Jordan VAT rate
Jordan does NOT levy a tax called VAT. Its VAT-equivalent is the General Sales Tax (الضريبة العامة على المبيعات), a credit-invoice consumption tax imposed by the General Sales Tax Law No. 6 of 1994 and its amendments and administered by the Income and Sales Tax Department (ISTD) of the Ministry of Finance. Article 6(a) charges the general tax at 16% on the supply or importation of goods and services by reference to the value of the supply or import; Article 6(b) separately charges a Special Tax (excise) at specific or ad valorem rates on the goods and services listed in Table (1). The 'vat' series id is used per the file spec — the correct instrument name is General Sales Tax.
| Current value | 16 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2010-01-01 |
| Official source | Income and Sales Tax Department (ISTD), 'The General Sales Tax Law No. (6) of 1994 and its Amendments' (consolidated English text, 2023 edition), Article 6(a): 'A general tax shall be charged under this Law at the rate of 16 per cent on the supply or importation of goods or services, by reference to the value of the supply or import of these goods and services.' |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
ACCESS PROBLEM — READ THIS BEFORE POINTING A WATCHER AT THE SOURCE: istd.gov.jo is NOT reachable from this location. https://istd.gov.jo and https://www.istd.gov.jo return ECONNREFUSED over the fetch path and time out (exit 28) over curl, on both http and https, and a browser-pane load was refused. The same is true of mol.gov.jo, mof.gov.jo, pm.gov.jo, customs.gov.jo and jordan.gov.jo — most .gov.jo hosts appear to refuse non-Jordanian traffic. Reachable Jordanian official hosts are cbj.gov.jo, dosweb.dos.gov.jo, petra.gov.jo, ssc.gov.jo and lob.gov.jo. The 16% text quoted above was read from the Internet Archive snapshot of the ISTD's own PDF taken 5 August 2025 (http://web.archive.org/web/20250805163652/https://www.istd.gov.jo/ebv4.0/root_storage/en/eb_list_page/general_sales_tax_law_and_its_amendments_2023-1.pdf) and independently confirmed in the ISTD's older consolidated English text of the Amended General Sales Tax Law No. 29 of 2009 (archived gst_law.pdf), whose Article 6 carries the identical 16% wording. EFFECTIVE DATE: 2010-01-01 is the commencement of Law No. 29 of 2009 ('this Law ... shall take effect from the date of 1/1/2010'), the consolidation that re-enacted Article 6 at 16%. The 16% rate itself is OLDER than that consolidation — the WTO Secretariat's 2008 Trade Policy Review of Jordan already records 'The standard GST rate is 16%' (WT/TPR/S/206) — but the amending instrument that first set 16% (understood to be among the 2004 amendments, Laws No. 5 and No. 32 of 2004) could not be verified from a reachable Jordanian primary source, so the older date is not served. The rate has not moved since: the WTO Secretariat's 2023 review states 'The standard GST rate remains at 16% for most goods and services' (WT/TPR/S/446, 23 Aug 2023, https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/tpr_e/s446_e.pdf). REDUCED AND NIL RATES (Article 7 and the annexed Tables, set by Cabinet regulation, so they move without a change to the headline): Table (2) goods and exports are ZERO-RATED — exports, supplies to free zones, cities and duty-free shops, and supplies to bodies relieved under Article 21; Table (3) goods and services are EXEMPT (no input credit) — including basic foods, dairy, agricultural inputs and certain financial services. Reduced positive rates of 1%, 2%, 4%, 5% and 10% apply to specified schedules; the WTO 2023 review records agricultural inputs and machinery zero-rated (76 products as of 2020, up from 58 in 2017), a 2% or 4% reduced rate on specified items, 5% on processed food, table-egg feed cut from 8% to 4% in 2020, confectionery cut from 16% to 5% effective 27 March 2022, and a Cabinet cut of 61 essential commodities to 4%. A SEPARATE 24% figure that is often mis-cited as a GST rate is not one: it is the Special Tax (Article 6(b), Table 1) on certain telecommunications services. GST is more than 75% of the tax the Kingdom collects at the border. E-COMMERCE: the ISTD opened a non-resident registration route for foreign suppliers of digital, electronic, broadcast and telecoms services from the start of 2024; that is an administrative regime for collecting the same 16%, not a separate rate. Re-verify Article 6 against istd.gov.jo directly if the host ever becomes reachable — the Arabic text prevails over the ISTD's English translation.
Get it programmatically
curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/jo/vat
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/jo/vat/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/jo/vatOther Jordan series: policy interest rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates