- Short answer
- It depends on your country and tax number — and Shopify taxes your subscription and your Shopify Payments fees under separate rules.
- Two regimes, not one
- Your subscription bill and your Shopify Payments processing fees are documented on different pages, under different rules
- Not your customers' tax
- This is tax on what Shopify bills you, not the sales tax you collect from shoppers
- Ireland is the named exception
- Irish stores are charged VAT on relevant Shopify fees, and reverse charge is documented as excluding Ireland
- Where Shopify is silent
- No page we read on 11 August 2026 states a subscription tax rate for European stores outside Ireland and Switzerland
- Adding a tax number
- Where Shopify documents an exemption (ABN, IRD, GSTIN), it applies only to invoices issued after you add the number
Two taxes on your Shopify charges — and neither is your customers' sales tax
Shopify charges you in two places and documents the tax on each in a different set of pages. One is your subscription — the plan fee and what is billed alongside it, such as shipping labels. The other is the processing fee Shopify Payments keeps from each sale. The two lists of taxed places are not the same, which is why a tax line on one charge can be missing from the next.
Neither is the sales tax, VAT or GST you charge your own customers — that has its own owner: whether Shopify files sales tax for you. This page is only about the tax Shopify adds to what it bills you.
When Shopify taxes your subscription
On the plan fee, the deciding fact is where your business sits, not what you sell. For the US and Canada, Shopify says it determines the taxes charged on your invoices based on your store's billing address, and that where your business is in a jurisdiction in which Shopify has a business presence, it is required by law to charge applicable taxes on your subscription.
One exemption merchants often ask for is ruled out in writing on the US and Canada billing page: Shopify states that resale exemptions do not apply to Shopify subscriptions, because you are using the service to run your business rather than reselling the service itself. Shopify publishes a separate billing-tax page for each group of regions it covers, and its hub page lists them all. The region-by-region breakdown, with the reclaim question for each, sits in one section of our Shopify billing guide.
When Shopify taxes your Shopify Payments fees
Processing fees run on their own short list of places, and it is not the list from the section above. Shopify names it directly:
When using Shopify Payments and operating your business from Switzerland, the European Union, Australia, or Singapore, taxes are added on processing fees.
The wording matters more than the list, because each page names a different object. In Australia the tax sits on top of the fee rather than inside it, so the fee figure alone understates what processing costs there, and the monthly invoice carries the GST total. Ireland and Switzerland are additionally charged, on the billing side, on "your relevant Shopify fees" — Shopify's qualifier, and one this page will not stretch into "everything you pay Shopify". The fees themselves are the subject of our Shopify Payments guide.
Find your country: which Shopify charge carries tax, and what lands on the bill
| Where your store is based | What the Shopify page says is taxed | What lands on the bill |
|---|---|---|
| Australia | “on top of all Shopify Payments processing fees” | GST at 10%, and the GST amount is not included within the processing fee |
| Australia, the other bill | “your Shopify subscription and any shipping labels” | A separate 10% GST that follows the billing rules, not the processing-fee ones |
| Ireland · Switzerland | “your relevant Shopify fees”, on the billing side | 23% VAT in Ireland, and the 7.7% that Shopify's page names for Switzerland. The qualifier is Shopify's own; the page does not say every fee |
| The rest of the EU | Nothing named for the subscription | Shopify requires a VAT number or a declaration that you have none; that page publishes no rate for them |
| Europe, excluding Ireland | Shopify Payments fees | No VAT inside the fee: they “don't include Value-Added Tax” |
Shopify Help Center billing and Shopify Payments tax pages. Read 11 August 2026.
Reverse charge in the UK and EU, tax numbers, and the Ireland exception
For processing fees in Britain and most of the EU, the tax does exist — at zero, with the paperwork moved onto you:
In the United Kingdom and within the European Union, excluding Ireland, a 0% tax rate, termed as a reverse-charge, is applicable. This means that you need to maintain records of your tax data, such as VAT, independently.
Ireland is excluded by name, in that sentence and again on the billing side, where an Irish store is charged 23% VAT on its relevant Shopify fees. Shopify states that step for European stores generally, and as an obligation: you need to either provide a VAT number or indicate that you don't have one — and for stores outside Ireland and Switzerland the billing page stops there and names no subscription rate. Elsewhere the same idea carries a local document — an ABN in Australia, an IRD number in New Zealand, a GSTIN in India, a 13-digit Tax ID in Thailand, a 10-digit Tax Identification Number in Türkiye.
What Shopify does not publish — and where your own numbers are
Three gaps are worth naming, and all three come from one reading of four of Shopify's regional billing-tax pages, their hub, and the Shopify Payments pay-periods page — read on 11 August 2026. No page we read there applies the term reverse charge to a subscription; in what we read, it appears only about processing fees. None of them states a subscription tax rate for a European store outside Ireland and Switzerland. And the US and Canada billing page does not describe processing-fee tax at all, which is why an answer about one bill does not settle the other.
Whether a charge you have paid can be reclaimed or credited is a question for your own tax authority and your accountant: Shopify applies the tax, it does not decide your position on it. Your own figures are already itemised — Shopify's Australian and German payout pages each say a Shopify Payments invoice generates for any month with transactions; the Australian page names a GST column for Australian merchants in the transactions CSV, and the German page a VAT column for European ones. Getting those lines into the books is covered in our Shopify accounting guide.
This article was written entirely by AI under human editorial direction. The editor sets the topic and structure, runs multi-stage validation on facts, links, and interactive elements, and verifies the output is useful from a business perspective. All claims are checked against official Shopify sources. Details may change — always confirm critical data at shopify.com.
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