Hungary: Mandatory Electronic Receipt Data Reporting from September 1, 2026 — NAV Publishes the Interface Specification and Grants a Four-Month Penalty-Free Transition

Country Update — Hungary  |  11 August 2026  |  Topic: Receipt Data Reporting / Digital Tax Reporting

On July 13, 2026 the Hungarian tax authority NAV published the machine-to-machine interface documentation for electronic receipt data reporting on its official repository, comprising interface specification version 1.0 and the corresponding XML schema.

On July 29, 2026 it published the guide to manual entry through the KOBAK portal, and on August 4, 2026 it announced a four-month transition period during which no penalties will be imposed.

The underlying obligation is statutory: from September 1, 2026 taxable persons must report the data content of hand-written and receipt-program generated receipts electronically, within three calendar days of issue, aggregated per day and broken down by VAT rate.

Background

Hungary has operated real-time invoice reporting since 2018 and has progressively extended the principle from invoices to other transaction documents. The receipt is the last significant category of Hungarian transaction document to fall outside continuous reporting.

Receipts issued through an online cash register have in effect been reported since online cash registers were introduced, because the device transmits automatically. What has remained outside the reporting perimeter is the receipt issued outside such a device: the hand-written receipt from a receipt book, and the receipt produced by a receipt program or computer application.

The legal instrument that frames the modernization of the receipt regime is Decree 8/2025 (III. 31.) of the Minister for National Economy, promulgated in Magyar Közlöny 2025/35 of March 31, 2025 and in force from April 1, 2025, with Chapters II and V to VIII and subtitles 9 and 11 applying from July 1, 2025 and section 59 and Annex 7 applying from July 1, 2028. It was amended once, by Decree 39/2025 (XII. 19.), in force from December 20, 2025.

It is important to attribute the September 1, 2026, obligation correctly, because commentary has repeatedly located it in the ministerial decree. NAV’s own material attributes it to the VAT Act — section 257/G and point B of Annex 11 of Act CXXVII of 2007 on value added tax. The decree governs the cash register and receipt-program framework; the reporting obligation itself is statutory.

The second frequent misattribution concerns what becomes mandatory. Use of an electronic cash register does not become mandatory on September 1, 2026. Electronic cash registers remain voluntary, and existing online cash registers remain usable until July 1, 2028. What becomes mandatory on September 1, 2026 is the reporting of receipt data.

The Legislative Change

The statutory obligation is not new in this window; what is new is the tooling and the enforcement posture, and both operate within the existing legal framework.

That distinction matters less than it might appear, because in a reporting regime of this kind, the specification is what determines whether a submission is accepted, and an accepted submission is what discharges the obligation. A specification version published seven weeks before a mandatory start date is functionally a deadline.

On July 13, 2026 NAV published the machine-to-machine interface documentation on its official repository at the nav-gov-hu organization, in the eRECEIPT project.

The artifacts are the interface specification, NAV_Nyugta_adatszolgaltatas_IF_specifikacio_v1.0.pdf, and the schema receipt-if-schema-v1.0.xsd, located under the path for receipt data reporting. Both are version 1.0.

The specification describes the /receipt-if service. This is the first published version of the interface, which means that no organization had a machine-readable target to build against before mid-July for an obligation starting September 1.

On July 29, 2026, NAV published the guide to the receipt data entry interface of the KOBAK portal, confirming that the obligation may be discharged either by manual entry on that portal or by machine-to-machine submission.

For a business issuing a small number of hand-written receipts, manual entry on KOBAK is the realistic route; for anything at volume, the interface is.

On August 4, 2026, NAV announced a four-month transition period. No penalties will be imposed for the period from September 1 to December 31, 2026, and sanctions apply only from January 1, 2027. This is a grace period on enforcement, not a deferral of the obligation. The duty to report from September 1, 2026, stands; what is suspended is the consequence of getting it wrong.

Two adjacent NAV artifacts in the same window are worth recording because they belong to the same modernization program. On July 21, 2026, NAV released the eVAT Tool application together with its user manual, distributed as release 1.2.16 of the eVAT-Tool project, which processes an Excel template, validates against the schema, generates XML and exports to the eVAT machine-to-machine interface.

On August 6, 2026, NAV issued the first distribution license for a hardware-based electronic cash register, restating the July 1, 2028 cut-off for online cash registers.

Scope

The reporting obligation from September 1, 2026, covers the VAT Act data content of receipts issued by hand from a receipt book and of receipts generated by a receipt program or computer application.

The data must be submitted electronically within three calendar days of issue, aggregated per day and broken down by VAT rate. That aggregation is a significant simplification relative to invoice-level real-time reporting: the obligation is a daily summary per VAT rate, not a document-by-document transmission.

