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Invoicing from the United States

There is no federal rule setting out what an invoice must contain. What shapes a US invoice is state sales tax, your contract, and what your customer needs before they will pay.

Invoicing in the United States works differently from the EU, and the difference is not a detail. There is no VAT, and there is no federal law listing what an invoice has to say — no US counterpart to the European list of required particulars. An invoice here is a commercial document, not a tax document.

That does not make it a free-for-all. Three things shape a US invoice: the sales tax rules of the states you sell into, whatever your contract or purchase order says, and what your customer's accounts payable department needs before it will release payment. The third is the one that decides how fast you actually get paid.

What to put on it

• Your business name and address, and your customer's.
• An invoice number and the invoice date.
• The purchase order or reference number your customer gave you, if there was one. Leave it off and the invoice can sit unpaid for weeks while somebody works out what it is for.
• What you supplied, with quantities and unit prices.
• Sales tax on a line of its own, if you are charging it.
• The total due.
• The payment terms, and the due date written out as a date.
• How to pay: ACH details, an address for a check, or a payment link.
• Your EIN, if the customer asks for it. Some do, for their own records.

Numbering

Unlike the EU, no law requires your invoice numbers to run in an unbroken sequence. Keep one anyway. It is how you find an invoice when a customer calls about it, and how anyone auditing your books follows them without asking you to account for every gap.

Payment terms

Net 30 is the usual default: payment due 30 days after the invoice date. Net 15 and Net 60 are ordinary too, and large customers often apply their own terms whatever you write. Put the due date on as an actual date rather than only "Net 30" — it settles in advance any argument about which day the clock started.

W-9 and the 1099-NEC

If you work as an independent contractor, a business client will usually ask for a Form W-9 before paying your first invoice. That is routine: they need your taxpayer ID to report what they paid you.

From tax year 2026 the client files a Form 1099-NEC only where they paid you $2,000 or more across the year, up from the $600 threshold that applied through 2025, and the new figure is indexed for inflation. Receiving no 1099 changes nothing about your own return — you report the income whether a form was issued or not.

How long to keep them

The IRS works to a three-year clock for most records, running from the date you filed. It stretches to six years if you left out more than 25% of your gross income, and there is no limit at all if you filed a fraudulent return or did not file one. Employment tax records are four years. States frequently want sales tax records for longer than the IRS wants income tax records, which is why the practical answer most accountants give is seven years for everything.

Electronic invoices

No US mandate requires you to send electronic invoices, to anyone, in any format. Adoption is voluntary — mostly EDI between large trading partners, and increasingly the DBNAlliance network. Federal agencies are the exception and generally want invoices through the Invoice Processing Platform. The Factur-X data this editor attaches costs you nothing on a US invoice: to anyone who ignores it, the file is an ordinary pdf.

Related

• Do I charge sales tax on my invoice?
• Do invoice numbers have to be sequential?
• What is an e-invoice (Factur-X)?