fetch-vat-rates

A minimal library/script to fetch and parse VAT rates from the official Taxes in Europe Database.

Because having to apply for a third-party API key or hope for someone else to manually update a JSON file is, frankly, ridiculous.

The package exports an async function fetchVatRates() that resolves with an object containing:

• allRates: an array of all active VAT rates in all EU members, with category codes and decriptions.
• standardRates: a simple mapping of country code to VAT rate in percent, which is probably what you want.

import { fetchVatRates } from 'fetch-vat-rates';
const { allRates, standardRates } = await fetchVatRates();
console.log(standardRates.LV); // 21

The functions it calls in sequence are exported as well:

export async function fetchVatRates() {
    const xml = await fetchVatRateXml();
    const allRates = parseVatRateXml(xml);
    const standardRates = extractStandardRates(allRates);
    return { allRates, standardRates };
}

Command line usage

If you just need the file or want to use this outside of Node.js, you can install the package globally

npm install -g fetch-vat-rates

And run the included "binary" (it's not)

fetch-vat-rates > rates.json

It outputs the full JSON to stdout. There is no interface to speak of.

Important!

• This package does not include the actual data and will not be updated regularly unless something breaks.
• The WSDL call takes a few seconds, probably should cache this and/or put it in a cron job.
• Greece is EL in the data returned from the service. It's copied as GR in standardRates, but allRates are returned as is.

License

Public Domain or CC0