Users of online cash registers and of electronic cash registers discharge the obligation automatically through the device and need take no separate action for receipts issued that way. The obligation therefore bites precisely where a device is not used.

NAV has officially confirmed that approximately 270,000 businesses are affected. Receipts are stored in the receipt repository for ten years. More than 200,000 online cash registers were in use as at April 2025, which gives a sense of the size of the population already reporting automatically.

The free cloud-based NAV electronic cash register application has been available for Android and iOS since July 2025 and offers a route for smaller businesses that would otherwise face manual entry.

Electronic cash registers remain voluntary. Online cash registers remain permitted until July 1, 2028, which is the date on which section 59 and Annex 7 of Decree 8/2025 take effect.

Timeline

• March 31, 2025 — Decree 8/2025 (III. 31.) of the Minister for National Economy promulgated in Magyar Közlöny 2025/35; in force April 1, 2025.
• July 1, 2025 — Chapters II and V to VIII and subtitles 9 and 11 of the decree take effect.
• July 2025 — the free NAV electronic cash register application becomes available for Android and iOS.
• December 20, 2025 — Decree 39/2025 (XII. 19.) amending Decree 8/2025 takes effect.
• July 13, 2026 — NAV publishes the machine-to-machine interface specification version 1.0 and schema receipt-if-schema-v1.0.xsd on its official eRECEIPT repository.
• July 21, 2026 — NAV releases the eVAT Tool application and user manual, distributed as eVAT-Tool release 1.2.16.
• July 29, 2026 — NAV publishes the guide to the receipt data entry interface of the KOBAK portal.
• August 4, 2026 — NAV announces a four-month penalty-free transition period.
• August 6, 2026 — NAV issues the first distribution licence for a hardware-based electronic cash register.
• September 1, 2026 — mandatory electronic reporting of receipt data begins, within three calendar days of issue, aggregated per day and broken down by VAT rate.
• December 31, 2026 — end of the penalty-free transition period.
• January 1, 2027 — sanctions apply for failures in receipt data reporting.
• July 1, 2028 — section 59 and Annex 7 of Decree 8/2025 take effect; online cash registers cease to be usable.

Businesses Affected

The obligation reaches any taxable person in Hungary that issues receipts otherwise than through an online or electronic cash register. In practice, that means two populations.

The first is small and micro businesses issuing hand-written receipts from a receipt book, for whom the realistic route is manual entry on the KOBAK portal or adoption of the free NAV application.

The second, and the population that matters most to multinationals, is businesses issuing receipts from a receipt program or computer application — including retail, hospitality, service and field-service operations where receipting is embedded in an enterprise application rather than in a certified till.

That second population is the one most likely to be caught out. A business that issues receipts from an SAP or other enterprise application may reasonably have assumed that receipt obligations were a cash-register matter and therefore outside its enterprise landscape. On the reading NAV has published, a receipt generated by a computer application falls squarely within the reporting obligation, and the reporting must be built.

Businesses already operating online cash registers are largely unaffected for now, but should note the July 1, 2028 cut-off and begin planning migration, particularly where the till estate is large or geographically dispersed.

Groups with Hungarian entities that do not issue receipts at all — pure business-to-business operations invoicing rather than receipting — are not affected by this obligation, but should confirm that assumption rather than assume it, since receipting can arise in unexpected corners such as staff sales, canteens and sample dispatches.

Required Actions

• Determine, entity by entity, whether receipts are issued in Hungary at all, and if so by what means: online cash register, electronic cash register, receipt program or computer application, or hand-written receipt book. This inventory is the whole of the scoping exercise and is frequently wrong on first pass.
• Where receipts are generated by a receipt program or computer application, download interface specification version 1.0 and schema receipt-if-schema-v1.0.xsd from the NAV eRECEIPT repository and scope the build. Note that the aggregation is daily and by VAT rate, which means the reporting layer needs a reliable daily close and a reliable VAT rate on every receipt line.
• Confirm that a receipt-level VAT rate is captured and correct in the source system. Aggregation by VAT rate is only as good as the rate determination on the underlying document.
• Establish the three-calendar-day submission cadence, including behavior across weekends, public holidays and period ends, and define the retry and escalation path for a failed submission.
• Where receipt volumes are low, evaluate manual entry on the KOBAK portal against the free NAV electronic cash register application, and assign named responsibility for daily entry. Manual routes fail through absence of ownership more often than through technical difficulty.
• Use the transition period deliberately. September 1 to December 31, 2026 is penalty-free, which makes it the window in which to submit real data, observe rejections and correct them. Treat it as a mandatory parallel run, not as four months of additional preparation time.
• Separately, and for entities in scope of the eVAT return, evaluate the eVAT Tool release 1.2.16 published on July 21, 2026 as a validation aid ahead of the eVAT machine-to-machine obligations.
• Begin planning for the July 1, 2028 withdrawal of online cash registers where a till estate exists, since hardware replacement programs at scale need lead time and the first hardware electronic cash register distribution licence was issued only on August 6, 2026.

