The tax arises if

• your bus or coach is not registered in Germany and
• you transport passengers in occasional traffic across a third-country border of the Federal Republic of Germany against payment. Occasional transport means, for example, excursion trips, holiday destination trips and transport with rented buses. A third-country border of the Federal Republic of Germany is a border with a state that is not a member of the European Union, i.e. the borders between Switzerland and Germany and at German seaports.

You must pay the tax whether you run a company based in Germany or abroad, or whether you transport German or foreign passengers. The tax is due as soon as the bus crosses the border. The customs office at the border levies the turnover tax for each transport individually in the so-called individual transport taxation procedure.

In the individual transport taxation procedure, the turnover tax is calculated on the basis of an average transport charge. The average transportation charge is 4.43 cents. At a tax rate of 19 percent, the sales tax is therefore 0.84 cents for each passenger kilometer that you travel in the Federal Republic of Germany. You calculate the passenger kilometers by multiplying the number of passengers carried by the number of kilometers the motor bus actually traveled in the Federal Republic of Germany.
For example: If you transport 50 persons in a bus over 100 kilometres in Germany, the result is 5000 passenger kilometres.

In the case of individual transport taxation, no input tax is taken into account. This means that the sales tax you pay when purchasing goods or services for your business, so-called input tax, is not refunded. However, you can claim a refund of input tax amounts if the input taxes are related to a passenger transport that has been subject to individual transport taxation.