Finance exports Tuesday's UK invoices from the EU warehouse, and two carts over £135 have no VAT line while the £90 order from the same morning still shows 20%.
Nobody touched Settings, Taxes, or Locations, yet the invoices changed anyway.
From 29 September 2026, Shopify Tax works out VAT on orders over £135 to Great Britain from the fulfilment location assigned to the order. The store address in General settings and any UK location that never receives the order play no part.
I call this the postmark rule: a parcel's postmark shows the town it left from, whatever return address you wrote on the back, and Shopify Tax now reads that postmark.
Treat what follows as a settings checklist. Confirm filing, EORI, and importer-of-record duties with your accountant before you change a live rate.
Introduction
This article teaches the postmark walk after the 29 September 2026 Shopify Tax change: list every EU-to-UK path, test both sides of £135, record whether VAT still posts when you are importer of record, and write one fallback. Recording duties, currency, shipping, and catalog gaps in each market before Black Friday ads go live belongs in Shopify Markets Black Friday Traps: Duties, Currency, and Catalog Gaps.
This piece stays on the tax engine. Fulfilment location, the £135 split, and the method you will use if the line is missing sit here.
The table holds the whole job. The sections after it show how you fill each column.
| Checklist row | What you record | Pass criterion | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| EU-to-UK shipping path | Origin location, order-routing rule, carrier, DDP or DAP | Every live path that can fulfil a UK order is named | Ops / 3PL |
| Importer of record | Who pays import VAT, and which UK VAT number sits on the invoice | IOR and registration match how the parcel actually moves | Finance / accountant |
| Test order at or under £135 | Checkout tax line, order tax line, VAT invoice | UK VAT posts at the expected rate on that path | Commerce |
| Test order over £135 | Checkout tax line, order tax line, VAT invoice | VAT posts when you are IOR, or the skip is written and accepted | Commerce / finance |
| Fallback tax method | Manual UK VAT, real UK pick location, or duties product | One engine owns the line, with a review date | Tech / finance |
| Next announced change | US return shipping fee tax from 23 October 2026 | Workaround reviewed so tax is not counted twice | Finance / returns |
Why £135 matters
The £135 split in UK law is older than this change. Consignments of £135 or less shipped into Great Britain from outside the UK are a point-of-sale VAT supply, so the seller charges VAT at checkout and remits it. Consignments over £135 are imports. VAT and duties then sit with the importer of record, unless you already collected them and will pay them on the parcel.
Everything on this sheet turns on who imports.
If you ship DDP from an EU warehouse and you are the importer of record, you still expect a 20% UK VAT line on carts over £135. You will pay that VAT as the importer, and you have already taken it from the buyer. Those are the merchants who watched the line vanish between two afternoon checkouts while every settings screen looked unchanged. If the buyer is the importer, a missing line on those carts can be correct, and the surprise arrives as a duty request on the doorstep.
Write down which model you run on each path before you call the checkout broken.
List every path that can ship to Great Britain
Start with the warehouse that picks the unit. Order routing, a 3PL app, or a staff override can send a UK cart to Stockholm, Poznań, or Tilburg even when a UK row exists in Locations.
Write one row per path that can ship to Great Britain this month. Note the origin location ID, whether it is active, whether it holds stock for the SKUs you advertise in the UK, and the routing rule that would choose it. Add the carrier and whether the label is DDP (you are importer of record) or DAP (the buyer meets customs). Northern Ireland follows different VAT rules from England, Scotland, and Wales, so keep it on separate rows if you sell there.
The ghost location catches the most stores. Plenty added a UK location in 2024 because an older help article said "add an active UK location". It still counts only if routing assigns the order there. Shopify's current tax-registration article says the store address is not a physical location for tax, and an unused UK row leaves the £135 import threshold in place. Treat a location that has never held stock and never shipped as a label in admin with no postmark behind it.
Print-on-demand and multi-warehouse apps add a second origin you will miss if you only export Locations. Place a cheap test SKU on each app location and see where the order lands. The list is finished when every UK sale from the last 30 days maps to a row.
Name the registration on each path
Record the UK VAT number that should appear on the invoice, the GB EORI if you import, and whether Managed Markets or a broker sits in the middle. Where it is available, Managed Markets makes Global-e the merchant of record for qualifying international orders. A UK or EU brand on ordinary Markets still owns the registration. Plan selection for Plus, checkout extensions, and B2B is a separate decision from this tax sheet, and it lives in Choosing the Right Shopify Plan.
Shopify Tax updates registrations you already connected and stays quiet when a new one is missing, so if finance cannot name the number on a path, fix that row before any test order.
Test both sides of £135
Use a development store or a staff-discounted live cart. Keep the same SKU, origin, and UK address on both sides of the threshold. One order at £90 and one at £180 is enough to see whether the engine still splits. Repeat the pair on every path, including the 3PL origin and any UK location you claim will pick UK demand.