Practical Implications

The substantive implication is that Hungary has closed the last significant gap in its transaction reporting coverage. With invoices reported in real time, receipts reported daily, and the eVAT return drawing on both, the administration will hold a substantially complete picture of Hungarian output transactions. That has consequences beyond the receipt obligation itself: any inconsistency between receipt data, invoice data and the VAT return becomes visible to the administration without an audit.

The timing is the operational problem. An interface specification published on July 13 for an obligation commencing September 1 leaves roughly seven weeks, of which a substantial part falls in the European holiday period.

The four-month penalty-free transition is the authority’s acknowledgment of that compression, and it should be read as an invitation to go live imperfectly rather than as permission to go live late. Organizations that wait until January 2027 to submit their first receipt data will have forfeited the only risk-free testing window they will get.

For SAP-based landscapes, the design question is where the daily aggregation happens. Aggregating by day and VAT rate is straightforward if receipts carry a reliable tax code and posting date in the system of record, and awkward if receipting sits in a peripheral application that posts to SAP in summary.

The cheaper architecture is almost always to derive the aggregate from the same data that produces the VAT return, so that the two cannot diverge.

Finally, a note on how this development has been reported. Several accounts have described September 1, 2026 as the date on which electronic cash registers become mandatory, and have attributed the obligation to the ministerial decree. Both are wrong. Electronic cash registers remain voluntary, online cash registers survive until July 1, 2028, and the reporting duty derives from section 257/G and Annex 11 point B of the VAT Act. Scoping decisions taken on the mistaken version of the facts will scope the wrong project.

Expected Next Steps

Further versions of the receipt interface specification and schema should be expected, since version 1.0 was published only weeks before go-live and first versions of Hungarian interfaces have historically been revised. Organizations should monitor the eRECEIPT repository releases rather than waiting for a news announcement.

NAV guidance on error handling, correction and cancellation of submitted receipt data should be expected, as should clarification of the treatment of receipts issued and reported across a period-end boundary.

Further hardware electronic cash register distribution licenses should be expected following the first on August 6, 2026, and the market for compliant devices should develop through 2027 ahead of the July 1, 2028, withdrawal of online cash registers.

The interaction between receipt data reporting and the eVAT return should be expected to be specified more fully, since the value of a pre-populated return depends on the administration being able to reconcile receipt aggregates to declared output tax.

KGT will report separately on any new version of the receipt interface specification, on NAV guidance on correction procedures, and on the progression of the electronic cash register framework toward the 2028 cut-off.

How Can KGT Support You?

KGT is a specialist indirect tax technology firm. Our SAP-integrated e-invoicing and e-reporting add-ons generate, validate and transmit country-compliant structured documents directly from SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA, keeping tax determination, document mapping, status handling and the audit trail inside the system of record rather than in a downstream converter. Because the add-ons validate against the current national schemas, schematrons and code lists before transmission, a change of specification version becomes a configuration and regression-test exercise rather than a redesign.

We also deliver SAP Document and Reporting Compliance (DRC) services end to end: fit-gap assessment against the national mandate, activation and configuration of the relevant country versions, eDocument and eStatement setup, interface and connectivity design, master and transactional data remediation, test strategy including negative testing against the authority’s own validation artifacts, and post-go-live monitoring of rejections and status reconciliation. If you would like a readiness review against the developments described above, or an impact assessment for your SAP landscape, we would be glad to help.

Official sources

• NAV, publication of the receipt data reporting interface documentation on the official repository, July 13, 2026: View source
• NAV, guide to the receipt data entry interface of the KOBAK portal, July 29, 2026: View source
• NAV, announcement of the four-month transition period in receipt data reporting, August 4, 2026: View source
• NAV official eRECEIPT repository (interface specification version 1.0 and schema): View source
• Decree 8/2025 (III. 31.) of the Minister for National Economy, National Legislation Database: View source
• Decree 39/2025 (XII. 19.) amending Decree 8/2025, National Legislation Database: View source
• Magyar Közlöny 2025/35 of March 31, 2025: View source
• NAV official eVAT-Tool repository (eVAT Tool release 1.2.16, July 21, 2026): View source

This publication is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or professional advice. Please consult your advisor before acting on any information contained in this update.