Expense tracking for growing businesses, sliced the way you run it

Israel's VAT started life at 8% in 1976 and has never once been set above 18% — the exact ceiling it climbed back to at the start of 2025.

The OECD's record shows the minimum and maximum standard rates since 1976 have been 8.0% and 18.0%. Israel also runs a zero rate on a number of goods and services plus a specific regional rate — the Eilat exemption.

In Canada the same doughnut can be taxed or tax-free depending only on how many you buy: fewer than six is taxable, six or more is zero-rated.

CRA's Basic Groceries memorandum treats cakes, muffins, pies, pastries, doughnuts, cookies and similar single-serving sweetened baked goods as taxable when sold in quantities of fewer than six, but as zero-rated basic groceries at six or more — even a mix of six different items (e.g. two bagels, two muffins, two doughnuts) counts as six and is zero-rated.

Whether your medicine is VAT-free in Ireland can depend on which end of you it goes in.

Medicine for human oral consumption is zero-rated, while many non-oral medicines and medical products are charged at the standard 23% rate (with limited exceptions such as certain hormone and nicotine replacement therapies).

Brazil is running two entire consumption-tax systems at once — the old five taxes and the new two — and will keep doing so until 2033, because untangling three tiers of government from the same tax base takes a seven-year transition.

Constitutional Amendment 132, promulgated on 20 December 2023 after some 30 years of discussion, folds the federal PIS, Cofins and IPI, the state ICMS and the municipal ISS into a dual VAT: the federal CBS plus the state-and-municipal IBS, with a Selective Tax alongside for goods considered harmful.