France's E-Invoicing Mandate September 2026

France e-invoicing mandate going live september 2026

Here's What You Need to Know

The days of emailing a PDF invoice to French business partners are numbered. We break down the mandate, the Y-model, and how to get compliant before the deadline.

If your business handles invoicing with French companies, September 1, 2026 is a date you need to circle in red. France's landmark e-invoicing mandate officially takes effect, and it's far more comprehensive than simply switching from PDFs to digital files. It's a full-scale shift in how tax data is captured, transmitted, and reported — and the window to prepare is closing fast.

To help demystify this, Arratech hosted a live webinar with Thibault Samson, co-founder of The Invoicing Hub and one of France's leading independent experts on the mandate. Here's what every software vendor, ERP provider, and finance team needs to understand.

What the mandate actually requires

At its core, the French mandate makes electronic invoicing compulsory for domestic B2B transactions — meaning any invoice between two French businesses. But the requirements go well beyond that:

E-invoicing replaces PDF, postal, or email invoices for French B2B transactions. Invoices must be transmitted electronically through a accredited platform and in one of three mandatory formats: UBL, CII, or Factur-X (a hybrid format combining a XML invoice with a embedded human-readable PDF, similar to Germany's ZUGFeRD).

The invoice life cycle messages (so called CDAR) requires both parties to exchange structured status updates throughout the invoice's journey — from "submitted" and "sent by platform," through "approved," "disputed," "suspended," and ultimately "paid." Some statuses are mandatory, others optional, but all require your systems to communicate in a structured XML format.

E-reporting extends the mandate to international B2B transactions and all B2C transactions. Rather than transmitting invoices themselves, companies must send periodic reports of tax-relevant data to the French tax authority (DGFiP). Depending on your VAT regime, this can be required every 10 days, monthly, or bi-monthly.

The deadlines, broken down by company size

Deadlines for French e-Invoicing mandates

Understanding the the Y-model

France has moved away from a centralized platform model (like Italy's SDI) and instead adopted what's effectively a five-corner exchange model. Here's how each party fits together:

5 corner model for e-invoicing applied in France

Two terms are essential here. The PA (Plateforme Agréée) is a private company that has been formally accredited, and simultaneously extracts tax data for the government. Using a PA is mandatory you cannot transmit compliant invoices without one.

The PPF (Portail Public de Facturation) is the government's public billing portal. It acts as a data concentrator for all tax extracts and e-reports, and hosts the Annuaire a public directory that works similar to a Peppol SMP, identifying which PA each company uses. Invoices are exchanged over the Peppol network in one of the three mandated formats.

The complexity hiding in plain sight: use cases

Beyond the core framework, the mandate defines 44 (and growing) specific "use cases" real business scenarios that require extended invoice formats or special handling. These include factoring arrangements, marketplace transactions, subcontracting, self-billing, insurance payments, deposit invoices, and even employee expense reimbursements.

PAs are not required to support every use case, so it's essential to map which ones apply to your business and confirm your platform covers them. The specifications are published by the AFNOR commission in document XP Z12-014 — and the guidance was updated as recently as February 2026, so staying current matters.

How Arratech makes compliance fast and future-proof

Arratech was built by founders with decades of experience of the Peppol network, including former and current leadership positions in OpenPeppol. That foundation shapes everything about how our platform works.

We handle the transport layer so you can focus on the invoice payload and your core product. Our infrastructure is scalable to handle any transaction volume, and we partner with a SecNumCloud-certified hosting provider to meet French sovereign cloud requirements.

Not sure if we're the right fit? You can sign up for a free sandbox environment directly on our website and have your technical team test the integration today no sales call or subscription required.

FAQs

Does the UK mandate use Peppol, or will it have its own format?

The UK government has signalled that it will align with international standards and will most likely adapt to the Peppol Network, the same network already mandatory in Belgium, Germany, Australia, and Singapore and used in many other countries. Full technical specifications are still being finalised by HMRC, but the direction is clear: structured XML invoices exchanged via an approved network, consistent with the EN 16931 European standard. This is good news for vendors already connected to Peppol elsewhere. Slovakia, Belgium, and the UK are all expected to use the same underlying infrastructure model, meaning you can work with one Peppol Access Point infrastructure provider such as Arratech and cover all of them. Arratech monitors HMRC guidance continuously and will update customers as the UK framework is confirmed.

My platform serves both UK and European customers. Do I need separate integrations for each country?

No and this is one of the strongest arguments for acting now. Peppol is a single network with country-specific configurations, not a collection of separate systems. Through working with an infrastructure provider such as Arratech, you can cover UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Slovakia, and many other mandate markets through one connection. The invoice format (EN 16931 XML) is the same European standard across all of them. The difference between countries is which Peppol Authority accredits providers, which syntax variants are accepted, what additional reporting obligations apply. Arratech's unified API handles this per-country complexity automatically, so your platform doesn't need a separate integration for each jurisdiction.

We're a software vendor, when should we start preparing for the UK e-invoicing mandate?

The demand from your customer does not correlate with the deadline of 2029, it's that your enterprise customers will start asking about what you are doing to stay compliant already in 2027, and procurement cycles for infrastructure changes run 12–24 months. The practical answer is almost always to partner with a dedicated experienced Peppol Access Point provider rather than build your own. Building and certifying your own Peppol AP takes 12+ months, requires ongoing OpenPeppol certification maintenance, and demands a dedicated compliance engineering function. Partnering gives you the certainty of being live well before deadline, compliance updates being handled by your partner and provides one simple connection for the increasing complexity as each country implements its own flavor of Peppol Network. The vendors who are ready in 2027 are the ones making the partnership decision in 2026.

Glossary

Peppol Service Metadata Publisher (SMP)

A Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) is a registry on the Peppol network that stores essential details about a business or organisation — such as which types of electronic documents (e-documents) it can receive (e.g., e-invoices, purchase orders) and how those documents sho

If your organisation wants to receive e-documents via Peppol, it must be registered in an SMP. Without this registration, other companies and government agencies cannot find the technical information they need to deliver documents to you.

Service Metadata Locator (SML)

The Service Metadata Locator (SML), the only central component in the Peppol eDelivery Network. It keeps track of where each participant’s Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) is located. When a sender wants to deliver an electronic document, their Access Point queries the SML to find the correct SMP address for the recipient. The SMP then provides the detailed technical information needed to send the document securely and correctly.

CNAME record

A DNS record type formerly used for SML lookups (pointing one domain name to another) that is being deprecated in this context.

NAPTR (U-NAPTR) record

A DNS record type that replaces CNAME in the new lookup method. It supports more advanced and flexible routing for metadata resolution.