Georgia Monthly Tax Declaration: Deadlines, Filing and Rules

Every registered business in Georgia owes the Revenue Service a monthly tax declaration, and the obligation does not pause because a month brought in nothing. Missing that pattern is one of the easiest ways to accumulate a penalty without noticing you have done it. Here is what has to be filed, the deadline that actually matters, how the rs.ge portal works, and how to convert foreign currency income into GEL correctly.

Who has to file every month, and for what

Georgia's monthly declaration obligation is not limited to one type of registration. The underlying regime is covered in general terms by reference sources such as PwC's Georgia tax summary, and it applies to:

• Any Individual Entrepreneur holding Small Business Status, reporting turnover at the 1% (or 3% above the cap) rate
• Any ordinary Individual Entrepreneur without the status, reporting at the standard rate
• Any LLC, including those under Virtual Zone, International Company or Free Industrial Zone regimes
• Any VAT-registered business, regardless of entity type

A natural person with no registered business does not file this way, and a Micro Business under the 30,000 GEL threshold with no employees is exempt from the monthly cycle as well. Everyone else registered with the Revenue Service is inside it, whether or not the month produced any income.

What each entity type actually declares

Not every registered business is filing the same thing every month, even though the deadline is identical for all of them.

• Individual Entrepreneur with Small Business Status files an income declaration reporting turnover, with tax calculated automatically at 1% or 3% depending on whether the 500,000 GEL cap has been crossed that year.
• Ordinary Individual Entrepreneur without the status files the same type of declaration, but tax is calculated at the standard 20% rate rather than the preferential one.
• An LLC files a corporate tax declaration, though tax is only actually due in months a distribution is made. A month with no distribution still requires the filing, just with nothing owed.
• Any VAT-registered business, regardless of entity type, files a separate monthly VAT declaration on top of whichever income or corporate declaration already applies, covering output VAT charged and input VAT reclaimed.
• An LLC or Individual Entrepreneur with employees also files monthly pension and payroll declarations alongside the income or corporate one.

The 15th deadline is the same across all of these. What differs is which forms actually get submitted, and a business that has grown past a single Individual Entrepreneur filing, by registering for VAT or hiring its first employee, usually notices its monthly filing gets meaningfully more involved at exactly the same moment its accounting needs do.

The 15th deadline, and how the month is counted

The declaration is due by the 15th of the month following the one being reported. January's turnover is declared by 15 February. A year that runs January through December produces twelve declarations, filed on a rolling one-month lag, every year, without exception for holidays falling near the deadline.

This is not the same date as any annual filing deadline you might also have. The monthly declaration reports turnover, or for an LLC the relevant monthly obligations, for the single month just finished. It does not replace or interact with the annual return, which sits on a separate schedule entirely.

Zero declarations: the one nobody remembers

A month with no invoices issued and no income received still requires a declaration. This is the single most common way we see people accumulate penalties, because the logic feels backwards. If nothing happened, why file anything?

The Revenue Service does not read "no income" as "no obligation." The obligation is to declare, not to declare only when there is something to declare. Skip a zero month on the assumption that it does not matter, and the penalty accrues exactly the same way a late declaration on a busy month would.

This matters most for seasonal businesses and for anyone who takes an extended break, whether a slow winter, a trip home, or a gap between contracts. The declaration obligation does not pause for any of those reasons, and the systems on the other end do not distinguish between "forgot" and "decided it did not apply this month."

Filing through rs.ge, step by step

The portal itself is rs.ge, and it is in Georgian throughout, which is the main practical friction for a non-Georgian-speaking owner rather than the filing logic itself.

Before your first filing, it helps to have three things ready: your rs.ge login credentials, a running log of every payment received during the month with its date and currency, and the bank statement or dashboard showing exactly when each payment landed. Missing any of these turns a fifteen-minute filing into a much longer one, usually spent reconstructing the month from memory the night before the deadline.

