Irish VAT at 23%, 13.5% and 9%

What this works out

Irish VAT, in both directions, across all five bands. Type a price that excludes the tax and it adds it; type one that includes it and it works the tax back out, which is a division rather than a subtraction.

The table underneath applies the same amount in every band at once, with the VAT fraction for each. On five bands that table earns its place: Ireland moves supplies between bands more often than most, and the question “what if this is 9% rather than 13.5%” has an answer worth seeing without retyping anything.

Five bands, two of them fractional

Standard, 23%. The default. It covers everything Revenue has not assigned elsewhere, which is most consumer goods, professional services and telecommunications. It has been 23% since January 2012, when it rose from 21%.

Reduced, 13.5%. Building work, hotel and guesthouse accommodation, fuel for heat and light, cleaning and maintenance.

Second reduced, 9%. Gas, electricity and newspapers, and — since 1 July 2026 — restaurant and catering food and hairdressing.

Livestock, 4.8%. The narrowest band in the system: live cattle, sheep, pigs, deer and goats, greyhounds, and the hire of horses. It is an agricultural measure rather than a general reduced rate.

Zero, 0%. Most food bought from a shop, children’s clothing and footwear, books, oral medicines and exports.

The fractions are the honest part. Two of these rates are not whole numbers, and it shows: 13.5% gives 27/227 and 4.8% gives 6/131. Even the standard rate is 23/123, which does not reduce. British guidance makes the VAT fraction sound like a tidy shortcut because 20% happens to give one sixth — that is a lucky case, and Ireland has none of them.

The July 2026 change

Finance Act 2025 moved food and drink supplied as part of a restaurant, catering or hot takeaway service from 13.5% to 9% with effect from 1 July 2026, and hairdressing moved with it. No rate changed value; supplies moved between two bands that both already existed, which is why the rate table underneath this page is untouched by it and the change is written here instead.

The exclusions decide most real bills. Alcohol, bottled water, soft drinks and sports drinks stayed at 13.5%. Hot tea, coffee and fruit juice came down to 9%, because they are treated as part of the food supply. And accommodation was deliberately left out, so a hotel now charges 13.5% on the room, 9% on the restaurant food and 13.5% again on the bar — three lines, two rates, one bill.

Before you read on

From July 2026, a hotel bill covers the room, dinner in the restaurant and a glass of wine with it. How many VAT rates are on that bill?

• AOne — it is all one stay.

  Three separate supplies, and Revenue bands them separately.

• BTwo.

  Yes: 13.5% on the room, 9% on the food, and 13.5% again on the wine.

• CThree — a rate each.

  Close, but two of the three lines land on the same rate. Accommodation and alcohol both sit at 13.5%.

Two rates across three lines. Restaurant food moved from 13.5% to 9% on 1 July 2026, but accommodation was deliberately left out of the change and alcohol was never in it — so the room is 13.5%, the dinner is 9%, and the wine is 13.5% again. That is the shape of most Irish rate questions: nothing changed value, supplies moved between bands that already existed, and the bill has to be split before any of the arithmetic starts.

The method

Adding is a multiplication. Removing is a division: a price of €123 including 23% VAT is 123% of the net, so the net is €123 divided by 1.23, or equivalently the tax is 23/123 of the gross.

Subtracting the rate instead is worse here than in Britain. The error is the rate squared, so it is 4% of the net at 20% and 5.29% at 23%: taking 23% off €123 gives €94.71 rather than €100, a third worse than the same mistake made on a British invoice.

Only the VAT is rounded, and the third figure is derived from the other two, so the net and the tax always add back to the price actually charged.

Rounding is half up to the cent, with no option. The round-down concession that the UK VAT tool offers is HMRC’s, granted to traders issuing invoices there; there is nothing Irish to point at, and adding the switch because a sibling tool has one would be inventing a rule.

The arithmetic is decimal rather than binary floating point, which matters more at fractional rates than at whole ones. 13.5% of €19.00 is exactly €2.565 and rounds to €2.57, but the nearest double sits fractionally below it, so a naive implementation reports €2.56.

A worked example

Adding. €100 before VAT at the standard rate:

VAT	€23.00
Price before VAT	€100.00
Price including VAT	€123.00
VAT fraction	23/123

Removing, at the second reduced rate. A restaurant food total of €43.60 including 9% VAT:

vat = 43.60 x 9 / 109
    = 392.40 / 109
    = 3.60

net = 43.60 - 3.60
    = 40.00

The cent case. €19.00 plus 13.5% is €2.57 of tax and €21.57 in total — not the €2.56 a floating-point calculation reports.

These are the same figures asserted in this tool’s test file, so the page and the formula cannot drift apart without the build going red.

What it does not do

It does not decide which band a supply falls in; Revenue publishes a searchable database and that is the only reliable way to check an unusual one. It holds no historic rates, so an invoice from before the July 2026 change needs the rate typing into “Another rate”. It does not handle the reverse charge, the margin schemes, the flat-rate farmer scheme beyond offering the 4.5% figure as a typed rate, postponed accounting for import VAT, or the special rules for supplies into Northern Ireland.

For a country with no tool of its own, or a rate nothing here holds, a VAT calculator with no rate table is the right page. The two other countries covered so far are UK VAT and German VAT.

Adding VAT to a price that excludes it:
  vat   = round(net x rate / 100)
  gross = net + vat

Removing VAT from a price that includes it:
  vat = round(gross x rate / (100 + rate))
  net = gross - vat

Irish bands and their VAT fractions:
  standard         23%    23/123
  reduced        13.5%    27/227
  second reduced    9%     9/109
  livestock       4.8%     6/131
  zero              0%     no tax

round = to the nearest cent, half up. No round-down
        option: that concession is British.

Only the VAT is rounded. The third figure is derived from
the other two, so net + vat = gross to the cent, always.