The countries where your first sale is the registration

Three ways a threshold turns out not to be yours

1. There is no threshold in law for a foreign seller. Fourteen countries here work this way, and the obligation begins at sale one.
2. The published threshold is reserved for residents. The figure is real, it is just not available to a business established elsewhere.
3. The threshold is measured on something that is not your sales into that country, so a small local presence can still be over it.

Only the first of the three looks unusual at a glance. The other two are the dangerous ones, because they leave a real number on the page and let you do the arithmetic against a line that was never yours.

The error always runs the same direction

Nobody reads a threshold page and concludes they owe more than they do. Every one of these misreadings produces the same result: a seller who believes they have runway, spending it, and finding out afterwards that registration was due from a date already in the past.

Where they are

The other eight are South Korea, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Serbia, Georgia and Israel. In each, a foreign business supplying digital services to consumers registers on the strength of the supply itself rather than its size.

There is a reason they cluster. Most of these regimes were written after 2015 specifically to catch foreign digital sellers, and a registration threshold exists to spare small local businesses paperwork. Applied to a foreign supplier it would spare nobody the drafters cared about.

What no threshold actually obliges you to do

Usually less than it sounds, and sooner than you would like. Most of these countries run a simplified registration for foreign suppliers: no local entity, no local representative in many cases, an online form, then charge the local rate and file a periodic return.

What you do not get is a quiet period. There is no equivalent of watching a number climb toward a line, because the line is behind you the moment the first consumer in that country pays you.

1. 1Establish whether you have sold there at allFor a zero-threshold country this is the entire test. One consumer sale is the same answer as ten thousand, and most sellers have never looked at their revenue split this way.
2. 2Separate consumers from businessesNearly every regime in this group reverse-charges cross-border B2B, so the duty attaches to consumer sales. This split is the difference between registering and not, so it is worth getting right rather than estimating.
3. 3Check who was the seller on each saleIf a merchant of record or an app store made the supply, the sale into that country was theirs and none of this reaches you. If you sold directly, it does.
4. 4Register before the volume becomes worth pursuingA regime with no threshold still has finite enforcement attention. The gap between owing a duty and being asked about it is the window in which registering is cheap.

The Gulf figures are resident figures

The United Arab Emirates publishes a registration threshold of AED 375,000 and Saudi Arabia publishes SAR 375,000. Both are widely quoted, both are correct, and neither is available to a business without an establishment in the country.

A non-resident making taxable supplies in either must register regardless of turnover, which is why both appear in the zero-threshold list above rather than at their headline figures.

Europe does exactly the same thing

The EU's €10,000 is available only to a seller established in one member state and shipping from it. The UK's £90,000 belongs to a UK-established business. A non-established taxable person has no UK threshold and registers on its first taxable supply.

Both cases have enough detail to deserve their own treatment, and they have it: see the UK VAT threshold for overseas sellers and EU OSS registration versus US sales tax nexus.

Switzerland counts your worldwide turnover

The Swiss figure is not a threshold on Swiss sales. It is a test on your global annual turnover, and a business over it registers on its first B2C supply in Switzerland. A company doing serious business elsewhere is already past it before selling a single Swiss subscription.

Japan looks two years into the past

Japan measures against a base period that is generally two years before the current tax year. Liability can therefore arrive in a year when your Japanese sales look small, on the strength of a year you have stopped thinking about.

It is the same failure as the others in a different costume: the number is right, the window it is measured over is not the one you pictured, and the discovery happens after the fact rather than before.