Euro Only Pricing Since 9 August 2026: What Bulgarian Businesses Need to Get Right

Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026 at the fixed rate of 1.95583 leva to one euro, and for a full year, from 8 August 2025 to 8 August 2026, every price shown to a customer had to appear in both currencies. That obligation has now ended. Since 9 August businesses price in euro, and any lev figure you choose to keep is optional and purely informational. The end of dual display did not end the rules on prices, though, because the Commission for Consumer Protection now checks price rises under the Consumer Protection Act until 9 August 2027. We are marketers rather than lawyers or accountants, so confirm the exact wording of the law and your receipt obligations with your accountant before you send anything to print.

Since 9 August 2026 the euro has been the only currency you are required to display, because the one year period of mandatory dual lev and euro display, which ran from 8 August 2025, ended on 8 August 2026. The fixed conversion rate has not changed: it remains 1.95583 leva to one euro, the rate Bulgaria joined at, and a converted amount is rounded mathematically to two decimal places. What changed is the obligation, not the arithmetic. If your menu, your shelf label or your website still shows two numbers because the law asked for two numbers, it now only has to show one, and the euro price has to be the one that clearly counts.

No. Since 9 August 2026 a lev price is optional and informational only, so you may keep it, drop it or keep it in some places and not others. If you keep it, the official guidance on evroto.bg says it has to be unmistakable that the euro price is the only selling and payable price and that the lev figure is there for reference, written clearly and in a way that cannot mislead anyone. The practical question is whether it helps your customer. Some of your customers may still think in leva, and for a bakery serving the same neighbourhood every morning a small secondary lev figure is a courtesy rather than clutter. If you keep it, keep it consistent and clearly secondary, one lev figure per price, in a smaller size, always converted at 1.95583 so nobody can accuse you of quietly rounding in your own favour.

Menus, shelf and price labels, your website, your Google Business Profile, your delivery platform listings and your social bios, and that is the full list of the places customers actually read a price. The ones businesses forget are the ones they do not own: the price fields and menu attached to a Google Business Profile, the item prices inside delivery apps, the price in a pinned Instagram post or a link in bio page, and the PDF menu somebody uploaded eighteen months ago that still ranks in search. Printed menus and price lists that still carry both currencies do not have to go in the bin, because evroto.bg says they can stay in use as long as the euro price is the one you actually charge and the lev figure is only there for reference. Write the list down, tick it off, and check each one on a phone rather than a laptop, because that is where the mismatch shows up first.

Pick honest, clean euro price points and be ready to show why, because a straight conversion produces numbers nobody would choose as a price: 9.99 leva at 1.95583 is 5.1078 euro, which the rounding rules turn into 5.11, and 19.99 leva becomes 10.22. So the decision is which way you move, and the law has a say in that until 9 August 2027. Moving 5.11 up to 5.50 euro is an increase of just over 7 percent, and the Consumer Protection Act now bans price rises that are not justified by objective economic factors. If the Commission for Consumer Protection asks, you have to show a direct and proportionate link between the rise and something real, such as higher supplier, labour, energy or raw material costs or a change in taxes, and a business found in breach faces a fine of up to €100,000, charged separately for each product, service or outlet affected. Rounding down to 5.00 never breaks that rule. If your costs really have gone up, keep the invoices that prove it, take the 5.50, and put one honest line on the menu saying prices were converted at the fixed rate and why they moved. Silence is what reads as gouging. A sentence that explains the change, ideally on the menu itself and repeated in a social post the week you change, costs nothing and removes the argument before it starts.

Yes, and this is the part worth your attention. Nothing forces you to reprint now that dual priced menus can stay in use, but when you do reprint, to drop the lev column or to settle on clean euro prices, the marginal cost of making the new menus work harder is the thinking, not the printing. That means menu engineering rather than retyping: knowing the gross profit on every dish, moving the high margin items to where eyes actually land, cutting the dishes that sell rarely and cost you prep time, and setting price points that hold at a clean euro number instead of being dragged there by a conversion. It also means the print itself finally matching the rest of your brand, which is design work we do, and for food and drink businesses the dish level costing sits inside our F&B Partnership. If you only do one thing beyond changing the numbers, cost your top ten sellers before the new menu goes to print.