The Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority announced the twenty-fifth wave of the e-invoicing Integration Phase in July 2026, and it is the one that changes the shape of the programme. Every wave until now has worked its way down through larger businesses. This one reaches most of the rest.
The number, and the window
The criterion is VAT-taxable revenue above SAR 187,500 in any one of 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025. Taxpayers who meet it must integrate their e-invoicing solution with the Fatoora platform by 1 February 2027.
Two details in that sentence do more work than they appear to.
The first is that the threshold is half of Wave 24's SAR 375,000. It is also the same figure as the voluntary VAT registration threshold, which tells you where this is heading: e-invoicing integration and VAT registration are converging on the same population.
The second is the phrase any one. It is not last year's revenue, and it is not an average. If 2022 was a strong year and the three since have been quiet, you are still in scope. We have already had this conversation with clients who assumed a slow current year kept them out. It does not.
What "integration" actually means
Phase 1 — Generation, live since December 2021 — asked for a structured electronic invoice with a QR code. Most businesses met it by changing a setting in whatever they were already using.
Phase 2 — Integration — is a different animal. Your system has to:
- generate the invoice as XML in ZATCA's required format
- apply a cryptographic stamp and a UUID
- for standard invoices, business to business, obtain clearance from Fatoora before you hand the invoice to the customer
- for simplified invoices, business to consumer, report them to Fatoora afterwards
- store the whole thing so it can be produced later
That third point is the one that catches people. A cleared invoice is not a document you print and file. It is a document that must make a round trip to a government platform, in real time, and come back stamped. If your billing runs on a spreadsheet, or on software written before 2021, or on a system whose vendor has gone quiet, it will not do this.
The grace period is not a reprieve
ZATCA extended its fines-and-penalties cancellation initiative a second time, to 31 December 2026. That initiative is genuinely useful — it lets taxpayers regularise unfiled returns and unpaid principal without the penalties — but it is being widely misread as a delay to the e-invoicing deadlines. It is not. Wave 25's integration date of 1 February 2027 sits after the amnesty ends.
The practical reading: the amnesty is your window to clean up whatever is behind you. The wave deadline is a separate clock for what is ahead.
Six months' notice is less than it sounds
ZATCA notifies taxpayers in each wave at least six months before their integration date. Six months is comfortable if your system is already capable and you need to switch on a connection. It is tight if you have to select software, migrate your products and customers into it, train the counter staff, and run parallel for a month before go-live.
We would rather start that conversation when the notification arrives than three weeks before the date.
What to do now
Check your own numbers first. Pull VAT-taxable revenue for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. If any one of them clears SAR 187,500, plan for 1 February 2027 whether or not a notification has arrived.
Ask your software vendor a direct question. Not "are you ZATCA compliant" — everyone says yes. Ask: does your system obtain clearance from Fatoora for standard invoices, and report simplified invoices, on my own tenant, today? A vendor who answers that clearly is fine. A vendor who talks about QR codes is describing Phase 1.
Do not wait for a penalty to reveal the gap. The cost of finding out late is not only the fine. It is that a non-compliant invoice can be disputed by the customer who received it, and by the time you discover that, you have issued a few hundred of them.
If you would like us to check which wave you fall into and what your current system can actually do, send us your commercial registration number and the name of your billing software. That check takes us a day and costs nothing.
Thresholds and dates in this article are as announced by ZATCA and were correct when it was written. Confirm your own position against the Fatoora platform or with us before acting on it.
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