From 1 October 2026, online prices take on a new form: every selling price must be accompanied by an anchored price, and the entire price list must be published as a CSV or XML file, every working day by 8:00 AM.
If you sell products or services to end customers on your website, you are facing a change that alters the way you display prices. From 1 October 2026, every selling price must be accompanied by an anchored price, and the entire price list must be available as a CSV or XML file - in a format that machines, not just people, can read.
This is not just another administrative layer. It changes how customers see your prices and how you must manage your data. Unlike a PDF or a table on a page, a machine-readable price list must be accessible to automated tools, refreshed on a precise schedule, and archived for at least thirty days.
Below we cover everything important: who the obligation applies to, what exactly must be in the file, what the deadlines and penalties are, and how to set this up technically on your webshop - without manual work every day.
Without legal jargon, all in one place.
The price that applied on that day becomes the anchored price and no longer changes.
From that date both obligations enter into force for all obligated parties.
Displaying the anchored price and publishing the price list in XML/CSV format. They do not have the same scope of obligated parties.
Without a website there is no obligation for a machine-readable price list - an in-store price list is sufficient.
The measure is informational, not a price freeze. Only the difference becomes visible.
For sole proprietors from €1,000 to €20,000, for legal entities up to €30,000.
In practice they are most often merged into one. Displaying the anchored price and publishing the price list in a machine-readable format are not the same and do not obligate the same entities. Two questions are enough to know where you stand: do you sell goods or services to citizens, and do you have a website.
| Obligation | What it means in practice | Who it applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Displaying the anchored price | Every selling price must be accompanied by the price from 10 September 2026. | Every retailer and service provider selling to citizens - regardless of whether they have a website |
| Publishing the machine-readable price list | CSV or XML file on the website, accessible to programs | Only those obligated parties who have an established website |
Important: the legal form of business changes nothing. The Croatian Chamber of Trades and Crafts lists sole proprietors, companies, family farms, non-profit organisations, private renters, and independent professionals. One thing is decisive - do you address natural persons as customers.
Find your situation in the table below. If you recognise yourself in multiple rows, the stricter criterion applies.
| Your situation | Anchored price | Price list publication (CSV/XML) |
|---|---|---|
| Webshop | Yes | Yes - every working day by 8:00 AM |
| Physical store with a website | Yes | Yes - every working day by 8:00 AM |
| Physical store without a website | Yes | No - an in-store price list is sufficient |
| Services, and you have a website (salon, repair shop, driving school, clinic…) | Yes | Yes - with every price change, by 8:00 AM |
| Services without a website | Yes | No - an in-store price list is sufficient |
| You work exclusively with companies (B2B) | No* | No* |
* According to the position of the Croatian Chamber of Trades and Crafts, the obligation does not cover entities that deal exclusively with other companies. An official interpretation from the Ministry has not yet been published.
It is not important what kind of company you are, but whether you ever issue an invoice to a natural person who is not buying it for their business. Most people misclassify themselves right here.
One such invoice is enough for the obligation to cover everything you sell to that group. If you have no such customers, according to our reading you can skip this. If you have them occasionally, it is more cost-effective to set up a price list than to prove yourself later - the penalty for a legal entity goes up to €30,000.
The regulation itself uses the term additional price. The price list you publish requires the column anchored price. It is the same data - just called differently in different documents.
In this text we use both terms interchangeably, but we mean one thing.
The price that applied to a specific product or service on 10 September 2026, excluding promotions, discounts, clearance sales and other special forms of sale. That is the whole definition.
Why "anchored"? Because that price serves as a reference point from which the customer starts. When next to a price of €79 there is information that the product once cost €120, the brain automatically perceives €79 as a bargain - even if the €120 price was never real.
It was precisely this practice that the legislator targeted. Instead of the trader choosing the anchor and adapting it to the current campaign, it is fixed to a single day that applies to everyone - 10 September 2026.
| Period | Selling price | Anchored price | What appears on the price list |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 September 2026 | €15.00 | €15.00 | - |
| November 2026 | €18.00 | €15.00 | €18.00 / anchored price €15.00 |
The difference itself is not a violation. A penalty only follows if you fail to state the anchored price at all or state an amount that was not real.
