"With its Christmas agreement, Arizona missed an opportunity to bring clarity"

While the government coalition's budgetary rationale has been heeded, Unizo is concerned to discover "uncertainty under the Christmas tree." Without clear transitional measures, the Union of Independent Entrepreneurs warns that the VAT increase risks severely impacting the profitability and operational management of Belgian businesses.

© FRe

The budget agreement reached at the end of November aimed to stabilize public finances. However, the details still needed to be finalized. And the Christmas agreement reached overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday offers more uncertainty than guarantees, particularly for SMEs. Bart Buysse, managing director of Unizo, sums up the situation as a lack of predictability that risks turning a tax measure into an administrative quagmire.

The first point of economic friction concerns the de facto retroactive application of profit margins. Many sectors (hotels, events, campsites) operate with bookings made months in advance.

The problem is arithmetic: for a service sold inclusive of VAT based on a VAT rate of 6%, the sudden application of a rate of 12% at the time of service directly cuts into the entrepreneur's margin, if the latter cannot legally pass the increase on to the end customer.

UNIZO is advocating for two urgent protective mechanisms: maintaining the previous VAT rate for all reservations and agreements concluded before the law came into effect, and classifying the VAT increase as a case of force majeure in existing contracts, thus allowing for a legal price adjustment.

Without these safeguards, the VAT differential will become a "dead loss" for businesses. "Furthermore, it would have been preferable to bring the new measures into force no earlier than the second quarter of 2026, so that entrepreneurs would have more time to prepare and inform their customers," says Bart Buysse.

The preparation date, a new tax benchmark

To try to clarify the often blurry distinction between "takeaway" and catering services, the government is introducing a new technical criterion for taxation: deferred consumption according to an arbitrary storage period set at 2 days.

From now on, products consumed within forty-eight hours will automatically switch to the 12% VAT rate. This across-the-board measure will affect both the hospitality sector and large retailers.

“We understand that the government wants to bring clarity to a matter that was increasingly resembling an absurd war of interpretation. But in our view, the chosen solution risks creating more uncertainty and new problems on the ground,” says the managing director of the professional union.

While the intention is to reduce legislative ambiguities, UNIZO fears the opposite effect in practice. Linking a tax rate to a variable expiration date creates significant operational complexity (inventory management, differentiated labeling) and opens the door to further disputes during tax audits. "With gray areas, additional administration, and contractual discussions, if you make VAT dependent on an expiration date, you expose yourself to errors, disputes, and an increased audit burden," predicts Bart Buysse.

Request for postponement to April 1, 2026

Beyond the rates themselves, it is the implementation schedule that worries economic stakeholders. With entry into force planned for March, the time between the official publication of the texts (after review by the Council of State) and their actual application will be minimal.

Updating point-of-sale software, reprinting price lists and menus, communicating with customers… For businesses, this timeframe is considered insufficient to adapt critical infrastructure. Faced with this risk of a logistical bottleneck, Unizo is requesting a postponement of the implementation date to April 1st at the earliest, or even to the second quarter of 2026, to allow businesses time to comply with the new requirements without disrupting their operations.

For the business world, the urgent need is not just to know the new rate, but to obtain a stable framework for implementation that does not transform tax collection into an unmanageable administrative burden.