How to Register For VAT in Germany as a Foreign Company or Self-Employed

If you want to store goods on German soil, you will need to register for VAT in Germany, no matter whether you sell in the country or not.

There are many other reasons to register, but the topic of this article is “how to do it”.

As usual, the information about this on the Internet is scarce, written by tax offices that want to charge you €500 (or more) to get that number for you and file your tax returns.

There’s no need to pay, I explain how to do it below.

1. Figure Out Which Tax Office to Register with

As a federal country, Germany has several “Finanzamt”, which means tax offices, in their “lands”, the equivalent of…a region.

Companies or self-employed entities located in Belgium, for example, need to register at the Finanzamt of Trier.

Use Perplexity or any other AI search engine to figure out which Finanzamt you should register with based on where your headquarters are located.

2. Fill up the Paper Work

I wrote to my Finanzamt and asked them which forms I had to fill in.

They provided a URL with several form. The one I had to fill in was named “Fragebogen zur umsatzsteuerlichen Erfassung von im Ausland ansässigen Unternehmern” (bless you). Note that it is also available in English under the name “VAT registration form for non-resident businesses”.

They told me to fill it up and “send it back to them” but I actually had to send that through the Elster portal (more on that below), not to them directly.

You can find the forms here: https://www.formulare-bfinv.de/ffw/catalog/openFolder.do?path=catalog%3A%2F%2FUnternehmen%2Fust%2Fust-frag.

I suggest you fill it up with ChatGPT. Don’t forget to fill up any adjacent forms if needed. You will figure this out as you fill up the main form.

In my case (self-employed located in Belgium), I filled up two forms (034806, 034809).

3. Fill Up the Questionnaire on Elster and Send the Form

Once you’ve filled up the form above, you’ll be able to fill up the questionnaire on Elster and send the form through Elster.

Elster is the platform through which you do your tax work in Germany.

1. Register on elster.de. Make sure you choose “register as an organization”. I chose “register as a private individual” and had to create a second account as a result.
2. Go to “my forms”: https://www.elster.de/eportal/meineformulare
3. Click on “start new forms”.
4. Select the correct form.
5. Fill it up
6. Join the form(s) you filled in the section 2 of this article.
7. Send to the correct “Finanzamt”.
8. Wait for a month.

There are several things to keep in mind.

1. How to choose which form to fill up: that depends on your situation. I registered for VAT as a self-employed person in Belgium. The form is different than if you register your company instead. Ask a professional, or better, ask ChatGPT.
2. Not everything is translated on Elster. I filled up the entire questionnaire with ChatGPT in German and it understood reasonably well. Don’t fill up the form by yourself if you have no knowledge or experience. Ask a professional, or ask AI.
3. When you fill out the questionnaire, you might figure out that you may need to add an additional questionnaire to fill out, depending on your situation. Don’t forget that.

After a month, you will receive three letters:

1. One with your German personal tax ID in Germany.
2. One with your business tax ID in Germany.
3. One with your VAT number.

You should now be able to declare VAT through Elster. There’s a form for that in “my forms”.

If you cannot find the form, then it is likely because you registered as a private user instead of registering as an organization or because your Elster account isn’t yet linked to your tax ID, but still linked to your email address only (the usage of Elster is then restricted).

If this is the case, go to your profile, and select “Unlock functions of a full user account”.

I thought that they would automatically link your account to your tax ID but they didn’t, which is why I ended up creating a second “business account” then told everyone on the Internet to do it, although, to be honest, that was because Gemini told me to. But anyway. No need for several accounts.

Conclusion

I figured out all this by talking to the tax office in Trier and using the deep search function of Grok. I sent the form and one month later, I received my VAT number by the post.

Hopefully, this article will be enough for you to manage to register for VAT in Germany as a foreign company or a self-employed person.

If not, I suggest you use Gemini or Grok to figure it out, or write to your “Finanzamt”. Make sure you write in German as they do not speak English.

Good luck!

BTW, I wrote a book about taxes which you should definitely check out if this content interests you.