Meal voucher rule changes in Europe, 2025 to 2028

The calendar

Effective	Market	What changes	Who it affects
1 January 2023	Slovakia	Meal vouchers must be issued electronically, with a narrow exception where an electronic voucher cannot be used at or near the workplace	Issuers, employers
1 July 2024	Bulgaria	Transition from paper to electronic food vouchers completes, after a six month changeover	Issuers, employers, food retail
1 January 2025	Luxembourg	Paper cheques-repas can no longer be issued. The digital regime began a year earlier, alongside a face value rise from 10.80 to 15 EUR	Issuers, employers
1 December 2025	Hungary	Cold food in supermarkets becomes payable with a SZEP card, by government regulation, with an end date attached	Issuers, food retail, employees
1 January 2026	Bulgaria	Euro adopted. The 200 BGN monthly limit converts to 102.26 EUR without being raised, and the national quota is carried over unchanged	Employers, employees, issuers
1 September 2025	Italy	Commission an issuer may charge an accepting merchant capped at 5 percent, for newly issued vouchers	Issuers, food retail, hospitality
1 January 2026	Italy	The 5 percent cap applies across the whole market	Issuers, food retail, hospitality
1 January 2026	Italy	Tax exempt value of an electronic voucher rises from 8 to 10 EUR per day. Paper stays at 4 EUR	Employers, employees
1 January 2026	Belgium	Maximum meal voucher value of 10 EUR per working day, with the employer share capped at 8.91 EUR	Employers, issuers
1 January 2026	France	Employer contribution exempt up to 7.32 EUR per title	Employers
March 2026	Belgium	Payflip recognised as an official meal voucher issuer, the first new entrant in over a decade	Employers, competitors
17 March 2026	Italy	The competition authority opens investigation A578 into the market leader over alleged abuse of a dominant position	Issuers, food retail
30 April 2026	Hungary	The cold food window closes. From 1 May the SZEP card works only at hot kitchen catering establishments	Issuers, food retail, employees
1 October 2026	Romania	The 45 RON daily ceiling is reindexed under the mechanism in law 165/2018. The figure for the new semester was not published as at 22 September 2026	Employers, issuers
31 December 2026	France	The derogation allowing any food product to be bought with a titre-restaurant expires, unless Parliament adopts the June 2026 bill that extends it to 31 December 2027	Employees, food retail
1 January 2028 (bill)	France	End of paper issuance under bill n° 2892, filed on 9 June 2026 and still before Parliament. Paper titles issued for 2027 stay usable until the end of February 2028	Issuers, employers, food retail
1 January 2027 (draft)	Germany	The benefit in kind value of a meal rises to 4.70 EUR under the draft seventeenth amendment to the Sozialversicherungsentgeltverordnung, making a subsidised meal 7.80 EUR with the tax free supplement	Employers, issuers
Around 2028	European Union	The revised payment services rules take effect, keeping the limited network exclusion but narrowing it	Issuers

Hungary changed what the card buys, twice, in five months

Two of the dates above are the same instrument in the same country, switched on and then off. Cold food in supermarkets became payable with a SZEP card on 1 December 2025 and stopped on 30 April 2026. Nothing about the card changed on either date, and neither did the merchants. A regulation changed which of them were permitted.

It is the shortest illustration on this site of why acceptance scope belongs in a rule a programme can edit rather than in the product. Every other entry on this calendar is the same thing happening more slowly.

Paper is ending country by country, not all at once

The 2027 figures for most markets are not written yet. A separate page tracks which instrument decides each one and where it stands.

Four of the dates above are the same event in different places. Belgium finished with paper in 2016, Slovakia made electronic vouchers the rule in 2023, Bulgaria completed its changeover in mid 2024, Luxembourg stopped issuing paper at the end of 2024, and France has the same point in a bill, with paper issuance ending on 1 January 2028.

Read as a list they look like five national decisions. Read as a sequence they are one direction, and the countries still permitting paper are the exception rather than the norm. An issuer planning for a market that has not yet set a date is planning for a date that has not been announced, not for its absence.

Italy: what the 5 percent commission cap actually caps

The cap sits on the commission an issuing company charges a merchant that accepts its vouchers. It does not touch what the employer pays, and it does not touch the value the employee receives. Only the contractual relationship between issuer and shop changes.

The reason it happened is arithmetic. EuroCommerce put acceptance costs in Italy and Portugal at between 5 and 20 percent of sales value, against food retail margins of 1 to 3 percent. At the top of that range, accepting a voucher cost a supermarket more than the sale earned.

The rule arrived in stages. From 1 September 2025 it applied to newly issued vouchers, and vouchers issued under the old terms stayed valid to the end of that year. From 1 January 2026 it covers the market. Full detail is on the Italian rules page.

France: what happens to paper titres-restaurant

Paper is being retired by law on a set date, and the date has moved once. The June 2025 announcement targeted 1 January 2027. Bill n° 2892, filed on 9 June 2026, sets the end of paper issuance at 1 January 2028 and applies to titles issued for 2028 onwards; Parliament was due to take it up from September 2026. Paper titles issued for 2027 stay usable until the end of February 2028 under the normal validity rule.

The volume still to move is not trivial. According to the CNTR roughly 30 percent of titles were still on paper, even though about 80 percent of transactions already ran on a card or an app during 2025. Every French issuer therefore has a migration to run inside a fixed window, and any issuer without a card product has a bigger problem than a migration.

Two related changes landed alongside it: use on Sundays is now open to all employees, use in supermarkets is settled rather than temporary, and rebates paid back by issuers to employers are prohibited. The French rules page covers the acceptance mechanics.

Belgium: the ceiling and the fourth issuer

Belgium has been card only for a decade. Paper meal vouchers have not been issued since 2015 and have not been accepted since 2016, which makes it the cleanest example of a fully dematerialised scheme in Europe.

From 1 January 2026 the maximum voucher value is 10 EUR per working day, of which the employer may fund up to 8.91 EUR. Separately, in March 2026 the FOD Economie recognised Payflip as an official issuer, taking the register to five. That is the first new name in over a decade in a market that had settled into three.

Does the payment services review bring meal vouchers into interchange regulation?

Not on the current text, and this is worth stating carefully because it is frequently reported the other way round.

Meal vouchers sit outside interchange regulation today because of a specific exemption: it covers instruments valid in a single member state, provided at the request of an employer or public body, regulated by a national authority for a social or tax purpose, and usable at suppliers holding a commercial agreement with the issuer. That is the legal reason affiliated merchant networks exist.

The revised European payment services rules reached political agreement on 27 November 2025 and were endorsed by member state representatives on 23 April 2026. The limited network exclusion survives, but it is narrowed: an instrument now has to be usable within a single limited network rather than the broader wording used before. Meal vouchers are not named in the agreed text.

How this page is maintained

Every entry carries the date a rule takes effect and the market it applies to. Announcements without an effective date are not listed. Proposals are marked as proposals. The page is reviewed quarterly and after any national budget law that touches voucher ceilings, since those are the changes that move most often.

If a figure here is out of date, it is a mistake rather than a rounding: tell us and we will correct it.