How it works
VATcodex is a search engine over the European Union’s value-added tax case law: judgments of the Court of Justice and the General Court, Advocate General opinions and reasoned orders, together with the legislation they interpret and the Commission material that explains it. It is built for VAT practitioners across the EU, EFTA and the United Kingdom.
Search by meaning, not just keywords
Type a question the way you would describe it to a colleague, “fixed establishment and subsidiaries”, “place of supply of B2C services”. Results appear instantly from a keyword index, then re-rank by meaning once the semantic model finishes loading. Both run inside your browser: the corpus is downloaded to your device and queried there, so your searches are never sent to a server and nobody, including us, can see what you are researching. The model is downloaded once and cached, so later visits are immediate.
Grouped by case, and joined cases resolved
A single case often produces several documents, a judgment, an Advocate General opinion, sometimes an order. They are grouped under one case number, with the most authoritative document first and links to every sibling document on EUR-Lex. When the Court joins several references and rules once, that judgment carries only one case number: searching any of the other numbers still finds it, and the page says which case it was decided in.
Linked to the law, in both directions
Each case is tagged with the articles it cites of Directive 2006/112/EC, Implementing Regulation (EU) No 282/2011, the refund directives (Directive 2008/9/EC and Thirteenth Directive 86/560/EEC) and the Sixth Directive 77/388/EEC. Inside the text of a judgment, citations to articles and to other cases are live: click one and read the article, or the very paragraph cited, without losing your place. The Compendium turns it around: pick an article and see the cases that interpret it.
What the Commission has said about an article
Under each article the Compendium also gathers the VAT Committee guidelines and the sections of the Commission’s Explanatory Notes that deal with it, so the administrative reading sits next to the judicial one. Both are marked not binding where they are read, because confusing administrative guidance with law is the expensive mistake. Guidelines the Commission records as overtaken are shown as such, and each guideline and note says how many judgments on that article came after it, so you can see at a glance whether the Court has spoken since.
The full text, made for reading
Every document that exists in the corpus can be read here in full, with the Court’s own paragraph numbering, in a reading window sized for hours rather than minutes: one column, text size you set and we remember, and search inside the document that stays put while you scroll.
What is coming
The calendar lists forthcoming judgments, opinions and hearings on VAT. The Court’s own calendar cannot be filtered by subject, so this page does it: a case is listed only when it is already in this corpus, or when the notice published in the Official Journal at the time it was lodged invokes the VAT Directive. Nothing merely tax-adjacent is shown, and nothing uncertain.
Discussion, attached to the source
Signed-in practitioners can annotate a case with a question, a practice note or a comment, and tag it with the Member State it speaks for. Notes stay attached to the judgment they are about rather than drifting into a forum of their own; the Discussion page simply gathers the most recent ones. The most useful thing you can leave is how a ruling is actually applied by your tax authority, because that is the part no official source publishes.
What it is not
It is not a chatbot and it does not answer legal questions. Case summaries are AI-generated and clearly labelled: factual digests to help you triage, never a replacement for reading the judgment, and never authority to cite. A handful of documents the Court does not publish in English carry an unofficial translation, marked as such and never replacing the original. It does not give tax advice and is not a substitute for professional judgement or for consulting the authoritative source.
How complete it is
Today the corpus holds 1,183 cases, 1,181 of them with the full text and 1,178 with a summary, linked to 671 articles across five instruments. It is assembled from CURIA and EUR-Lex and may lag behind publication: a case missing here is not a case that does not exist. Where a document is held only in a language other than English, the interface says so and links to the original.
Sources & reuse
Case law is reproduced from CURIA and EUR-Lex (© European Union). Legislation is reproduced under Decision 2011/833/EU (CC BY 4.0). VAT Committee guidelines and Explanatory Notes are documents of the European Commission, linked to their official publication. The authoritative text is always the version published in the Official Journal of the European Union; a link to the official source is provided on every result. VATcodex is an independent research tool and is not affiliated with the Court of Justice of the European Union.