In this article
From 10 July 2027, a single EU-wide rule caps every cash payment for goods or services at €10,000 — the first time cash has had one shared ceiling across the whole bloc. Until then, and largely afterwards too, restaurants sit inside a real patchwork: Greece bans any cash payment of €500 or more to a business, Spain and France draw the line at €1,000, Belgium at €3,000, Italy and Bulgaria near €5,000 — while Germany and Austria have no general ceiling at all, today. Seven numbers walk through what already applies to your own dining room, what changes in 2027, and what "splitting the bill" actually risks.
A communion lunch for twenty-two, a corporate dinner the organiser wants to settle before they leave, a wedding buffet the family insists on paying in full, in notes, at the end of the night — every independent restaurant eventually meets a guest who wants to hand over a large amount of cash in one go. Almost none of them stop to ask whether that is actually legal, and neither, in most cases, does the restaurant. It usually is legal, right up to a number that depends entirely on which country the till happens to be standing in.
That number is not a future problem waiting for a new law. Every limit in this article except the first is already in force, has been for years in some cases, and carries a real fine that lands on the business as much as on the guest. What is genuinely new is the first number: from 10 July 2027, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 — the EU's new anti-money-laundering regulation, usually shortened to the AMLR — puts a single €10,000 ceiling on cash payments for goods or services everywhere in the bloc. It does not raise anyone's limit. It closes the two markets that currently have none at all.
This is not the same law as the certified cash register your till has to run under, and it is not about a drawer that does not balance at closing — those are covered elsewhere on this site (see the fiscal cash-register rules and the till-discrepancy article linked below), and neither one mentions a legal ceiling on what a guest may hand over. This article is specifically about that ceiling: the amount above which a cash payment stops being a payment method and starts being a compliance problem.
Seven numbers give you the whole picture: the 2027 EU ceiling itself, the strictest national limit in the EU today, the figure three countries land on for exactly the same reason, a mid-range limit two very different countries happen to share, the two markets with no ceiling at all — for now — and the one number that decides whether "let's just split it into two payments" ever actually works. A live calculator further down turns all of it into one answer for your own bill.
Why this deserves your attention now
None of the nine national figures in this article is a proposal. Greece's €500 limit, Spain's and France's €1,000 rule, Belgium's €3,000 ceiling, and the roughly €5,000 lines in Italy and Bulgaria are all live law today, with fines that apply to the business as much as to the guest paying. A restaurant that has never checked its own country's number has been operating inside — or outside — a real limit the whole time, whether anyone noticed or not.
The 2027 change is easy to misread as "the EU is raising the cash limit," and for almost every country on this list that is backwards. Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 sets a ceiling, not a floor: any country whose own limit already sits below €10,000 keeps it exactly as it is. The only markets where 10 July 2027 changes anything meaningful are the ones with no ceiling today — which, among the countries this article covers, means Germany and Austria specifically, and nowhere else.
This is a practical map for a working restaurant, not a legal opinion. Fines, exact wording and enforcement practice shift, and a handful of these numbers (Italy's proposed increase, in particular) are still moving as this is written. Where a figure is unsettled, the article says so directly — treat this as the starting point for a conversation with your own accountant or national tax authority, not the end of one.
The 7 numbers
In the order that makes the most sense at the pass: the ceiling arriving in 2027 first, then today's national numbers from strictest to loosest, and finally the one trick that does not get anyone out of any of them.
1. €10,000 — the EU-wide ceiling that applies everywhere from 10 July 2027
Article 80 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 — the AMLR, part of the EU's new anti-money-laundering package — states plainly that "persons trading in goods or providing services" may accept or make cash payments only up to €10,000, whether as a single payment or as several payments that are clearly linked to each other. A restaurant is squarely a person providing a service, so this line applies to your dining room exactly as it applies to a car dealer or a jeweller.
The regulation is a ceiling, not a target: member states may keep or introduce a lower national limit, they may never allow a higher one. Any country that already had a stricter rule in place had to notify the European Commission by 10 October 2024 to keep it once the EU-wide rule takes effect. That single design choice is why numbers two through six below do not simply disappear on 10 July 2027 — most of them are lower than €10,000 already, and stay exactly where they are.
From a diverging set of national rules to a single EU-wide ceiling — four moments that matter.
Nothing here waits for the deadline: every national number in this article already applies today, years before the EU ceiling arrives.
2. €500 — Greece, still the strictest cash limit anywhere in the EU
Greek law forbids settling any transaction of €500 or more with a business in cash — it has to go through a card, a transfer, or another traceable method instead. The threshold is calculated on the transaction's full value, not on the receipt in front of you, so a €480 dinner plus a €40 tip handed over separately still adds up to €520 and still crosses the line. Get it wrong and the fine is not a flat penalty: it is set at double the amount that was paid in cash in breach of the rule, and it can fall on the business as well as the guest.