The regulation mandates which data must be in the price list. At the same time, it does not define exactly what the CSV file should look like - neither the column names, nor their order, nor the delimiter, nor the XML schema.
| Data | Obligation | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Mandatory | Product name as the customer sees it |
| Code | Mandatory | Internal product code (SKU) |
| Brand | Mandatory | Product brand |
| Unit of measure | If applicable | pcs, kg, l, m… |
| Price per unit of measure | If applicable | Amount per litre, kilogram or piece |
| Retail price | Mandatory | Including VAT, as the customer sees it |
| Special form of sale | If applicable | Information on whether the price was applied during a promotion + the name of that form of sale |
| Anchored price | Mandatory | Price from 10 September 2026, excluding special forms of sale |
| Barcode | If applicable | Don't have one? Don't enter it. |
| Availability | Mandatory | available / unavailable |
| Data | Obligation | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Service name | Mandatory | E.g. "Haircut", "Air conditioner service" |
| Retail price | Mandatory | Price for the end consumer |
| Special form of sale | If applicable | Information + name of the form of sale |
| Anchored price | Mandatory | Price from 10 September 2026 |
Note for services: when you charge by the hour or per unit, the anchored price follows the hour or unit - not the total value of the job. If you determine the price after visiting the site, the price list includes the items you normally offer, with the price per unit.
The price list must be in a format that enables automated processing. The regulation allows two formats.
| Format | Advantages | When to choose it |
|---|---|---|
| CSV | Simple, lightweight, easy for both people and programs to read | Small and medium catalogues, quick creation and review |
| XML | Structured, supports hierarchy and attributes, better for complex catalogues | Large catalogues, multiple product variants, integrations |
The exact file format has not yet been prescribed. The regulation mandates which data the price list must contain, but does not determine column names, their order, the CSV delimiter, or the XML structure. The Croatian Chamber of Trades and Crafts has published its own template, but that is not an official Ministry example.
Practical tip: build the system so that the structure can be adjusted in a few minutes when the specification is released. If you compile the price list manually in Excel, every format change means starting over.
This is the part that is most often underestimated. For products, the obligation does not depend on whether anything changed. The price list is published every working day - including the day when all prices are the same as yesterday.
| Type of obligated party | Frequency | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| Retailers (products) | Once a day, for the current working day | No later than 8:00 AM |
| Service providers | With every price change | No later than 8:00 AM on the day the amended price list is published |
| Archive of published price lists | Each publication remains available | 30 days from publication, or from each change |
Plan a new service price a day in advance. If the new price list should be valid from Monday, the file must be on the website on Monday by 8:00 AM - not at noon.
Days are not skipped. A successful publication on Monday does not guarantee it went through on Tuesday. It is useful to set up an automatic check that alerts you if today's file does not exist.
| File name element | Example |
|---|---|
| Type of sales facility | online-webshop |
| Address of sales facility | Ulica-dr-Lavoslava-Ruzicke-42-Velika-Gorica |
| Sales facility ID | web-1 |
| Storage number | 0005 |
| Timestamp (date and time) | 01-10-2026T06-30 |
The same file must not be overwritten. Each publication carries its own name and timestamp, and older ones remain available for a month.
The file must be accessible to a software tool, not just a human in a browser. Without login, without clicks, in real time.
If you have multiple sales locations, all files must have the same structure, and the facility ID must differ from location to location.
This is where mistakes are most often made. Three numbers, three different roles. None replaces the other.
| Criterion | Anchored (additional) price | Lowest price in 30 days | Base price |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it shows | Price from a single fixed day - 10 Sep 2026 | Lowest price in the 30 days before the promotion | Price from a precisely defined day in the previous period |
| Since when | From 1 Oct 2026 | From 28 May 2022 (Art. 19 CPA) | From 17 Nov 2026 (NN 59/2026) |
| When it changes | Does not change | With each promotion | Depends on the rulebook (not yet published) |
| When displayed | Always, with every price | Only during discounts or promotions | According to the rulebook |
| Purpose | Comparison with a fixed point in the past | Basis for calculating the discount percentage | Additional reference point |
The product cost €40 on 10 September. In November it goes on sale from €50 to €35, and in the last thirty days its lowest price was €38.
The discount percentage is calculated from €38, not from €50 and not from €40.
Base price: does not start on 1 October. Article 7, paragraphs 1-9 of the Consumer Protection Act enter into force on 17 November 2026, and the minister still needs to prescribe by rulebook for which day, for which products and in what manner the base price is displayed. That rulebook has not been published at the time of writing.
| Date | What happens | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 2 May 2025 | Reference date of the first decision for 6 product categories | Retained only if you actually displayed the additional price for those 6 categories on the day the new decision entered into force |
| 10 September 2026 | Reference date for the new decisions - anchoring day | The price from that day becomes the anchored price for all products and services |
| 1 October 2026 | Both decisions enter into force | Anchored price and daily price list start to apply |
| 17 November 2026 | The obligation enters the Consumer Protection Act and becomes permanent | A third price also arrives - the base price. Publishing the price list becomes part of regular business, not an emergency measure. |
Transitional provision: if until now you only had the price and nothing more, you have one reference date, not two - yours is 10 September 2026. Anyone who has already been displaying the additional price keeps two dates: the older one for those 6 categories and the newer one for everything else.
