E-Invoicing Monitor: Almost One in Five Businesses Receives E-Invoices, but They Are Only About 4 Percent of Incoming Invoices

Since January 1, 2025, every business in Germany must be able to receive e-invoices, from large corporations down to one-person operations. This monitor measures what actually arrives. It is based on the incoming invoices that self-employed people and small businesses upload to Norman or receive there as e-invoices, with invoice dates from January 2024 to September 2026.

One clarification up front, because this is where most misunderstandings start: a genuine e-invoice is exclusively a structured, machine-readable format under the EN 16931 standard. In practice that means XRechnung (pure XML) or ZUGFeRD (a PDF with embedded XML). An ordinary PDF has not legally counted as an e-invoice since 2025. Our processing detects and parses these formats automatically on every incoming document. We do not estimate; we count.

The result in one sentence: almost one in five businesses now receives e-invoices, but in the invoice inbox they are still the exception.

More and more businesses receive e-invoices

In the first quarter of 2025, the first quarter of the receive duty, about one in ten active businesses received at least one genuine e-invoice (9.5 percent). By the end of the year the share had risen to about 18 percent. In the first half of 2026 it was about 15 percent, and in the third quarter of 2026 it reached 18.3 percent: almost one in five businesses. A business counts as active if it processed at least three incoming invoices in the quarter.

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The clear step came in 2025: the share almost doubled, from about one in ten to almost one in five businesses. Since then it has moved between about 15 and 18 percent. We do not read moves of 2 to 3 points from quarter to quarter as a trend.

In the invoice inbox, the e-invoice is still small

Businesses that receive e-invoices mostly get only a few. In 2024, the year before the mandate, 0.3 percent of all incoming invoices were genuine e-invoices. In 2025 it was 3.5 percent, and so far in 2026 it is 3.9 percent, about 4 percent.

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Four in five active businesses have not received a single e-invoice in 2026 so far. And even where e-invoices do arrive, they remain a minority: at the median, about a fifth of those businesses' incoming invoices are structured. So the e-invoice is spreading broadly, but hardly in depth.

The transition law's punchline

Until the end of 2026, a remarkable asymmetry applies. Any business may freely send a paper invoice. An ordinary PDF, however, requires the recipient's consent. And the e-invoice must be accepted by every recipient. The transition rules treat paper more generously than email with a PDF attached, while making the structured format the only one nobody is allowed to refuse.

The road ahead: from January 1, 2027, businesses with prior-year revenue above €800,000 must issue e-invoices. From January 1, 2028, the duty applies to everyone. One exception is permanent: Kleinunternehmer do not have to issue e-invoices (§ 34a UStDV), but they must still be able to receive them.

What this means for 2027 and 2028

Between businesses, nobody has to issue e-invoices yet; whoever sends them does so voluntarily. From 2027, high-revenue businesses must, and from 2028 everyone except Kleinunternehmer. The bigger jump in the invoice inbox is therefore still ahead. Whether the 2027 issuing duty bends the curve will show up here first.

This monitor is updated quarterly at this address; the changelog at the bottom of the page documents every revision. All analyses in this section: Data & Research.

Methodology

The basis is the incoming invoices that self-employed people and small businesses in Germany uploaded to Norman themselves, handed over in the chat, or received as e-invoices, with invoice dates from January 2024 to September 2026. Businesses whose documents arrive automatically through a bank connection are excluded in all periods: since April 2026 most of their invoices arrive that way, and the time series should cover the same intake channels in every quarter. Only a structured format under EN 16931 (XRechnung, ZUGFeRD) counts as an e-invoice, detected by our processing on intake; ordinary PDFs, scans, and photos do not count. The time series follows the invoice date, not the upload date; the most recent quarter is preliminary, because documents arrive late.

The main figure is the share of active businesses, meaning businesses with at least three incoming invoices in the quarter, that received at least one e-invoice. It counts every business once. We report the share of e-invoices among all incoming invoices only for full years: a few businesses with many e-invoices weigh heavily on it, too heavily within a single quarter for a stable result. Averaged across businesses, the share in 2026 is about 7 percent; across all invoices, about 4 percent.

Internal and test accounts are excluded. All values are shares; no published figure is based on fewer than 40 businesses. We do not publish absolute numbers. Our user base is more digitally inclined than average; the true e-invoice share is likely lower.

Legal sources: the German Federal Ministry of Finance's FAQ on e-invoicing, § 34a UStDV, and the BMF circular of October 15, 2025. How we handle data in general is documented in Methodology & data basis.

About this data

Norman is an accounting platform for self-employed people and small businesses in Germany; the anonymized documents analyzed here originate there. Charts and figures from this page may be reused freely with attribution to "Norman". Press inquiries and data requests: press@norman.finance.