VAT starts at 100,000 lari of turnover — and the reverse charge can reach you before that

Registration becomes mandatory once taxable turnover passes 100,000 lari in any rolling twelve-month period — not a calendar year, which is the detail that catches people. A single transaction above that amount triggers it on its own. Andersen's guide, written against the law as it stood in August 2025, puts the filing window at two business days from the moment you cross. The standard rate is 18%, and once registered you file and pay by the 15th of the following month.

When a non-resident supplies a service consumed in Georgia, the duty to account for 18% VAT shifts to the Georgian recipient. Legalese's 2026 guide names the obvious cases directly: social media advertising and digital services bought from foreign providers such as Meta and Google. So a guesthouse spending a few hundred dollars a month on Facebook ads, or an agency paying for foreign software and listing fees, can be sitting on a VAT obligation while its own turnover is nowhere near the threshold.

A private owner letting one flat and paying the 5% tax on residential rent is in a different regime and is not thereby a VAT payer. The threshold counts taxable supplies, and certain exempt transactions are excluded from the calculation — though Andersen notes the exclusion falls away where exempt activity is the main business, where goods are exported, or where a specific provision in the tax code applies. This is precisely the kind of boundary where a paid hour with an accountant is cheaper than a guess.

Keep a rolling twelve-month total of your taxable turnover rather than a year-to-date one, so you can see the threshold coming instead of discovering you crossed it in March. And keep every invoice from a foreign supplier of services in one place, because those are the documents a reverse-charge question turns on. Both habits cost nothing and remove the two most common ways a small operator here ends up filing late.