Pricing and billing
EU VAT number checker
Check an EU VAT number against VIES itself, and see the registered trader name.
Free, no accountLive check
Result
Fill in the form and press Check VAT number. The verdict and the detail appear here.
What this is
This EU VAT number checker calls VIES - the European Commission’s own VAT Information Exchange System - directly, so the answer is a live registration status from the member state itself, not a cached guess, plus the trader’s name and address when that member state’s tax authority publishes them through it.
VIES does not hold its own database of VAT numbers; each query is forwarded to the national database of the member state named and the answer returned on the spot, which is what makes a VIES answer a live check rather than a reference table.
Whether VIES returns a trader’s name and address alongside a valid result is entirely the member state’s own choice - several do not return either, so a valid number with nothing shown beside it is still a valid number.
How to read the result
A result of "is a valid VAT number" with nothing further is as complete an answer as VIES ever gives for some member states: the absence of a name is stated directly as a finding here rather than left unexplained.
"Could not check" is a different outcome from "not valid", and only appears when VIES itself could not be reached or answered with something unreadable - never when VIES plainly said the number is not registered.
Common mistakes
What goes wrong most often, and how to tell.
- Reading "could not check" as the number being invalidVIES is a live system with its own occasional outages, and a timeout or an error response from it says nothing about the number itself. This page keeps that outcome separate from an actual "not valid" answer rather than letting a bad moment for VIES look like a bad VAT number.
- Expecting a name and address for every valid numberSeveral member states’ tax authorities never return a trader’s name or address through VIES, for a valid number as much as any other. A blank there is that member state’s own choice, not a lookup that half-failed.
- Typing the country code into the VAT number boxThe country is its own field here because VIES’s endpoint takes the two letters and the number separately - paste just the digits (and letter, where the country uses one) after the country code, with no spaces.
Questions
What people ask about this tool.
- Live. Each check calls VIES’s own REST endpoint, which forwards the query to the named member state’s national VAT database and returns its answer directly - this page caches that answer for a short period only to avoid asking VIES the same question twice within the same minute.
- Because returning a trader’s name and address through VIES is each member state’s own decision, and several do not do it at all. A valid result with nothing beside it is still a valid result.
- Because the two mean different things: VIES itself can be unreachable or answer badly for reasons that have nothing to do with the VAT number, and treating that the same as VIES saying "not registered" would tell someone a number is wrong when it might not be.
- Because VIES’s own endpoint uses "EL" for Greece - its member state code differs from the ISO country code there, and this page follows VIES’s own spelling rather than ISO’s.
Sources
Every fixed value here comes from the provider’s own documentation. These pages change, so each says the day it was last read.
Use it from the API
The same check, as one request.