The process, in outline:

1. Log into your personal account on rs.ge using the credentials set up when your Individual Entrepreneur or LLC was registered.
2. Open the declaration section for the relevant tax type: income tax for an Individual Entrepreneur, or the corresponding sections for VAT, corporate tax or payroll if those apply to you.
3. Enter turnover for the reporting month, converting any foreign-currency income to GEL first, and confirm the figure matches your own records.
4. Submit the declaration before the 15th. The system calculates the tax due once the figures are entered, whether that is 1% or 3% for Small Business Status or the standard rate otherwise.
5. Pay the calculated amount from a Georgian bank account before the same deadline. Filing and payment are treated separately: submitting the declaration does not itself move money.

The most common filing errors are not complicated ones: a wrong reporting month selected, a currency conversion done at the wrong date's rate, or a declaration submitted without the payment actually following it. None of these are difficult once you know to check for them, which is largely why an accountant handling this monthly removes more risk than the filing itself is complex.

Converting foreign currency income to GEL

Most independent businesses working with clients outside Georgia are declaring income that arrived in USD, EUR or another foreign currency, and it has to be converted to GEL before it goes into the declaration. This is the other routine source of filing errors, and it is worth doing properly rather than approximately.

The conversion uses the official exchange rate published daily by the National Bank of Georgia, applied on the date the payment was actually received, not the invoice date and not an average across the month. A payment received on the 3rd of the month converts at the 3rd's rate. A payment received on the 22nd converts at the 22nd's rate, even if both relate to the same invoice or the same client.

This has a practical consequence for anyone with several payments landing across a month: each one is converted separately, at its own date's rate, and the declaration reflects the sum of those individually converted amounts rather than one lump sum converted at a single rate. On a month with several payments in a currency moving against the lari, the difference between doing this correctly and taking a shortcut with one average rate is usually small, but it is exactly the kind of recurring discrepancy an audit position gets built on.

A worked example

Say an Individual Entrepreneur with Small Business Status receives three client payments in a single month: 2,000 USD on the 3rd, 1,500 EUR on the 14th, and 3,000 USD on the 27th. Each one converts separately, at the National Bank's official rate for its own date, not a single rate applied to the whole month.

If the USD rate happens to be 2.70 GEL on the 3rd and 2.72 GEL on the 27th, and the EUR rate is 2.95 GEL on the 14th, the declaration reports 5,400 GEL for the first payment, 4,425 GEL for the second, and 8,160 GEL for the third: 17,985 GEL of declared turnover for the month, rather than a figure produced by applying one exchange rate to the combined total. The rates used here are illustrative only. The actual figure for any given date is whatever the National Bank publishes for that day, which is why the log of payment dates matters as much as the payments themselves.

What happens if you file late or get it wrong

Late filing and underpayment are handled under the general penalty framework in the Tax Code of Georgia: daily interest accrues on any unpaid balance from the deadline until it is settled, and understating the tax due in a declaration carries its own penalty on top of the shortfall itself.

None of this is discretionary in the way a late fee sometimes is elsewhere. The penalties accrue automatically once the deadline passes, and they keep accruing the longer the position stays unresolved. A single missed zero declaration is a small, fixable problem if caught quickly. A pattern of missed declarations across several months is a considerably larger one.

A pattern of missed or incorrect filings does not, by itself, revoke Small Business Status the way exceeding the 500,000 GEL turnover cap for two years running does. But outstanding tax debt and an inconsistent filing history tend to surface at exactly the wrong moment regardless, such as when you are trying to close the business, convert to an LLC, or open a business bank account and the bank asks for a clean filing history.

Making the monthly cycle actually easy

None of the individual steps here are difficult. What causes problems is doing them inconsistently across twelve months a year, in a portal that is not in your language, on top of running the actual business.

A few habits make the difference:

• Keep a running log of payments as they arrive, with the date and currency, rather than reconstructing the month from bank statements right before the deadline.
• Convert each payment on the day it is received, using that day's official rate, instead of batching conversions at month end.
• File a few days before the 15th, not on it. Portal issues and last-minute questions are far less stressful with a buffer.
• Treat filing and payment as two separate actions, and confirm both are done, not just the one that felt like the important part.

