Factur-X: Is Your Business Ready for 2026?
Businesses in France are running out of runway. Starting September 1, 2026, large and mid-sized companies must be able to issue and receive structured e-invoices — and every VAT-registered business in France, regardless of size, must be able to receive them from that same date. If you issue or process invoices for customers in France, or you're building PDF tools for the ERPs and accounting platforms they rely on, the format at the center of that mandate is one you need to know well: Factur-X.
If that name sounds familiar, it's because Factur-X and Germany's ZUGFeRD standard are, technically, the same format. Here's what that means for your business, and how to build Factur-X-compliant PDFs with the Adobe PDF Library.
What Is Factur-X?
Factur-X is a hybrid electronic invoice format that pairs a human-readable PDF with a machine-readable XML file inside a single PDF/A-3 document. Open a Factur-X invoice in any PDF viewer and it looks like an ordinary invoice. But embedded inside that same file is a structured XML dataset — invoice number, seller and buyer identification, line items, tax breakdowns, payment terms — that accounting and ERP software can extract automatically, with no OCR and no manual re-keying.
Factur-X was developed jointly by France's FNFE-MPE and Germany's FeRD (the same organization behind ZUGFeRD) as a shared Franco-German standard. Since ZUGFeRD 2.0, released in 2019, the two formats have used the same underlying UN/CEFACT Cross Industry Invoice (CII) XML syntax and the same EN 16931 European e-invoicing semantic standard. The practical result: a properly built ZUGFeRD 2.x PDF and a Factur-X PDF are interchangeable. The current joint release is published as Factur-X 1.09.2 / ZUGFeRD 2.5.2 — one specification with two names, depending on which side of the Rhine you're standing on.
Why Factur-X, Specifically, for France
France's e-invoicing and e-reporting reform, administered by the Direction Générale des Finances Publiques (DGFiP), requires domestic B2B invoices to move through state-registered plateformes agréées (approved platforms, formerly called PDPs) rather than as unstructured PDFs or paper. The reform recognizes three structured formats: UBL 2.1, CII, and Factur-X. Of the three, Factur-X is the one most small and mid-sized businesses gravitate toward, because the visible PDF layer means a human can still open and read the invoice directly — no dedicated viewer or translation step required — while the embedded XML satisfies the platform and reporting requirements.
The rollout is phased by company size:
- September 1, 2026: Every VAT-registered business in France must be able to receive compliant e-invoices. Large enterprises and ETIs (intermediate-sized companies) must also be able to issue them.
- September 1, 2027: SMEs and micro-enterprises join the issuing obligation, along with certain non-established taxable persons operating in France.
France's National Assembly rejected a proposed further delay to this timeline in 2025, and the DGFiP's subsequent readiness guidance has reinforced that these dates are holding. If your invoicing pipeline touches French customers or suppliers, the safest assumption is that these deadlines arrive on schedule.
Factur-X Has Profiles — Choose the Right One
Not every Factur-X invoice carries the same amount of structured data. The specification defines five profiles, each a superset of the one before it:
- MINIMUM — bare invoice identification only: number, date, parties, currency, and document-level totals. No line items.
- BASIC WL (Without Lines) — adds more header-level detail but still no line items. This is the minimum profile accepted under the French reform for simple invoices.
- BASIC — the first profile to include line-item detail.
- EN 16931 (also called Comfort) — full alignment with the European EN 16931 semantic standard. This is the profile most businesses should target, since it guarantees interoperability with other EN 16931-compliant formats and platforms.
- EXTENDED — everything in EN 16931 plus additional fields for sector-specific or national requirements. France defines its own EXTENDED-CTC-FR variant for flows that need it.
A file simply being "a Factur-X PDF" doesn't by itself guarantee EN 16931 compliance — that depends on which profile you generate and whether every required field for that profile is actually populated. For most businesses preparing for the French mandate, EN 16931 is the profile to build toward.
How to Build a Factur-X-Compliant PDF
Structurally, creating a Factur-X invoice comes down to the same four steps whether you call it Factur-X or ZUGFeRD:
1. Convert the PDF to PDF/A-3. Factur-X requires the PDF/A-3 archival format specifically, because it's the only PDF/A variant that allows embedding files — like your invoice XML — that aren't themselves required to be PDF/A-compliant.
2. Prepare a compliant invoice XML. The XML must follow the CII schema for your target profile, with all required fields populated, and must be named factur-x.xml. This file needs to be built and validated by your invoicing logic before conversion — a PDF library can embed and structure the file correctly, but it can't generate compliant invoice data for you.
3. Embed the XML with the correct relationship type — and this is where France diverges from Germany. The XML is attached to the PDF as an associated file, and the PDF/A-3 spec requires an AFRelationship value describing how that attachment relates to the document. Germany's ZUGFeRD convention uses Alternative. France's Factur-X convention calls for Data or Source instead. If you're adapting a ZUGFeRD pipeline for French invoices — or building one from scratch with French customers in mind — this single value is an easy detail to get wrong, and it's exactly the kind of thing a Factur-X validator will flag.
4. Add the required XMP metadata and PDF/A-3 extension schema. Factur-X properties — document type, embedded filename, conformance level, and version — aren't part of the base PDF/A standard, so they need to be declared through a custom extension schema in the document's XMP metadata.
Once assembled, run the finished PDF through a Factur-X/ZUGFeRD validator to confirm both PDF/A-3 conformance and the profile-specific XML content before treating an invoice as compliant.
Factur-X Conversion with the Adobe PDF Library
Datalogics' Adobe PDF Library (APDFL) handles the PDF/A-3 conversion, file embedding, and metadata work Factur-X compliance requires. Our C++ sample, ConvertToFactur-X, walks through the full process end to end:
- Opens an input PDF and a
factur-x.xmlinvoice file - Attaches the invoice XML to the PDF as a named file attachment
- Converts the document to PDF/A-3b
- Sets the
AFRelationshipkey on the attachment — configurable on the command line, so you can passAlternativefor German ZUGFeRD invoices orData/Sourcefor French Factur-X invoices from the same codebase - Writes the required Factur-X XMP metadata and PDF/A extension schema
- Saves the finished, validator-ready PDF
Because Factur-X and ZUGFeRD 2.x share the same underlying structure, this sample — and the same conversion approach — covers both. If you're already generating ZUGFeRD invoices for German customers with APDFL, extending that pipeline to produce Factur-X invoices for French customers is largely a matter of pointing at the correct relationship type and profile, not building something new.
Note that APDFL doesn't generate or validate the invoice XML itself — your input XML needs to already be Factur-X-compliant for the target profile before conversion. What APDFL handles is the PDF/A-3 packaging, file attachment, and metadata work that turns a compliant XML invoice and a regular PDF into a conformant Factur-X document.
Factur-X Code Samples by Language
The ConvertToFactur-X sample above is written in Adobe C++, but the same conversion approach is available across Datalogics' supported languages and interfaces:
Getting Started
Whether you're preparing your own invoicing pipeline for French customers or adding Factur-X support to a product used by companies who do business in France, September 2026 is closer than it looks. Adobe PDF Library already supports the PDF/A-3 creation and file-embedding work Factur-X compliance requires — the ConvertToFactur-X sample is a working starting point today. Start your free trial of Adobe PDF Library and build toward compliance now, ahead of the deadline.