Vintro Pro
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Vintro Pro
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Yes — antiques are named in the rules, in all four countries. What decides it is not the piece on your shelf but the invoice you bought it on.
Yes, antiques qualify. What decides it is not the piece, but how you bought it.
A margin scheme is not just for second-hand goods. GOV.UK names four things in one breath: second-hand goods, works of art, antiques and collectors’ items. Antiques are in there by name, so a chest of drawers from 1890 is never the problem.
The problem is the invoice. Under HMRC’s rules you cannot use a margin scheme for any item you bought for which you were charged VAT. And since 1 January 2025, dealers across the Channel face a narrower version of the same idea: in the EU, art, collectors’ items and antiques bought at a reduced VAT rate are shut out of the margin scheme altogether.
A reduced rate on purchase or import rules out the margin. Law of 19 December 2025.
The additional margin scheme for purchases at 9% VAT ended on 1 January 2025.
Article 297 B of the CGI was repealed. The option no longer exists.
No reduced-rate rule, but a wider one: charged VAT on the purchase? No margin scheme.
Four countries, four percentages, one idea underneath: VAT paid on the way in means no margin scheme on the way out. The UK got there first and by a different route, with a broader rule that has nothing to do with reduced rates.
The margin scheme is optional and you choose it per item. You pay VAT at 16.67% (one-sixth) on the difference between the price you paid and the price you sold it for.
HMRC’s own worked example: buy a work of art for £1,500, sell it for £2,000, and you pay 16.67% on the £500 difference. On an antique bought for £400 and sold for £900, the margin is £500 and the VAT due is £83.33.
Three things are excluded outright:
You do not show VAT on the invoice to your customer, and they cannot reclaim any. If you hold a lot of low-value stock, global accounting is the lighter version of the same scheme — more on that on the page about the UK margin scheme.
Age, not style. For customs purposes the category carries code 9706 and covers objects more than one hundred years old. In Belgium the same line is drawn in Table A, heading XXI of Royal Decree no. 20.
Under a UK margin scheme that distinction changes little — both are eligible. It matters when you buy or sell inside the EU, because the 2025 change applies only to art, collectors’ items and antiques, not to ordinary second-hand goods.
Directive (EU) 2022/542 rewrote article 316 of the VAT directive. The new text opens with a condition that was not there before:
“Where no reduced rate has been applied to the works of art, collectors’ items and antiques concerned supplied to, or imported by, a taxable dealer, Member States shall grant taxable dealers the right to opt for application of the margin scheme.”
The same directive added article 98a: reduced rates do not apply to supplies of art, collectors’ items and antiques that are sold under a margin scheme. The two now exclude each other, and member states had to apply this from 1 January 2025.
How each country landed:
None of this binds a UK dealer directly. It binds your EU customers, which is a different thing from irrelevant.
The same chest of drawers, two ways of entering stock. The difference is in the invoice, not the piece.
You buy an oak chest from 1890 for £400 at a house clearance and sell it for £900. No VAT was charged to you, so the margin scheme is open.
The margin scheme is closed for that piece. You sell under the normal rules: VAT on the full selling price, with the VAT you were charged recoverable as input tax.
That is not automatically worse, but it is a different calculation, and it turns on how wide your margin is. Work it out before you buy, not once the piece is on the shop floor.
Under four different regimes, three things come back everywhere.
Four countries, one idea. What differs is which VAT counts and at what rate, not the thinking behind it.
Purchase, sale and margin per item. The UK asks for a stock book; the Netherlands adds a purchase declaration from €500 up.
A margin sale shows one amount, no rate and no VAT figure. Your customer cannot reclaim anything, and that is correct.
The purchase invoice settles the scheme. Thinking about it at the till means the choice was already made without you.
That piece can never go into a margin scheme, however it is described on the sales invoice.
An antique is over one hundred years old. Below that it is an ordinary second-hand good — still eligible here, but treated differently inside the EU.
Without a per-item record of what you paid and what you sold it for, the margin cannot be shown and cannot be defended.
It hands your customer a deduction they are not entitled to, and hands you the problem.
Written on 8 September 2026. Checked on 8 September 2026. United Kingdom: HMRC, VAT margin schemes on gov.uk. European Union: Directive 2006/112/EC, article 316, as amended by Directive (EU) 2022/542, to be applied from 1 January 2025. Belgium: law of 19 December 2025 (Belgian Official Gazette of 31 December 2025), circular 2026/C/14 of 13 January 2026, article 58 §4 of the VAT code. Netherlands: Ondernemersplein, the Dutch government business portal. France: BOFiP BOI-TVA-SECT-90-40, § 80, and articles 297 A and 297 B of the CGI. The Belgian tax authority general explainer page on the margin scheme had not been updated — checked on 8 September 2026; the circular itself is on Fisconetplus — checked on 10 September 2026.
This is an explanation, not legal or tax advice. Which scheme applies to your purchases depends on your invoices, and those differ from piece to piece.
You set it once, at the purchase: margin scheme or normal rules. Vintro Pro works out the VAT per period and keeps the two apart, without a second list to maintain.
Free up to 10 pieces, no card details and no end date.
Yes. GOV.UK is explicit: you can choose to use a margin scheme when you sell second-hand goods, works of art, antiques and collectors' items. The scheme charges VAT at 16.67% (one-sixth) on the difference between what you paid and what you sold it for. The condition that trips dealers up is the other way round: you cannot use a margin scheme for any item you bought for which you were charged VAT.
One-sixth of the margin. If you buy a piece for £400 and sell it for £900, the difference is £500 and the VAT due is £83.33. You do not charge VAT on the invoice to your customer, and they cannot reclaim any. The scheme is optional per item: for a piece you sell at little or no profit it saves you almost the whole VAT bill.
Three things are excluded outright: any item you bought for which you were charged VAT, precious metals and investment gold, and precious stones. That first exclusion is the one that catches dealers who buy from a VAT-registered trader selling under the normal rules rather than under a margin scheme.
For art, collectors' items and antiques, EU member states may no longer allow the margin scheme when the reseller acquired or imported the goods at a reduced VAT rate. Directive (EU) 2022/542 rewrote article 316 of the VAT directive to that effect, applicable from 1 January 2025. This is an EU rule: it binds dealers in Belgium, the Netherlands and France, not the UK.
Only when you trade into the EU or buy from a dealer who does. The UK is outside the EU and HMRC runs its own margin scheme, which has no reduced-rate rule. But a Belgian, Dutch or French dealer buying from you now has to check whether a reduced rate was applied on their side, so the question will reach you through your customers before it reaches you through HMRC.