A penalty only applies if you fail to display the anchored price at all or enter a fictitious amount.
Penalty range for natural persons - sole proprietors and independent professionals.
Maximum penalty for companies and other legal entities.
These are things you only see once the price list is actually set up - and where people most often stumble.
The file exists, but programs cannot fetch it. For the regulation, it is as if it does not exist. The same applies to firewall rules, security add-ons and robots.txt blocking the price list folder.
WordPress set to UTC - a publication scheduled for 6:00 AM runs at 8:30 AM, i.e. after the deadline, and timestamps in file names are shifted two hours back.
For a large catalogue, generating the price list takes minutes, and servers tend to cut off overly long requests. Set up a check that alerts you if today's file does not exist.
Price lists must remain available for 30 days from each publication. The same file must not be overwritten - each publication is a new file with its own timestamp.
A trader with two online stores has two sales locations. If both publish the price list under the same ID, it looks like one location is publishing two price lists with different prices for the same item.
A product introduced after 10 September has an anchored price from the day it was first added to the offer. That price can later not be reconstructed from anything except a database backup.
Open the price list URL in a browser where you are not logged in, then request it also outside the browser (e.g. curl or an HTTP request testing tool). If the second does not work, the file exists - but for the regulation it is as if it does not.
If you are building a new webshop or website with a price list, now is the moment to do it right. If you already have a webshop, we will upgrade it so that the price list is generated automatically - every day, without your intervention.
The price list is generated and published automatically, every working day by 8:00 AM, without manual work or Excel spreadsheets.
We pull anchored prices from your database or backup and write them to the product page and the price list - accurately and without guesswork.
Each publication remains available under its own name and timestamp. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is lost.
We test whether the file passes through Cloudflare, firewalls and security add-ons. If something blocks access, you get a notification - not a silent breach of obligation.
Server, scheduled tasks and timestamps in file names are aligned with the Croatian time zone - without shifts and without missed deadlines.
When the Ministry publishes the exact specification, we adjust the structure in a short time - without rebuilding the system.
We build webshops and websites with built-in automatic price list publication. Tell us what you sell - we will suggest a solution and a preliminary estimate.
This text is for informational purposes and is based on publicly available decisions, clarifications and guidelines. It is not legal advice.
Certain interpretations - for example, the application to entities dealing exclusively with other companies, the treatment of delivery costs, or the mandatory content of certain fields - have not been officially confirmed by the competent ministry at the time of writing. For a binding interpretation, contact the competent authority or a legal adviser.
Everything you want to know about the anchored price and machine-readable price list.
The anchored price (also called the additional price in the regulation) is the price that applied to a specific product or service on 10 September 2026, excluding the impact of promotions, discounts and other special forms of sale. It is displayed alongside every selling price and remains unchanged.
The obligation starts on 1 October 2026. From that date, retailers and service providers with a website must publish their price list in a machine-readable CSV or XML format.
All retailers and service providers that have a website, including those whose website serves only an informational or presentational purpose. A social media profile is not considered a website.
Retailers update their product price list once a day, no later than 8:00 AM for the current working day. Service providers publish a new price list with every price change, no later than 8:00 AM on the day the change takes effect.
Name, code, brand, unit of measure (if applicable), price per unit of measure (if applicable), retail price with information on the special form of sale, anchored price, barcode (if applicable), and availability status.
Service name, retail price, information on whether a special form of sale was applied along with its name, and the anchored price.
Yes. The anchored price does not freeze prices. You can change your selling price as many times as you like, up or down, and the anchored price remains the same alongside it. A penalty only applies if you omit the anchored price or enter an incorrect amount.
For sole proprietors, penalties range from €1,000 to €20,000, and for legal entities up to €30,000.
According to the position of the Croatian Chamber of Trades and Crafts, the obligation does not cover entities that deal exclusively with other companies. The crucial question is: do you ever issue an invoice to a natural person who is not purchasing within their business activity. If you do - the obligation applies.
Delivery does not affect the anchored price of a product. However, delivery is a service you charge to the consumer, so it is recommended to include it in the service price list with its price and anchored price. Free delivery above a certain amount is a condition, not a price - it does not go into the price list.
Yes. ALTEQ builds webshops and websites with built-in automatic publication of price lists in CSV and XML format, with an archive of publications, correct file names, and verification that the file is accessible to programs. Request a quote →
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