Keep four records per order: the checkout tax line before payment, the order tax line in admin, the VAT invoice Shopify Tax generated if you use that feature, and the fulfilment location stamped on the order.
If checkout shows VAT and the order later does not, you are looking at a capture or edit problem in the order itself. If both are empty on the £180 cart and the location is the EU warehouse, the new logic is doing what the current help article describes.
Watch the country selector too. UK stores with tax-inclusive pricing and a 20% home rate have seen that estimate appear on a United States country choice until a full US address is entered, even when the US market is set to skip collection. A buyer who bounces on a padded total never reaches the fields that would clear it. Put that on the same sheet as a display row, and use How to Fix Shopify Checkout Abandonment When Your Funnel Looks Healthy when the drop is already in the funnel.
Run the tests in the week you ship. A Monday settings change is worthless if routing flipped the origin on Wednesday.
Write yes or no, with the location you saw
For each path and each side of £135, write yes or no. Add the fulfilment location ID you observed on the order. A useful row reads "£180 from Poznań to Manchester, IOR is us, VAT missing, location 38421", which tells finance far more than "taxes look fine in Settings".
Community reports after the change describe support first blaming a missing address on the ghost UK location. Support later confirmed a deliberate logic change. The expected impact was described as small, which is why many finance teams only found the gap on invoices two days later.
The pattern on your sheet tells you which problem you have: the same skip on every EU origin points to the product change, while one 3PL path skipping points to routing.
Then hold the sheet against how you file. If you are importer of record and you already remitted 20% on those invoices, every missing checkout line is import VAT paid from margin until a fallback is live. If you were never IOR, the missing line may match the law, and you still need doorstep-duty copy, HS codes, and a carrier that can collect. Keep Shopify Payments reserves and payout timing off this sheet, because a held payout after a chargeback review is a different finance job, covered in Shopify Payments Reserves: Does Upgrading to Plus Change Anything?.
Pick one fallback and one owner
There are three ways back, and each UK market should run on one engine only.
| Fallback | When it fits | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Assign UK orders to a real UK pick location | You hold UK stock and routing can send Great Britain orders there | A location with no stock or no routing rule leaves the VAT line missing |
| Manual UK VAT rates | You need the 20% line back this week while you are IOR from the EU | Leaves filing and importer paperwork with you, and fights Shopify Tax if both stay on |
| Collect duties and import taxes at checkout | You want duties and import tax on the same checkout, and you accept the fee | Shopify's considerations article says skip it when you only need UK VAT |
A real UK pick location is the setup the current help article describes for charging VAT on orders over £135 to Great Britain. Stock has to live there, and routing has to choose it. A location with no stock or no routing rule leaves the VAT line missing, and opening a warehouse to satisfy a tax engine is an operations decision that deserves its own review.
Manual UK VAT rates are the fast path. Merchants used them in the first week after the change, when they needed invoices to match DDP while shipping as IOR from the EU. Support has already called that path short-term, so write a review date on the day you switch it on. Manual rates leave filing and importer-of-record paperwork with you. Left running beside Shopify Tax on the same market, they buy you a month of double lines and silent skips.
The third is collect duties and import taxes at checkout. Support sometimes names it when the line goes missing. It collects duties as well as import tax and can add a transaction fee, and Shopify's own considerations article says to leave it off when you only need UK VAT. Use it only if you actually want duties at checkout.
Whichever you pick, name the person who can turn it off. A rate change without an owner becomes the next surprise.
One more dated change for the same sheet
From 23 October 2026, Shopify will calculate applicable tax on return shipping fees for US returns. Those fees may show $0 tax today. The change leaves restocking fees, handling fees, and return fees outside the United States where they are.
If a returns app, a 3PL invoice, or a finance export already adds tax on that fee, review the workaround so the new calculation does not sit on top of yours. Place one US return with a shipping fee after the cutover and keep the same four records.
Any shipping-profile or market edit can move a customer you were not watching. When you add a country or move a SKU between profiles, re-run the £90 and £180 pair on paths you already signed. Peak trading keeps moving during a quiet week, so fold this sheet into the dated gates in A Shopify Black Friday Readiness Checklist for Brands That Already Scale if those UK paths will take November traffic. Sign the walk only when every live EU-to-UK path has a recorded IOR, two test orders, a VAT yes or no, and one named fallback.
Conclusion
You can now list each EU-to-UK shipping path after the 29 September 2026 Shopify Tax change, place test orders above and below £135, record whether VAT still posts when you are importer of record, and write the fallback tax method. Check the postmark on every path first, because the tax now follows it.
If the sheet still disagrees after a week, because routing, a 3PL, and two tax products all claim the same invoice, a Shopify stack audit maps which setting owns the VAT line before the next export week. Theme work will not put 20% back on a cart the tax service has already classified as an import. For a wider discovery conversation, start from contact.
