DAC7: what OnlyFans and other platforms automatically report about you to the tax authorities

What DAC7 is — and what it is not

DAC7 is Directive (EU) 2021/514, in force since 1 January 2023. It requires digital platforms to collect tax data on their sellers and report it annually to the tax authorities. Spain transposed it through Law 13/2023 and Royal Decree 117/2024, implemented via Form 238, filed by the platform — not by you — each January.

DAC7 creates no new tax. It doesn't change what you owe, your income tax bracket, or any obligation you didn't already have. All it does is put a figure with your name on it directly in front of the tax authority, to be cross-checked against what you declared. It's a change in visibility, not in taxation.

That distinction matters because it explains the underlying error in many guides: treating the reporting threshold as if it were a tax-free allowance. It isn't. If you're carrying on an economic activity, your tax obligations exist whether or not the platform ever reports anything.

First error: "if you earn under EUR 2,000 they don't report you"

This is false for content creators. The threshold of 30 transactions and EUR 2,000 exists, but it applies exclusively to the sale of goods.

The annex to Royal Decree 117/2024 defines an "excluded seller" as one for whom the platform facilitated, through the sale of goods, fewer than thirty relevant activities for total consideration not exceeding EUR 2,000 during the reporting period. Both conditions must be met at once, and both are tied to the word "goods."

Content creation is not a sale of goods. It is a supply of services. And for personal services there is no threshold at all: a single reportable transaction is enough. The same applies to immovable property rental, which likewise gets no de minimis relief.

Put differently: if your activity falls within the directive's scope, it falls in from the first euro. A creator earning EUR 300 a year is in exactly the same position as one earning EUR 80,000.

Second error: assuming everything you do is reportable

That isn't automatic either. Not everything a creator is paid for fits the definition of a "personal service". Subscriptions to pre-recorded content probably fall outside it, according to the OECD commentary.

DAC7 doesn't cover "platform income" in the abstract. It covers four listed activities, and the one that may apply to you is personal services, defined in Annex V, Section 1.A(11), as a service involving time- or task-based work carried out by one or more individuals at the request of a user, online or offline.

The weight sits on those last five words: at the request of a user. The commentary to the OECD model rules reads this as requiring the service to be adapted, at least to some degree, to what a particular user asked for. The Dutch State Secretary of Finance put it usefully: the user must be able to influence how the service is delivered.

The FAQs to the OECD model rules confirm that pre-recorded digital content — photos and videos posted by a creator — does not meet that customisation requirement and falls outside the reporting framework. The same conclusion has been argued for livestreams accessible simply by paying a subscription.

For a typical creator, that splits the activity in two:

Exactly what data is sent

This isn't a generic flag that "you have income." It's an identifying and financial package:

• Full name, address and date of birth
• Tax ID and member state of tax residence
• The financial account identifier — normally your IBAN
• Gross amounts paid, broken down by quarter
• Fees and commissions withheld by the platform
• The number of relevant activities in the period

This isn't only European

A common mistake is assuming that because OnlyFans is British — Fenix International Ltd, based in London — and the UK left the EU, the directive doesn't reach it. It does, by two routes.

First, DAC7 reaches non-EU platform operators with EU-resident sellers: they must register in a member state and report. Second, since January 2024 the UK has applied the OECD model reporting rules for digital platforms (MRDP), the functional equivalent of DAC7, feeding the same automatic exchange of information between administrations.

Canada is another. Its rules live in Part XX of the Income Tax Act and are expressly based on the same OECD model rules; the bill carrying them received Royal Assent on 22 June 2023. Platforms had to run their due diligence on sellers already registered as of 1 January 2024, and the first information return was due on 31 January 2025 for the 2024 calendar year. The annual exchange of those records is scheduled for the end of April following the year reported.

Personal services are a reportable activity there too, and the definition turns on the same hinge as the European one. The Canada Revenue Agency describes a personal service as time- or task-based work performed by one or more individuals at the request of a consumer using a platform, unless it is purely ancillary to the transaction. So the reasoning two sections above carries across: what a specific person asked you for is what brings the payment into scope.

One number does not carry across, and it is the one to be careful with. Canada's excluded-seller threshold is fewer than 30 relevant activities for the sale of goods with total consideration not exceeding CDN $2,800 — a different amount from the EUR 2,000 discussed earlier, and tied to the sale of goods in exactly the same way. If what you sell is a service rather than goods, neither figure is a floor you sit below.

The regime is international, not European. Switching platforms within the same bloc changes nothing, and looking for a platform outside the perimeter has less and less room to run as more jurisdictions adopt the OECD rules.

The 60-day rule: your account can be blocked

This part gets little coverage and has the most immediate consequences. If the platform asks for your tax details and you don't provide them, it must remind you. After two reminders and 60 days without a response, the platform is required to close your account or withhold your payments.

This isn't a commercial threat from the platform: it's an obligation the rules impose on it, and the incentive to comply is strong. In Spain the tax agency provides for a fine per omitted or incorrectly reported seller, and at EU level penalties on the platform can reach a percentage of its global revenue.

The practical reading: ignoring the platform's tax form doesn't make you invisible. It stops you getting paid.

The part nobody tells you: complying exposes you to your bank

Here is the real tension, and the reason this guide sits on a site about getting paid rather than a tax site.

DAC7 makes your activity traceable and, above all, labelled. It's no longer just money coming in: it's money with an identified origin, an associated IBAN and an activity category. The same trail that puts you right with the tax authority is what tells your bank exactly where your income comes from.

That matters because some institutions have closed accounts over precisely this. Not as a suspicion: there are written policies expressly excluding adult entertainment, documented cases with names attached, and at least one bank that has had to explain in court why it closed six accounts belonging to a client in the sector. We've compiled it institution by institution, with the source next to every claim.

The conclusion isn't that complying is a bad idea — not complying is worse, and DAC7 has closed that door anyway. The conclusion is that being tax-compliant and being stably banked are two different problems, and solving the first without the second leaves you halfway. The answer isn't hiding where the money came from: it's making sure it arrives through a channel that survives both kinds of scrutiny.