Bulgaria's euro switch and your company: what actually changed

Invoices since 1 January 2026: euro only

Since 1 January 2026, Bulgaria has been part of the eurozone and the euro is the country's official currency. The lev was converted at a fixed, irrevocable rate: 1 euro equals 1.95583 lev. That rate does not move and is not negotiable, it is the same for everyone, permanently.

For your company, this has one concrete consequence: documents under Article 112 of the VAT Act, meaning invoices, credit notes and debit notes, are issued only in euro from that date onward. You do not need to show a lev equivalent on the invoice itself, even if the deal was originally agreed in another currency.

• Every invoice issued on or after 1 January 2026 is in euro.
• No lev line is required on the invoice, unless you want one for your own reasons.
• If you use invoicing software, confirm it switched to euro automatically. Manual currency errors were the most common early-2026 mistake.

If your company is VAT-registered (the tax charged on sales and reclaimed on purchases), your returns to NAP, Bulgaria's National Revenue Agency, are also filed in euro for periods after 1 January 2026. FreeMe.bg handles this switch automatically, so you are not the one recalculating anything by hand.

Dual pricing: mandatory until 8 August 2026

Separate from invoicing sits another obligation that mostly concerns customer-facing prices: dual price display. It comes from the Law on the Introduction of the Euro in the Republic of Bulgaria, and it is a different rule from the one covering invoices. Its purpose is to let consumers get used to euro prices and to prevent hidden price hikes during the switch.

• The mandatory dual-display window runs from 8 August 2025 to 8 August 2026, so it spans time both before and after the actual currency change.
• It covers consumer-facing prices: price lists, menus, catalogues, shop shelves, and websites that show prices.
• Between 8 August and 8 October 2025 there was a grace period during which inspectors issued corrections rather than fines. That window has already closed, but it is worth knowing about if you come across older material on the topic.
• A price list showing only lev, or only a lev-derived figure, no longer meets the requirement. Both currencies need to be visible at once until 8 August 2026.

One clarification worth keeping in mind: this rule is about what the customer sees, not about internal accounting documents. Your invoice is in euro (see above), but the shelf price or menu still needs to show both currencies until the window closes.

January 2026: the one month both currencies changed hands

If you missed the start of the year, or simply want to understand what happened, here it is: during the first month after the euro's introduction, all of January 2026, Bulgaria had a period of dual cash circulation.

• During that month, customers could pay in cash with either lev or euro.
• Change, however, was given only in euro, a deliberate design meant to pull lev banknotes and coins out of circulation faster.
• For a cash-handling business (a shop, a restaurant, an on-site service), this meant a till holding two currencies for a short stretch, and staff trained to make change correctly.
• That period is now over. As of writing, cash payments in Bulgaria are entirely in euro.

If you run a company from abroad and were not following this closely at the time, the good news is that this transition month is already behind us and requires no action from you now.

Bank accounts: automatic and free of charge

This is one of the more reassuring parts of the whole switch: there was nothing you needed to do with the company's accounts.

• On 1 January 2026, every lev-denominated bank account, including company accounts, was converted to euro automatically at the fixed rate of 1.95583, with no fees and no commissions.
• You did not need to file anything, visit a branch, or move funds anywhere.
• If you still hold lev in cash, banknotes or coins, commercial banks exchanged it free of charge from 1 January through 30 June 2026. At the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), the country's central bank, that exchange remains free with no time limit and no quantity cap, even after that date.
• Interest rates and terms on the company's loans and deposits were converted at the same fixed rate, with no change to the real value of what is owed or saved.

In other words, the banking side of the transition was designed to pass you by, aside from the new balance showing up in euro.

Old records stay in lev. Nothing gets recalculated

This is the point that reassures most owners once they have heard everything else: accounting documents dated before 1 January 2026 are left alone.

• Invoices, VAT ledgers, annual returns and any accounting entries relating to periods before 2026 stay in the currency they were created in, almost always lev.
• There is no obligation, and no mechanism, to retroactively convert old documents into euro.
• If you file the 2025 annual tax return during 2026, the return itself and its supporting documents stay in lev, even though the filing process now happens inside the eurozone.
• Only new documents issued from 1 January 2026 onward switch to euro (see the first section above).

The practical takeaway: you do not need to rework your archive, reissue old invoices, or ask your accountant to convert 2023 into euro. The line is a single date, and it is a clean one.

What is actually left to do

To sum up: invoices have run in euro since 1 January 2026, customer-facing prices show both currencies until 8 August 2026, bank accounts converted themselves, and anything issued before 2026 stays in lev permanently. You do not need to memorize any of this, the hard part is already behind you.

If you still want the system you invoice and file taxes through to move in step with this transition, FreeMe.bg switched currencies automatically, keeping old lev documents and new euro ones correctly formatted in the same archive.

Useful next reads:

What invoicing looks like with FreeMe.bg
How VAT and tax filing will work with FreeMe.bg
Invoicing to the EU: what you need to know

Log in with your Google account and let FreeMe.bg track the currency, the deadlines, and the company archive, so you can run the business instead of doing conversions.