ZATCA E-Invoicing Waves: Find Your 2026 Deadline

What the Fatoora Phase 2 waves are

The Fatoora Phase 2 waves are the schedule ZATCA uses to bring every VAT-registered business in Saudi Arabia onto live e-invoicing integration, working down from the largest taxpayers in 2023 to businesses with taxable revenue of just SAR 187,500 by 2026. It matters because a business's wave sets a fixed legal integration date, not a suggestion, and ZATCA determines the wave from a business's own past VAT filings.

Phase 1, the Generation Phase, has applied since 4 December 2021 and simply requires a resident taxpayer to issue invoices in a structured electronic format with a QR code, kept on the business's own systems. Phase 2, the Integration Phase, has applied since 1 January 2023 and adds live integration: the invoicing solution must connect to ZATCA's Fatoora platform, attach a cryptographic stamp to each invoice, and either have standard tax invoices cleared before they reach the buyer or have simplified tax invoices reported within 24 hours of issue. This article is about finding a business's wave and preparing for its date; our guide on ZATCA Phase 2 e-invoicing covers what the integration itself technically requires.

How ZATCA assigns a wave

ZATCA does not let a business pick its own wave or apply to join one. Each wave is defined by a taxable-revenue threshold measured against one or more specific past calendar years, most often the years just before the wave is announced, and ZATCA identifies which businesses cross that threshold from the VAT returns already on file. A business is then notified directly, at least six months before its integration date, through the Fatoora portal and its registered contact details.

Because the criterion is taxable revenue in a named past year, a business's own bookkeeping is the fastest way to check where it stands: pull taxable revenue for each of the years a recent wave used and compare it against the published thresholds. A business that has not yet been notified is not necessarily safe for good, every wave since Wave 8 has lowered the threshold, so a business sitting just above a newly announced figure should expect a notification within the following wave or two rather than assume it has been overlooked.

The revenue figure ZATCA works from is taxable supplies as already reported on filed VAT returns, not an internal management figure, which is one more reason the VAT return and the general ledger need to agree before a wave notification arrives. A business whose VAT filings understated revenue in the relevant years risks a double problem: the understatement itself, and a wave assignment that arrives later than it should have, leaving less time to prepare once it does.

The wave table: threshold and deadline

The waves below are not the full list ZATCA has announced since 2023, but they cover the pattern from the very first wave down to the most recent, smallest-threshold wave confirmed as of September 2026.

• Wave 1: taxable revenue above SAR 3 billion in 2021, integration required from 1 January 2023.
• Waves 2 to 8: the threshold stepped down through 2023 and early 2024; Wave 8 covered SAR 40 million to SAR 50 million turnover, effective 1 March 2024.
• Wave 20: taxable revenue above SAR 1.5 million in 2022 or 2023, integration deadline 31 October 2025.
• Wave 21: taxable revenue above SAR 1.25 million in 2022, 2023 or 2024, integration deadline 30 November 2025.
• Wave 22: taxable revenue above SAR 1 million in 2022, 2023 or 2024, integration deadline 31 December 2025.
• Wave 23: taxable revenue above SAR 750,000 in 2022, 2023 or 2024, integration window 1 January to 31 March 2026.
• Wave 24: taxable revenue above SAR 375,000 in 2022, 2023 or 2024, the ordinary VAT registration threshold, integration deadline 30 June 2026.
• Wave 25, the most recent announced (24 July 2026): taxable revenue above SAR 187,500 in 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025, with ZATCA due to notify targeted taxpayers no later than 1 February 2027.

Reading the pattern between waves

Two things stand out once the waves are laid out together. First, the threshold has fallen roughly by half at several steps, from SAR 375,000 at Wave 24 to SAR 187,500 at Wave 25, which is also the floor of voluntary VAT registration in Saudi Arabia, so the wave rollout is now reaching almost every VAT-registered business rather than only the largest ones. Second, no Wave 26 had been announced as of the September 2026 search date, so a business below the Wave 25 threshold, or notified for Wave 25 but not yet due, has no confirmed next deadline to plan against beyond ZATCA's usual six-month notice period.

A business that registers for VAT for the first time after Wave 25 was announced does not automatically fall into an existing wave: ZATCA groups new registrants into future waves as they are announced, based on the same kind of threshold test once the business has filing history to measure.

