Chorus Pro: e-invoicing for the public sector

Chorus Pro is a free platform managed by AIFE that handles the receipt, processing and routing of electronic invoices between suppliers and the public sector. The mechanism is straightforward: when a company invoices a public body, it no longer sends the document directly. It submits it to Chorus Pro, which routes it to the receiving entity and tracks its status ("being processed", "payment authorised", rejected). On the buyer side, it is the single point of receipt.

The obligation traces back to the ordinance of 28 June 2013 and its implementing decree, but it took effect on 1 January 2017. From that date, all public entities were required to receive invoices via Chorus Pro, and the obligation to issue invoices through the portal was phased in by company size: large companies in 2017, mid-market companies (ETI) in 2018, SMBs in 2019, and micro-businesses in 2020^[1]. Today, every supplier to the public sector, regardless of size, must invoice through this channel.

The scope is broad: the State and its ministries, plus regional and local authorities (regions, departments, municipalities), public administrative and industrial establishments, hospitals, and public operators such as SNCF, La Poste, Keolis, or RATP whenever they fall under public procurement rules. This is why an SMB that invoices a consultancy project to a regional council ends up having to master Chorus Pro just like a large industrial group.

The portal is just one of several entry points. The right choice depends mainly on the volume of invoices you send to public-sector buyers. The table below summarises the three routes, and the formalisation of PDPs for B2G flows from 2026^[2][3].

For a small business that invoices a single local council once a year, manually uploading a PDF to the portal is perfectly adequate: it is free and the public-facing interface is designed for exactly this. Once volumes increase, a supplier procurement solution that also manages your other flows becomes the right approach: rather than switching between the public portal, your accounting system, and your B2B invoices, a single dematerialised platform can route each invoice to the correct channel (Chorus Pro for public buyers, PPF or PDP for private ones) with no re-keying.

A PDP (certified private dematerialisation platform) is a private operator accredited by the French tax authority that transmits your invoices on your behalf. Historically limited to B2B flows, PDPs are officially authorised to route invoices to the public sector from 2026, with Chorus Pro itself becoming one accredited reception platform (PDPr) among others^[3]. In practice, you raise your invoice in your usual tool, the PDP converts it to the required structured format (typically Factur-X or UBL) and forwards it to Chorus Pro without any further action on your part.

The benefit goes beyond convenience. For a business that invoices both private clients and public entities, the PDP acts as a single routing hub: one submission point, and the platform knows whether the invoice should go to the PPF (private) or Chorus Pro (public). This is exactly the logic that will be generalised across the 2026 e-invoicing reform, and regular public-sector suppliers would do well to get ahead of it.

The B2B e-invoicing reform, effective 1 September 2026 for the universal reception obligation (all companies) and for issuance by large companies and mid-market companies (ETI), is built around a Public Invoicing Portal (PPF) operated by the DGFiP (French tax authority)^[4]. That PPF is Chorus Pro: the longstanding B2G platform is being expanded to become the pivot for B2B invoicing. The name changes; the underlying technology stays the same.

For public-sector suppliers, the implications are reassuring rather than unsettling. Your tool does not change: everything you were doing through Chorus Pro keeps working. What changes is the ecosystem around it: PDPs are now official gateways to the public sector, formats are standardising (the hybrid Factur-X format becomes the norm), and the routing logic ("private or public?") extends to your entire invoicing operation. A company already comfortable with Chorus Pro actually comes out ahead: it already has a handle on the gateway that everyone else will have to learn. For a detailed comparison of PPF, PDP, and Chorus Pro, our PDP vs PPF guide goes deeper.

Recurring public-sector suppliers (Keolis and RATP on transport contracts, La Poste service providers, SNCF equipment suppliers, plus regional and departmental service operators) have been living with Chorus Pro for years. For them, 2026 does not upend their day-to-day B2G operations. However, the B2B switch requires them to review their entire outbound invoicing chain: invoices sent to private clients will also need to pass through the PPF or a PDP from September 2026^[4].

Three practical workstreams follow. 1) Format: moving away from unstructured PDFs to structured invoices (Factur-X, UBL) that recipients can integrate without re-keying. 2) Channel: choosing between direct submission to the PPF and routing via a PDP, based on volumes and existing software. 3) Purchase-side compliance: receiving structured electronic invoices yourself means configuring your approval and reconciliation workflow. It is this last point, often overlooked, where an integrated supplier procurement platform makes the real difference, absorbing structured receipts and feeding them directly into the accounting system.

For SMBs and micro-businesses that have only ever had one public client to invoice, the challenge is more educational than technical: Chorus Pro is free, the upload interface is accessible, and AIFE's own tutorials are enough to get started. The real risk is discovering the obligation at the moment of billing, or assuming an email is enough. Those who support public procurement suppliers see it regularly: non-compliance with the channel does not trigger a direct fine, but it delays payment, which is often far more damaging to cash flow.

From a supplier's perspective, Chorus Pro is not just a submission portal: it is the downstream end of a public procurement cycle that begins with the purchase order and ends with payment. As e-invoicing becomes structured, the invoice naturally aligns with the purchase order and delivery note, the classic "three-way match" that procurement teams are looking to automate. When a government agency or public operator receives a structured invoice via Chorus Pro, it can automatically reconcile it against the corresponding order, speeding up processing and, ultimately, payment lead times.

The same logic applies on the supplier side: issuing a structured invoice also enables your own procurement system to better track commitments and settlements. Companies that invoice the public sector at high volumes have every reason to embed this logic in their supplier procurement tool, rather than treating Chorus Pro as an isolated exception. The convergence will happen anyway in 2026. Better to get ahead of it.