The standard rate — the one that applies unless something else does

The standard rate is the one that applies when nothing else does. That sounds like a technicality and it is actually the most useful thing to know about Irish VAT, because it inverts the question you ask. You are not looking for a list with your product on it. You are checking whether your product is on one of the other four lists, and if it is not, you are at 23%.

The legislation is drafted that way on purpose. Section 46(1)(a) of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010 charges tax at 23% on the amount on which tax is chargeable “other than in relation to goods or services on which tax is chargeable at any of the rates specified” in the paragraphs that follow it. Everything is standard-rated by default; the reduced rates are carve-outs written as exceptions to this paragraph.

What Revenue gives as examples

Revenue’s own page for this rate lists a handful of things by way of illustration rather than an exhaustive schedule, which is the correct shape for a residual rate — you cannot enumerate “everything else”. Those examples are below. Read them as what they are: a sample chosen to show the breadth, not a list to check against.

Two of those are worth pausing on. Solicitor and consultancy services are there because professional services are the largest thing people assume must have a special rate and do not. Motor vehicles are there because a car purchase involves several taxes at once — VAT at the standard rate, plus vehicle registration tax, plus the annual motor tax which is a different tax again and is not a percentage of anything.

The rate has moved, once, and briefly

The standard rate has been 23% since 1 January 2012, with one interruption: it was reduced for the period from 1 September 2020 to 28 February 2021. That is not a rumour or a footnote — it is stated in the Act itself, in section 46(1A), which says that during that period paragraph (a) “shall have effect as if there were substituted ‘21 per cent’ for ‘23 per cent’”. If you are reconciling an old invoice from that window, that is why the arithmetic will not come out.

Worked, both ways

A trade invoice is the natural example here, so this one is not a round hundred. Adding the standard rate to a price, and taking it back out of one that already includes it:

The second row is the one to look at. Taking VAT out of a gross figure is not subtracting 23% from it — that would give a smaller and wrong answer. The VAT already in a standard-rated price is twenty-three one-hundred-and-twenty-thirds of it, which is why the reverse calculation has its own page.

Where this comes from

Two independent sources, because one would not be enough here: Revenue’s rate pages describe what each rate applies to and never state a percentage on any of them, so the figure itself has to come from the statute and from Revenue’s separate historical rate table. They agree.