The livestock rate, and the percentage people confuse it with

Most countries with a VAT system have a standard rate, one or two reduced rates and a zero rate. Ireland has all of those and then one more: a rate of 4.8% that exists for the supply of livestock and for nothing else. It has been 4.8% since 1 January 2005 and it is the smallest positive rate in the system.

Section 46(1)(d) of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010 states it in a single clause with no schedule behind it: 4.8% of the amount on which tax is chargeable in relation to the supply of livestock. There is no Schedule 3 list to consult and no carve-out paragraph subordinating it to something else, which makes it the simplest rate in Irish VAT to state and — because of the paragraph below — one of the easiest to misapply.

What counts, and the horse question

The second row is a genuine fork in the legislation rather than a footnote. A horse normally intended for use in the preparation of foodstuffs or in agricultural production is livestock and sits here. A horse that is not — a racehorse, a riding horse — is at the reduced rate instead, and the reduced rate page lists live horses and the hire of horses among its entries. Same animal, two rates, decided by intended use.

Revenue states both halves in its own words on two separate pages, which is why this site carries both cites rather than paraphrasing one of them.

The percentage people confuse this with

In Revenue’s own historical rate table there is a column immediately to the right of the livestock column, and it is not a VAT rate at all. It is the flat-rate addition, currently 5.1%: the percentage an unregistered farmer adds to the price of agricultural produce and services supplied to a VAT-registered person, to compensate for the VAT they have borne on their own inputs and cannot reclaim.

It sits in the same table, it is a similar magnitude, and it is the reason a search for “farming VAT rate Ireland” returns two different small percentages that both look plausible. They are not alternatives. One is the rate charged on a supply of livestock; the other is an addition a specific class of unregistered supplier makes to a specific class of invoice.

This site does not compute the flat-rate addition — the calculator has five rates and this is not one of them — and it carries the figure only so that the distinction can be drawn. There is an open question recorded against it, honestly: the addition has changed almost every year, and Revenue’s table, published on 1 January 2026, still shows 1 January 2025 as its most recent row.

Source: Revenue — Historical VAT rates

Worked, both ways

A mart price rather than a round number:

At a rate this small the two directions come out close together, which is exactly when the difference is easiest to ignore and hardest to spot in a reconciliation. The VAT inside a gross livestock price is four-point-eight one-hundred-and-four-point-eights of it.

Where this comes from