free app
The Tax Agency aims it mainly at the self-employed, professionals and businesses with few invoices, but makes clear there is no invoice limit. It has limits worth knowing:
- it's a Verifactu app: it sends the record of each invoice to the Tax Agency;
- it doesn't issue simplified invoices (receipts), which rules out much of retail and hospitality;
- every invoice must have a recipient;
- it doesn't let you export records to carry on invoicing with another program;
- you sign in with Cl@ve Móvil, a digital certificate or an electronic ID card.
4. Don’t confuse it with e-invoicing
Mandatory business-to-business e-invoicing is a different rule with a different calendar: Royal Decree 238/2026 of 25 March, which stems from the “Crea y Crece” law. Hearing about one tells you nothing about the other.
The recommendation
You have until July 2027: there's no rush, but don't leave it to the last quarter. Talk to your invoicing provider now. If you invoice by hand, or with a Word or Excel template you only use to type and print, it most likely doesn't affect you, but confirm it with an adviser: don't decide it by reading an article, this one included. If you switch software, back up your data first and always go to the Tax Agency website by typing the address yourself: the Tax Agency warns of fake emails impersonating it, such as one in March 2026 titled “Notificación de factura electrónica”.
Sources
- Royal Decree 1007/2023, consolidated text — BOE, in Spanish
- Royal Decree-Law 15/2025, of 2 December — BOE, in Spanish
- Extension of the deadline to adapt invoicing systems — Tax Agency, in Spanish
- Who is obliged and which operations are included? — Tax Agency, in Spanish
- FAQ: general questions and scope — Tax Agency, in Spanish
- Free VERI*FACTU app from the Tax Agency — Tax Agency, in Spanish
- Mandatory e-invoicing — Tax Agency, in Spanish
- Tax Agency impersonation cases: 2026 — Tax Agency, in Spanish
Related
Review
Responsible for publication: Ibrahin. Date: 2026-09-04. Last checked: 2026-10-16. Dates come from the consolidated text of Royal Decree 1007/2023 in the BOE, whose last update is still that of 3 December 2025, and from Tax Agency pages. This article is not tax advice.