Most of our clients hand this whole cycle to us with monthly accounting rather than run it themselves, largely because the portal's Georgian-only interface makes a fifteen-minute task feel much longer for a first-time filer, and because the currency conversion step is exactly the kind of detail that is easy to get slightly wrong every month without ever noticing.

Monthly Filing, Handled

We file your declaration every month, convert foreign currency at the correct daily rate, and confirm payment has actually gone through, before the 15th, every time.

See what it costs

If you are setting up Small Business Status for the first time, the filing habit is worth building from the very first month rather than the month a large turnover year or an excluded activity forces the issue, covered respectively in our guide to the turnover threshold and the prohibited activities list. Registration itself is covered in how to register a company in Georgia, and the wider filing calendar, including the annual return, sits in our guide to taxes in Georgia.

Key takeaways

• Every Individual Entrepreneur, LLC and VAT-registered business files a monthly declaration, with narrow exceptions for natural persons and Micro Business.
• The deadline is the 15th of the month following the one being reported, on a rolling one-month lag.
• A zero-income month still requires a declaration. Skipping it accrues the same penalties as a late filing.
• Filing happens through the rs.ge portal, which is in Georgian throughout.
• Foreign currency income converts to GEL at the National Bank's official rate on the date each payment is received, not the invoice date or a monthly average.
• Late filing and underpayment carry daily interest and understatement penalties under the Tax Code, and a pattern of missed months surfaces at the worst possible moments.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to file a declaration if I earned nothing that month?

Yes. A zero-income month still requires a declaration by the 15th of the following month. This is one of the most common ways new businesses accumulate penalties, because it feels unnecessary when there is nothing to report.

When exactly is the monthly declaration due?

By the 15th of the month following the one being reported. January's income is declared by 15 February, February's by 15 March, and so on through the year, with no adjustment for weekends or holidays near the date.

Who has to file a monthly declaration in Georgia?

Any Individual Entrepreneur, with or without Small Business Status, any LLC of any type, and any VAT-registered business. A natural person with no registered business, and a Micro Business under 30,000 GEL with no employees, are the main exceptions.

How do I convert foreign currency income to GEL for the declaration?

Using the official exchange rate published daily by the National Bank of Georgia, applied on the date each payment was actually received. Each payment is converted separately at its own date's rate rather than averaged across the month.

What happens if I file late or pay late?

Daily interest accrues on the unpaid balance from the deadline until it is settled, and understating the amount owed in a declaration carries an additional penalty on top of the shortfall itself, under the general penalty rules in the Tax Code of Georgia.

Is the rs.ge portal available in English?

No, it is in Georgian throughout. This is the main practical difficulty for non-Georgian-speaking owners rather than the underlying filing steps, which are straightforward once you know the sequence.

Does filing a declaration also pay the tax, or are they separate?

They are separate actions. Submitting the declaration calculates and records what you owe, but you still have to make the payment from a Georgian bank account before the deadline. A declaration without a matching payment is not a completed filing.

Do I need a Georgian bank account to file and pay?

In practice, yes. You need somewhere to receive income and pay your monthly tax bill from, and having a Georgian account is what makes the payment step straightforward rather than a separate cross-border transfer every month.

What is the difference between the monthly declaration and the annual return?

The monthly declaration reports the previous month's turnover or obligations on a rolling basis throughout the year. The annual return is a separate, once-a-year filing on its own schedule, and filing your monthly declarations correctly does not remove the annual obligation.

Can an accountant file the monthly declaration on my behalf?

Yes, and it is the most common way our clients handle this. An accountant with access to your rs.ge account can file every month, apply the correct currency conversion, and confirm payment has gone through, which removes most of the risk of a missed or incorrect filing.

What if I made a mistake on a declaration I already filed?

Corrections are possible, and catching an error yourself before the Revenue Service does is considerably better than the alternative. The sooner a wrong figure is corrected, the smaller the interest and penalty exposure tends to be.