For a Greek restaurant this is the number that turns almost any table of six or more, any group booking, or any evening with a generous cash tip into a compliance question rather than a courtesy. It has been tightened over the past two decades specifically to close the tax gap that followed the country's 2008 financial crisis, and proposals to loosen it have been floated and withdrawn more than once — as of today it remains unchanged, and it is the number every other country on this list is measured against.
3. €1,000 — the figure France, Spain and (for a business) Portugal all land on
Spain's Ley 11/2021 bans a cash payment of €1,000 or more whenever at least one of the two parties is acting as a professional or a business — which, in a restaurant, is always true, since the restaurant itself is that professional party. It does not matter whether the payment is split into instalments: paying a €1,100 bill as two separate cash handovers of €550 still breaches the limit, because the rule looks at the value of the whole transaction. The penalty is 25% of the full amount, and both the diner and the restaurant are held jointly liable for it. Non-residents get a higher ceiling of €10,000, but that exception is about the payer's residency, not about the restaurant.
France applies the same €1,000 line to its own tax residents and to any transaction where a professional is a party, with a tax fine of up to 5% of the amount wrongly paid in cash; non-residents again get a materially higher figure. Portugal reaches the identical €1,000 number from a different angle: any business or professional required to keep organised accounts — a normal restaurant — has to use a traceable payment method for a transaction of €1,000 or more, even though Portugal's own general public limit (covered under number four, next) sits three times higher. Three different legal routes, one number, and in every case it is the restaurant's own status as a business that pulls the threshold down that far.
4. €3,000 — Belgium's blanket rule, and Portugal's default one
Belgium runs one flat rule for everyone: no cash payment or cash donation, business or private, may exceed €3,000 in total — and that includes a bill deliberately split into instalments, which still counts against the same €3,000 ceiling. The obligation was anchored directly into the Code of Economic Law by a law passed on 8 February 2024, and a breach can now be fined up to 10% of the amount paid in cash, capped at €1.8 million. There is no separate, lower business-facing tier here — €3,000 is simply the number, for every payment, every time.
Portugal arrives at the same figure by a different route. Its general cash-payment ban — for any transaction where the stricter €1,000 business threshold from number three does not already apply — sits at €3,000, and rises to €10,000 specifically for individuals who are not resident in Portugal and are not themselves trading as a business. So a Portuguese restaurant effectively lives under two thresholds at once: €1,000 whenever the payment counts as a business transaction (almost always), and this higher €3,000 line only in the narrower cases where it does not.
5. €5,000 — Italy and Bulgaria, a mid-range limit two very different countries share
Italy's current limit sits at €5,000: any payment of that amount or more has to go through a traceable method, splitting a payment specifically to stay under the line is explicitly prohibited by name, and the rule applies to both individuals and businesses. A 2026 budget-law amendment tabled by the governing Fratelli d'Italia party proposes doubling this to €10,000 while adding a €500 "special stamp duty" on any cash payment above €5,000 — as this article is written, that change has not passed, so Italy's operative number today remains €5,000, not €10,000.
Bulgaria lands within a rounding error of the same figure for an entirely unrelated reason. Its national cash-payment law caps a transaction at 10,000 Bulgarian lev — a limit that has been tightened more than once since it was first introduced in 2011 — and since Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026 at the fixed conversion rate of €1 = BGN 1.95583, that figure now reads as roughly €5,112. Two countries, two completely separate legal histories, and one nearly identical number a restaurant on either side of the border has to respect.
6. No ceiling today — Germany and Austria, about to be bound for the first time
This is the number worth reading twice: Germany and Austria have no general statutory limit on a cash payment today. A guest can legally hand over any amount in cash to a restaurant in either country, and no national law caps it at €500, €1,000, €3,000 or anything else. Austria has gone further than simply leaving the gap open — its government has pushed to write a constitutional right to pay in cash into national law, precisely to keep this position. That freedom is real, but it is narrower than it sounds: existing anti-money-laundering law (Germany's Geldwäschegesetz, for instance) already requires certain "obliged entities" — mainly dealers in goods such as jewellers, car dealers and precious-metal traders — to identify a customer paying €10,000 or more in cash. A restaurant provides a service rather than trading in goods, so in the ordinary case it does not fall into that specific obliged-entity category, and no separate identification paperwork is triggered purely by taking a large cash payment. If your own business has been designated an obliged entity under a national rule that goes beyond the EU list — some countries do add sectors — that changes, and it is worth a direct check with your accountant.
10 July 2027 is where that genuine freedom ends. From that date, Article 80's €10,000 cap applies directly in Germany and Austria exactly as it applies everywhere else, because a restaurant is squarely a "person providing a service." No other market on this list moves this far: every other country here is already below €10,000 and simply keeps its own stricter number, while Germany and Austria jump from literally no ceiling to a hard €10,000 line overnight. A restaurant in either country that regularly takes large cash payments for weddings, communions or corporate events has a genuine runway to prepare card or transfer capacity for the portion above that figure — but the runway has an end date, and it is fixed.
