Advance Corporate Tax Payments in Bulgaria: Who Owes What

What advance corporate tax installments actually are

Bulgarian corporate income tax is 10% of taxable profit, and by default you pay it once, by 30 June of the following year. Advance installments (авансови вноски) are the exception: some companies do not wait for the year to end, they pay the tax in instalments during the year it relates to.

The rules sit in Chapter 14 of the Corporate Income Tax Act (ЗКПО, or CITA), Articles 83 to 91. The important part: an advance installment is not calculated on profit you have already earned, but on your forecast taxable profit for the current year. You estimate what you will earn and you set the installment yourself, so the whole mechanism turns on how good your forecast is, not just on whether you paid on time.

The reconciliation happens at the end. The annual corporate tax is due by 30 June of the following year, after deducting the advance installments you already paid (Art. 93 CITA). If you paid in more than you turn out to owe, the difference sits with the National Revenue Agency (NRA) as overpaid tax and can be offset or refunded.

Who owes them: the 2026 thresholds in euro

Here is the good news for most foreign-owned Bulgarian companies. Whether you owe advance installments has nothing to do with your profit. It depends on your net sales revenue for the year before the previous one. For 2026 that means your 2024 turnover, not 2025.

• Up to €153,387.56 inclusive: no advance installments at all (Art. 83(2) CITA).
• €153,387.57 to €1,533,875.64: quarterly installments (Art. 85 CITA).
• Above €1,533,875.64: monthly installments (Art. 84 CITA).

The odd-looking figures are the old BGN 300,000 and BGN 3,000,000 thresholds converted at the fixed rate of €1 = BGN 1.95583 when Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026. Your 2024 statutory accounts are still in lev, so convert that turnover at the same rate before comparing it to the threshold.

One more exemption matters if you incorporated recently. Newly incorporated companies are exempt for two years: the year of incorporation and the year after. A company newly formed through a reorganisation under the Commerce Act, such as a merger or a spin-off, does not get that holiday. In practice, a founder who registered an EOOD in 2025 owes nothing here in 2026, and checks the threshold again only for 2027.

If you are below the threshold you may still make quarterly installments voluntarily (Art. 83(3) CITA). Worth considering if you expect a large annual tax bill and would rather spread it than pay it all on 30 June. A useful side effect: the Art. 89 interest described below does not apply to voluntary installments.

How much: the installment is based on a forecast

The formulas are short (Arts. 86 and 87 CITA):

• Monthly installment = forecast taxable profit / 12 x 10%
• Quarterly installment = forecast taxable profit / 4 x 10%

An example. A company on the quarterly regime forecasts €40,000 of taxable profit for 2026. Annual tax on that is €4,000, and the quarterly installment is 40,000 / 4 x 10% = €1,000. It pays three of those during the year, €3,000 in total, because there is no installment for the fourth quarter. The remainder is settled with the annual tax by 30 June 2027.

Forecast taxable profit is not the same as the profit you see in your management accounts. You start from the expected accounting result and adjust it for non-deductible expenses and the other tax adjustments in CITA. If your accountant handles the Bulgarian filings, agree this number with them in spring, not in December.

Filing: the Art. 87a declaration, 1 March to 15 April

Installments do not appear by themselves. Their type and amount are declared in an Art. 87a declaration, filed with the NRA between 1 March and 15 April of the same year. For 2026 that window is open right now and closes on 15 April 2026.

• It is filed electronically through the NRA portal with a qualified electronic signature, usually by your Bulgarian accountant.
• If you owe installments, the declaration is mandatory even if you forecast zero profit.
• If you owe none and do not want to pay voluntarily, you file nothing. Having no Art. 87a declaration on record is the normal state of affairs for a company under the threshold.

This is a separate filing from the annual tax return under Art. 92 CITA, which reports the year that has ended and is due by 30 June. Different deadlines, same spring, and easy to confuse if you are used to a single annual filing in your home country.

Payment deadlines through the year

The dates are fixed in Art. 90 CITA, not driven by your invoicing cycle:

• Quarterly: Q1 by 15 April, Q2 by 15 July, Q3 by 1 December. There is no installment for Q4.
• Monthly: January, February and March together by 15 April; April through November by the 15th of that month; December by 1 December.

Two details catch people out. First, 1 December, not 15 December, closes the year in both regimes: the last payment falls earlier than the monthly rhythm suggests. Second, there is no fourth-quarter installment, so a company on the quarterly regime pays three times a year, not four.

Miss a date and late-payment interest runs on the unpaid installment for the period of delay. That is separate from the Art. 89 interest below, and applies even if your forecast was accurate.

The autumn window: adjusting installments by 15 November

A forecast made in April rarely survives to November. CITA allows for that: an Art. 88 declaration lets you decrease or increase your advance installments when you conclude that the amounts already declared will differ from the annual tax actually due. The deadline is 15 November of the same year.

The sequencing matters. A decrease or increase applies after the declaration is filed. You cannot retroactively adjust an installment that was already due. That is why 15 November is not an arbitrary date: it sits just before the final installment on 1 December, so a revision can still reach it.

How founders actually use it:

• The year came in weaker than planned. Reduce the installments and stop parking cash with the NRA until 30 June next year.
• The year came in stronger than planned. Increase them and avoid the Art. 89 interest described next.

By November you have ten months of real numbers, which is exactly what April's forecast lacked. If you look closely at your Bulgarian company's figures only once mid-year, make it early November.

Art. 89 interest: the price of forecasting too low

Forecast a small profit, pay small installments, then report a much larger tax bill, and the law treats you as having held on to money that belonged to the budget. Art. 89 interest is not a penalty for a breach: it is the price of a forecast that was too low.

There is a 25% tolerance. Interest arises only when:

• on monthly installments: the annual corporate tax due exceeds the total of the declared monthly installments for the year by more than 25%;
• on quarterly installments: 75% of the annual corporate tax due exceeds the total of the declared quarterly installments by more than 25%.

Interest is charged only on the excess above the tolerance, per the formulas in Art. 89: A = B - (V + 0.25 x V) for monthly installments, and A = 0.75 x B - (V + 0.25 x V) for quarterly ones, where B is the annual corporate tax due and V is the total of the installments declared for the year.

Back to the example. Declared quarterly installments: €3,000. The tolerance covers 3,000 + 750 = €3,750, so an annual tax bill up to €5,000 attracts no interest at all. If the year turns out strong and the tax comes to €8,000, the amount carrying interest is 0.75 x 8,000 - 3,750 = €2,250.

Interest is set under the Act on Interest on Taxes, Fees and Other Similar State Receivables and runs for a fixed period, from 16 April to 31 December of the year in question. Since 1 January 2026 the statutory default rate is the European Central Bank's main refinancing operations rate plus 8 percentage points, roughly 10% a year for the first half of 2026. On €2,250 for about eight and a half months that is around €165. Survivable, but entirely avoidable: one Art. 88 declaration by 15 November would have removed it.

How FreeMe.bg helps

If you are under the threshold, your only job here is knowing it and checking once a year that you still are. If you are over it, your job is having a realistic profit forecast in April and another one in November. Both require looking at your company's numbers continuously, not once in June when the annual return is due.

That is what FreeMe.bg does: it tracks turnover and your taxable result in real time, files your returns, and tells you which deadlines are actually yours. Useful when you run a Bulgarian company from another time zone.

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And if a deadline is missed on our side, the fine is on us, not on you.