For a small trading business this pattern has a practical reading: the question is no longer whether Fatoora Phase 2 integration will apply, but roughly when. A business with SAR 200,000 of annual taxable revenue sat comfortably outside every wave through 2025, then found itself inside the scope of Wave 25 the moment its threshold was published, without any change in the business itself.

What changes on integration day

Once a business's integration date arrives, the day-to-day handling of an invoice changes in ways that are easy to underestimate if the team is only thinking about the technical connection. A standard tax invoice can no longer be issued to a business customer and reported later; it must be cleared by ZATCA before it leaves the seller. A simplified tax invoice, typically a retail or point-of-sale receipt, can be issued immediately but must be reported to ZATCA within 24 hours.

The other change is permanence. Once an invoice has been cleared or reported, it cannot be edited or deleted in the ordinary way a draft could be before integration; a mistake found afterwards is corrected with a credit note or a debit note, never by going back into the original document. Finance staff who are used to correcting an invoice directly need to unlearn that habit before the integration date, not after the first rejected correction.

A third change is where the archive lives. Fatoora Phase 2 invoices and their supporting records must be kept for a minimum of six years from the end of the relevant financial year, stored in Saudi Arabia, either on paper or in approved in-Kingdom digital or cloud storage, and available on request for audit. A business that has always exported invoices to a spreadsheet outside the Kingdom needs a different retention habit from integration day onward, separate from whatever general commercial-record retention it already follows.

Getting ready before the date

ZATCA's onboarding runs in a fixed order, and each step depends on the one before it, so readiness work should start well before the deadline rather than in the final week.

• Confirm the e-invoicing solution already generates the required structured fields, the QR code and a hash linking each invoice to the one before it.
• Request a Compliance CSID from ZATCA and generate the onboarding configuration for the invoicing solution.
• Run ZATCA's compliance checks on a sample of real invoice types the business actually issues, not only the simplest case.
• Once the compliance checks pass, request the Production CSID that switches the connection from testing to live.
• Brief sales and finance staff that a cleared or reported invoice becomes fixed, and that corrections happen through credit and debit notes from that point.
• Agree a fallback process for the rare case the Fatoora platform or the business's own connection is briefly unreachable.

Penalties and the current fines waiver

ZATCA's VAT penalty framework already carries real cost for compliance failures generally: late filing penalties scale from 5% to 25% of the tax that should have been declared, and late payment adds 5% of the unpaid tax for every month or part-month it stays outstanding. E-invoicing non-compliance sits within that same enforcement framework, so a business that misses its integration date and keeps issuing invoices the old way is exposed to ZATCA action on top of the operational risk of invoices its customers cannot process.

ZATCA's Cancellation of Fines initiative, which waives penalties for late registration, late payment and late filing across its tax laws, was extended by the Minister of Finance to run through 31 December 2026, though it excludes tax-evasion penalties and Article 45 VAT-law fines. That waiver is a reason to fix a lapse quickly once discovered, not a reason to treat the integration date itself as flexible; it does not change when a business must integrate.

Common mistakes businesses make with their wave

Most wave-readiness problems trace back to timing rather than to the technical integration itself.

• Waiting for the ZATCA notification before starting any preparation, when the compliance CSID and testing steps take real time to complete properly.
• Assuming a business is safe because it has not been notified yet, when its revenue already sits close to the most recent wave's threshold.
• Testing the integration only on the simplest invoice type and discovering a gap, such as credit notes or a discount line, after going live.
• Not briefing point-of-sale and sales staff that invoices become uneditable once reported or cleared, which turns a normal correction into a support incident.
• Treating the fines waiver as if it postpones the integration date, when it only reduces the cost of catching up once a lapse is found.

Doing this in Skyline Nexus ERP

Skyline Nexus ERP runs the ZATCA onboarding sequence from one settings area: Settings, Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority, with screens for the Dashboard, Configuration, Generate Config, Compliance CSID, Compliance Check, Production CSID and Renew CSID, plus an All Invoices view covering every invoice's clearance or reporting status, errors and warnings, with XML and QR downloads and a bulk option to send every invoice still awaiting reporting.

Once an invoice's ZATCA status is Reported, Cleared or Submitting, Skyline Nexus ERP will not let it be edited or deleted: the system shows the message that the invoice has already been filed and must be corrected with a credit note or a debit note instead, which keeps the business's own records aligned with what ZATCA already holds without relying on staff to remember the rule.