Every limit covered above, on one scale, against the €10,000 line arriving on 10 July 2027.
Countries below the dashed line keep their own number after 2027 — it is already stricter than the EU ceiling. Germany and Austria are the only two on this scale that the dashed line actually moves.
7. 1 — the number of payments a split bill still counts as
Article 80 does not cap "a payment" — it caps "a single operation or several operations which appear to be linked," and that phrasing is deliberate. Spain's own statute is even more explicit about it: a €1,100 bill paid as two cash handovers of €550 each is treated as one €1,100 transaction for the purposes of the limit, not as two payments that each individually clear the bar. The same logic runs through every national rule covered above — the number that matters is the value of what is being settled, not how many separate handovers it arrives in.
Deliberately splitting a large cash payment into smaller pieces specifically to stay under a threshold has its own name under anti-money-laundering law — structuring, sometimes called smurfing — and it is treated as a red flag in its own right, independently of and often penalised more heavily than simply breaching the original limit once. For a restaurant, the practical rule for the floor is blunt: if a guest offers to pay part now and part "next time," or asks two different cards or two different people at the table to each hand over cash separately for what is obviously one bill, the amount that counts is still the value of the transaction being settled — accept the cash up to your country's own legal line, and take the rest by card or transfer, every time.
Is this cash payment legal? Run your own numbers
The seven numbers above tell you which country sits where. They don't do the one thing a busy floor actually needs in the moment: tell you, for the exact amount a guest wants to hand over, whether it clears the line today and whether it still will after 10 July 2027.
Pick the country the till is standing in, type the amount, and tick the box if the guest has offered to split the payment — the tool applies the same "linked operations" rule described in number seven above rather than pretending splitting changes the answer.
The cash-payment check
Country, amount, and whether the guest is offering to split it — the tool does the rest.
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This covers the nine countries in this article only and reflects the sourced figures above, not a database of all 27 member states — confirm your own country's current number with your accountant if it isn't one of the nine.
Treat the result as a starting point, not a legal ruling: the exact wording, the fine and the enforcement practice sit with each country's own tax authority, and a handful of these numbers — Italy's proposed increase most of all — are still in motion as this is written.
If a large cash payment ever leaves your float short at close, or you simply want a second pair of eyes on the drawer at the end of a busy night, our free daily close & cash-up sheet is built for exactly that — and if you want to see how comfortably your business could absorb turning down the cash portion of one large bill, our free cash-flow planner answers that in minutes.
What to do with this, this week
None of these numbers are new — which means none of them can wait for a quiet week to check.
This week
- Look up your own country's current cash-payment limit using the calculator above, and write it down somewhere the whole floor can see it — not just the owner.
- Agree, out loud, what the team says when a bill approaches the limit: cash up to the legal line, card or transfer for the rest, no exceptions made under pressure at 23:00 on a Saturday.
- Make sure nobody on staff has ever been told — by a guest or by habit — that splitting a bill into two cash payments is a workaround. It is not, and number seven above explains exactly why.
For any booking likely to be paid in cash
- Ask upfront, before the day, how a large group intends to pay — a communion, wedding or corporate booking is exactly the kind of bill that tests these numbers.
- Where the total is likely to sit near or above your country's limit, ask for the deposit or the bulk of the payment by transfer or card, and leave only a smaller balance for cash.
- Keep a simple written note of who on your team authorised accepting a large cash payment, and for how much — useful if a question ever comes up later, and cheap to do now.
Before 10 July 2027
- If you're in Germany or Austria: this is the one date that actually changes something for you — start making sure card or transfer capacity can comfortably cover your largest bookings well before it arrives.
- Everywhere else: your own number almost certainly stays exactly where it is, but confirm with your accountant that your country's limit was properly notified to the European Commission and hasn't shifted since.
- Revisit this page closer to the date — a handful of these figures (Italy's proposed increase in particular) are still under discussion and could move before 2027 does.
The short version
Nine countries, five different numbers, and two markets with no ceiling at all — every figure in this article is already enforceable law today, not a future problem waiting for 2027. The single EU-wide cap arriving on 10 July 2027 sets a ceiling, not a floor: it does not raise anyone's limit, and for seven of the nine countries covered here it changes nothing at all.
The two markets it does change everything for are Germany and Austria, where an unbounded cash payment today becomes a hard €10,000 line overnight. Every other country on this list simply keeps the stricter number it already runs — which is exactly why knowing your own country's figure now matters more than knowing what 2027 will do to it.
The one habit worth breaking immediately, wherever you trade, is treating a split payment as a way around any of these numbers. It isn't, under EU law or under any of the nine national rules covered here — and a restaurant that gets that wrong is judged on the value of the bill, not on how many handovers it arrived in.