Country deep dive
Three postponements and two clocks. The decree took effect in September 2025 with a transitional window, the first phase commenced in January 2026, and the second has a statutory date and a practical one that do not match.
Presidential Decree 71/25 of 20 March 2025 entered into force six months after publication, replacing the 2018 invoicing regime. Article 16 makes electronic invoicing obligatory for General and Simplified VAT regime taxpayers; Article 17(2) requires software validated or supplied by the AGT that transmits in real time and cannot delete an issued document.
Electronic issuance and real-time communication become mandatory for large taxpayers, suppliers to the State, and taxpayers issuing invoices of 25 million kwanzas or more. A transitional window from 1 October 2025 had allowed paper without penalty while the AGT certified software. By April 2026 the AGT reported 28,949 taxpayers on the system generating 250,000 to 500,000 invoices a day.
Article 37 restricts the obligation to large taxpayers and State suppliers for twelve months from the implementing Executive Decree 683/25, which took effect around 21 September 2025. On the decree's own clock every remaining taxpayer is caught from this date. Angolan practice has instead aligned each phase to 1 January, and this entry is kept off the board because no authority has confirmed it as the operative date.
The obligation extends to every remaining taxpayer in the General and Simplified VAT regimes. The date is reported consistently by in-market sources and by certified software vendors, and it follows the pattern set by the first phase, whose statutory date of 20 September 2025 also commenced on 1 January. It is not the date written in the decree, which is why it carries an expected badge.
JSON to the AGT, not XML. There is no UBL, no EN 16931 and no Peppol authority. The document carries a QR code and a digital code the AGT defines, applied by certified software.
The obligation follows the VAT regime, not the customer. Every taxpayer in the General and Simplified regimes is caught eventually; the phases decide only who is caught yet.
Most of the work is registration rather than integration. Nothing can be issued until the software is certified, the taxpayer has joined, every establishment is declared and a series exists for each one, in that order.
Only software already validated by the AGT can communicate series or transmit documents. Nothing downstream is possible until this is true, and a non-validated system is itself a five per cent penalty per invoice.
Adoption is declared by the taxpayer, not assumed by the authority. This is the step that switches the obligation on for you and opens everything below it.
Article 24 wants each place that issues a document declared separately, with the software it uses. An unregistered site cannot be given a series, and so cannot issue.
Series are requested through the certified software and belong to one establishment. They cannot be shared, and next year's cannot be opened before mid-December.
Article 8 runs the clock from the operation, not from the month end. The penalty for missing it is small per invoice and applies per invoice.
Real-time transmission replaced the invoicing SAF-T for e-invoicing taxpayers in 2026, but not the inventory file due in February or the accounting file due in April.
Two are in circulation and they are four months apart. Watch the AGT's comunicados rather than a vendor timeline, and build for the earlier of the two.
Penalties are a percentage of the invoice, not a fixed fine, so exposure scales with the value that went unrecorded. A first offence is halved, and the heaviest rate covers not issuing and SAF-T omissions.
Other countries in the same region, ordered by their next dated milestone. Each links to a full briefing.