Bahrain VAT rate
Standard rate of value-added tax under Decree-Law No. (48) of 2018 regarding VAT, administered by the National Bureau for Revenue (NBR). Bahrain implemented VAT under the GCC Unified Agreement for VAT and is the only GCC state to have doubled its rate from the 5% treaty baseline.
| Current value | 10 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2022-01-01 |
| Official source | National Bureau for Revenue (NBR) — VAT FAQs, section 1 (General), Q1.1: 'VAT was introduced in the Kingdom of Bahrain on 1 January 2019 at a standard rate of 5% ... With effect from 1 January 2022, the standard rate of VAT has been amended to be 10%.' NBR page last updated 20 Jul 2026 |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
Standard rate 10%, in force since 1 January 2022 — the brief is correct and is confirmed verbatim by the NBR's own VAT FAQ, by the NBR homepage VAT calculator (which computes '10% VAT'), and by the Bahrain national portal (bahrain.bh): 'A standard rate of 10% Value Added Tax (VAT) has been applied in the Kingdom of Bahrain from 1 January 2022.' LEGISLATIVE CHAIN: the GCC Unified Agreement for VAT (Official Gazette No. 3387, 6 Oct 2018) commits members to a 5% standard rate; Bahrain enacted it as Decree-Law No. (48) of 2018, effective 1 January 2019 at 5%; the rate was doubled by Law No. (33) of 2021 amending the VAT Law, followed by NBR Chief Executive Decision No. (1) of 2021 on the procedures for implementing Article (4) of Law No. 33/2021 (transitional rules for contracts and supplies straddling 1 Jan 2022) — see https://www.nbr.gov.bh/laws_regulations/vat. The 10% is the STANDARD rate only: zero-rated and exempt categories exist under the VAT Executive Regulations (including a published list of basic food items not subject to VAT at the standard rate), and Bahrain operates a tourist VAT refund scheme. Do not confuse VAT with Bahrain's separate EXCISE tax on tobacco, energy drinks and soft drinks, which the NBR also administers. ACCESS NOTE for the source-watcher: nbr.gov.bh returns HTTP 403 to plain server-side fetchers (bot wall) — the pages above were read through a real browser session. The site is bilingual and defaults to Arabic; the English toggle is https://www.nbr.gov.bh/language/en, which switches the session and then serves the same paths in English. The FAQ answers are collapsed accordions, so a naive text scrape returns only the questions.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-01-01 | 5 | National Bureau for Revenue — VAT Law & Regulations page: De |
Get it programmatically
curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/bh/vat
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/bh/vat/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/bh/vatOther Bahrain series: policy interest rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates