Anchor prices and the web price list from 1 October 2026: what a small business in Croatia has to do

Two decisions, one date: 1 October 2026

The Croatian government published two decisions in Narodne novine 101/2026 that directly affect every trader or service provider who sells to consumers, and both take effect on 1 October 2026, supervised by the State Inspectorate (Državni inspektorat). The first requires displaying an additional, "anchor" price next to the current price. The second requires publishing a structured, machine-readable price list on the business's website. These are two separate obligations, and they are often confused with Fiskalizacija 2.0 and e-invoicing — they have nothing to do with either. Neither one involves sending anything to the Tax Administration; both simply mean publishing something on your own website, which the supervising authorities then collect from there.

If you run a café, restaurant, hair or beauty salon, a trade business, a small shop, or anything in tourism, and you sell to private customers (B2C), this applies to you. If you sell exclusively to other businesses (B2B), these two decisions do not apply to you.

Part one: the anchor price — what you actually have to display

The anchor price is the price that applied on 10 September 2026. From 1 October, next to every current price you show a consumer, you must display that anchor price too — clearly, visibly, and legibly. This is not a price cap — you can still raise prices. It is purely informational: the customer sees what a product or service cost a month ago, next to what they pay today.

The obligation applies everywhere a price is shown: on a shelf, a menu or a service price list, a leaflet or poster, an in-store digital screen, outdoor advertising, a website, and a web shop. A concrete café example: if "Coffee with milk" cost €2.00 on 10 September and you now charge €2.20, the menu has to show both — the current price of €2.20 and, next to it, something like "price on 10 Sept 2026: €2.00". The same applies to a hairdresser, a beauty salon, a room you rent out, or an item on a shop shelf.

A few exceptions and details are worth knowing up front:

• If an item was on a promotional discount on 10 September, the anchor price is the regular price that day, not the promo price.
• Food and beverages, cosmetics, cleaning products, and household goods keep the reference price from 2 May 2025 set by the earlier decision (NN 75/25) — nothing new changes for those categories right now.
• An item introduced after 10 September has no anchor price — instead, keep a record of its introduction date and starting price in case it's checked.

A practical step worth doing right away: export your price list from the till or Minimax exactly as it stood on 10 September, photograph your current menu or service price list, and screenshot your website as it looks today. That record is your evidence when someone asks where an anchor price came from.

Part two: the web price list, in CSV or XML

The second decision is independent of the first and applies to every business that has a website — even a purely informational one with no web shop. A plain informational site counts; a Facebook or Instagram profile on its own does not. The obligation is to publish a price list in a structured, machine-readable form — specifically a CSV or XML file. A PDF, an image of a price list, or a table embedded in an HTML page is not enough, however tidy it looks.

Update deadlines depend on the type of business:

• Traders selling products publish a fresh file every working day, no later than 8:00 a.m. for that day.
• Service providers publish a new version by 8:00 a.m. on the day a price actually changes — not every day, only when something genuinely changes.

Every published version of the file has to stay available for 30 days, so you cannot simply overwrite yesterday's file with today's — there has to be a way to go back and see the price history. The decision (Article VII) also requires that the website allow automated collection of the file by dedicated software tools, so it cannot sit behind a login or be blocked from automated retrieval.

The required fields differ for products and services:

• For products: name, code, brand, unit of measure, price per unit, retail price with a note on whether a special form of sale applies (and which), the anchor price on the reference date, barcode, and availability (available/unavailable).
• For services: service name, retail price with a note on any special form of sale, and the anchor price.

The file name itself has to carry the type of sales location, its address, a location identifier, the store number, and a timestamp — so the naming isn't arbitrary. As of 23 September 2026, no official technical schema (the exact field-by-field XML/CSV format) has been published yet, so businesses are working from the requirements the decision itself lays out while the final specification is pending.

None of this is sent to the Croatian Tax Administration or any ministry. The obligation is to publish it on your own website — state authorities collect it from there, automatically. This is not the same thing as Fiskalizacija 2.0 or e-invoicing; it is a separate, new price-transparency obligation.

Checklist: do this before 1 October

• Export or record your price list exactly as it stood on 10 September 2026 — for every product and service you sell to consumers.
• Check whether your product falls under the 2 May 2025 reference-price category (food, beverages, cosmetics, cleaning products, household goods) — nothing new to prepare there right now.
• Prepare the anchor-price label for your menu, service price list, shelves, and website, shown clearly next to the current price.
• Check whether your website already has a CSV or XML price-list export — if not, someone needs to set that up before 1 October.
• Decide who updates that file, and how, every working day (or on every price change, if you're a service provider) by 8:00 a.m.
• Make sure older versions of the file stay available for 30 days, not just the latest one.

How I solve it

These two obligations turn into daily manual work fast if someone has to watch them by hand — exactly the kind of thing that gets forgotten during a busy shift. I build the price list as part of the site itself, not as an extra task: the CSV and XML files publish themselves automatically, carry the correct timestamp in the file name, and keep 30 days of history without anyone tracking it manually.

Next step

If you're not sure whether either of these decisions applies to you, or your website has no machine-readable price list at all, the first conversation is free — I look at your current site and suggest the simplest fix before the deadline. Fill in the quote form and I reply with a concrete proposal within 24 hours, no obligation.

Sources: Narodne novine 101/2026 — Decision on displaying an additional price as a direct price-control measure and Narodne novine 101/2026 — Decision on publishing a product and service price list as a direct price-control measure.