Mandatory e-invoicing in 2028: why the deadline could catch Latvian businesses off guard
Latvia's parliament set 2028 as the new deadline for mandatory B2B e-invoicing after repeated delays, but experts warn the country's low e-invoice adoption rates suggest many businesses, especially small and medium ones, are not prepared.
On June 5, 2025, Latvia's parliament (Saeima) confirmed 2028 as the new deadline for mandatory e-invoicing in business-to-business transactions — another postponement of the originally planned 2026 target, since many companies, particularly small and medium enterprises, lacked the technical solutions and knowledge needed.
An e-invoice is not simply a PDF sent by email, but invoice data in a structured, machine-readable format that systems can process without manual intervention. The EU is driving this initiative both to reduce VAT fraud and to improve business efficiency.
Latvia lags behind Europe
Latvia's e-invoicing figures rank among the lowest in Europe. In 2023, only 15.7% of Latvian small businesses sent e-invoices — the third-lowest rate in the EU — compared with 97.4% in Italy and 92.9% in Finland. As of June 2026, Latvia had 186,632 active registered businesses, of which more than 90% are micro-enterprises with fewer than nine employees — the group expected to face the greatest difficulty adapting.
Practical challenges
In an April 2025 survey by research agency Norstat, 31% of 1,093 surveyed companies said they were not receiving sufficient support for implementing structured e-invoicing. Businesses in the Latgale region and micro-enterprises reported the biggest gaps.
Another issue is the parallel use of paper delivery notes and e-invoices — in municipalities, more than 60% of documents are still received on paper, creating roughly a million extra documents per year that must be processed twice.
Starting in 2026, businesses will need not only to prepare e-invoices but also to report them to the State Revenue Service. The process for correcting invoices will also change — errors can no longer simply be quietly resent but must be credited and reissued as new documents.
To prevent confusion over optional data fields in the PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 standard, the Latvian Information and Communication Technology Association is developing guidelines for implementing e-invoice data models in business systems.
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