How to invoice US clients from Spain: 2026 guide

You land a US client. The scope is clear, the rate is good, and then the first invoice sits half-finished on your screen because you are not sure what to put in the VAT field.

Short answer: nothing. A Spain-based freelancer or company billing a US-based client for a service is providing a service that is out of scope of Spanish VAT under the place-of-supply rule. No Spanish IVA applies. This guide covers what actually goes on the invoice, why a W-8BEN form might land in your inbox, how to handle getting paid in dollars, and what you still owe the Spanish tax authorities even without a VAT line.

Do you charge Spanish VAT to a US client?

No — with one condition attached. Spanish VAT (IVA) rules decide where a service is “located” for tax purposes, not where the person providing it happens to sit. For business-to-business services sold to a client established outside the EU, the service is located where the client is (art. 69.Uno.1º LIVA). The US client’s location, not yours, sets the tax treatment.

That means the operation falls outside the scope of Spanish VAT. You do not add 21% general IVA, you do not add IGIC if you bill from the Canary Islands, and you do not apply the reduced rates either. The invoice goes out at the net amount, full stop.

This applies to consulting, software development, design, marketing, coaching, SaaS subscriptions sold B2B, and most professional services. It is the same underlying logic that lets you invoice EU business clients without VAT under the reverse-charge mechanism — except with a non-EU client there is no reverse charge to mention, because the operation is not subject to EU VAT rules at all.

What “not subject to VAT” actually means on paper

Not subject to VAT is a different legal box than exempt from VAT. An exempt operation still lives inside the VAT system with a specific exemption article. A non-subject operation sits outside the system entirely because the location rule sends it there. The distinction matters because the wording on your invoice and the box you use on your quarterly VAT return are different for each.

For a US client, you are almost always in the “not subject” category, because the export-of-services location rule takes the operation out of Spanish VAT territory before any exemption question comes up.

What your invoice must say instead of an IVA line

A correct invoice to a US client needs the same mandatory fields as any Spanish invoice: your fiscal name and NIF, the client’s name and tax ID, invoice number, dates, description, and net amount (Reglamento de facturación, RD 1619/2012, art. 6). The difference is the VAT section.

Instead of a VAT percentage and amount, write a clear statement of the legal basis:

• “Operación no sujeta al IVA, art. 69.Uno.1º LIVA — servicio localizado fuera de la Unión Europea.”
• In English, for the client’s benefit: “VAT not applicable — service supplied outside the EU.”

Do not leave the VAT field blank with no explanation. An invoice that just skips VAT without a stated reason is the kind of detail that trips up an audit later, even though the underlying operation was correct. State the reason every time — it costs one line.

Client type	IVA on invoice	Legal basis to cite
Spanish business client	Standard IVA (21% general, or IGIC if Canary Islands)	Normal domestic rule
EU business client, VAT-registered	0%, reverse charge	Reverse charge mechanism, intra-EU rule
US business client	0%, not subject	Export of services, location outside EU (art. 69.Uno.1º LIVA)
US private individual (some digital services)	Depends on service type	Check the specific B2C case before invoicing

The W-8BEN form: why your US client is asking for it

If your US client’s finance team is doing things properly, they will send you a W-8BEN (individual) or W-8BEN-E (entity) before the first payment goes out. Do not confuse this with a Spanish document — it belongs entirely to the US tax system.

The form exists so a US payer can document that the person or company they are paying is a foreign taxpayer, not a US one. Without it on file, US withholding rules can default to treating the payment as subject to withholding. Filling it out correctly — your name, country of tax residence (Spain), and your Spanish NIF where requested — lets the client pay you the full invoiced amount rather than withholding US tax at source. The precise US withholding treatment, and any relief under the US–Spain tax treaty, depend on the form’s own instructions — confirm those with the client’s finance team or a US tax advisor if the question comes up on their side.

A few things the W-8BEN does not do:

• It does not register you with the Spanish tax authorities in any way.
• It does not replace your Spanish invoice or your IRPF declaration.
• It is not renewed every invoice — clients typically ask for it once, and again only when it eventually expires.

Getting paid in USD: exchange rate and FX costs

You can invoice a US client in USD, EUR, or technically any currency you both agree on. Most freelancers invoice in USD because that is how the client thinks about the budget and how their payment systems are set up. Nothing in Spanish law requires the invoice to be in euros.

What changes is the accounting step on your side. For your Spanish records — your income ledger, your quarterly IRPF calculation, your annual return — the amount needs to be expressed in euros. The standard approach is to convert using the European Central Bank reference exchange rate on the date the operation accrues (normally the invoice date), and to record that rate alongside the original USD figure.

A worked example:

You invoice a US client $3,500 for a month of consulting work, invoice dated March 10. The ECB reference rate that day is, say, 1 USD = 0.92 EUR. Your Spanish accounting records the operation at €3,220. That euro figure — not the dollar figure — is what flows into your quarterly IRPF payment on account and your VAT-exempt operations total.

Two costs sit outside the exchange rate itself and are easy to miss:

• Bank or platform conversion spread. Whoever converts the dollars to euros — your bank, PayPal, Wise, Stripe — takes a margin on top of the market rate. That spread is a real cost, worth comparing across providers if US clients are a recurring part of your business.
• Payment processing fees. International wires and some payment platforms charge a flat fee or percentage separate from the FX spread. Factor both into what you actually quote, especially on smaller invoices where a $30 wire fee eats a real percentage of the total.

Do you still have to declare this income?

Yes, in full. This is the point that trips people up: no VAT on the invoice does not mean no tax on the income. IVA and IRPF are two separate systems, and only the first one is affected by the export-of-services rule.

The euro-converted amount of every US invoice:

• For a Spain-based autónomo in estimación directa, it counts toward the quarterly IRPF payment on account (modelo 130) alongside your domestic income, and toward your annual Renta as part of your total business income. A company (SL) does not use modelo 130 or Renta — it declares the income through Impuesto sobre Sociedades (pagos fraccionados via modelo 202, annual return via modelo 200).
• Does not go on modelo 349 (recapitulative statement of intra-EU operations) — that form exists specifically for transactions with other EU member states. The US is a third country, so 349 does not apply here.
• Does show up in your VAT return, modelo 303, in the información adicional section — casilla 120, “operaciones no sujetas por reglas de localización” (the old casilla 61 was split into casillas 120–124 in 2021). It is not in the taxable-base boxes, but it is not invisible to the return either.

Common mistakes when invoicing US clients

Applying IVA anyway, “just to be safe.” It is not safer — it is wrong, and it means either overcharging the client or having to issue a correcting invoice later.

Applying IRPF retención. As covered above, this only applies between Spanish professionals and Spanish payers. A US client is not a Spanish payer.

Forgetting the legal basis on the invoice. An invoice with a blank or missing VAT field, no explanatory line, looks like an error rather than a deliberate export operation. One sentence fixes it.

Skipping modelo 130 on the income because “there’s no IVA involved.” IVA and IRPF are unrelated for this purpose. The money is taxable income regardless of the VAT treatment.

Treating W-8BEN as a Spanish tax document. It changes nothing about what you owe in Spain. It only affects US withholding on the client’s side.

Ignoring the FX spread when quoting rates. If you price a project at a round number in USD without accounting for conversion costs, the euros that actually land in your account can be meaningfully lower than expected.

How Frihet handles this

Multi-currency invoicing is built in — you can invoice a US client in USD while your dashboard shows the euro-converted figures, using exchange rate data so you are not doing manual ECB lookups on every invoice. The system supports 170+ currencies for exactly this kind of cross-border client mix.

Beyond currencies, Frihet handles Spanish invoicing with the IVA, IGIC and IRPF treatment your operations need, including VeriFactu. OCR-based expense capture, a real-time financial dashboard, a public API, and an MCP server for AI-driven workflows sit on top of the same engine, all inside the free tier.

Billing a US client should not mean opening a second tool just to get the VAT field right.