Best VAT Number Checkers and Validation Tools in 2026

VIES on-the-Web is the European Commission's public interface to the VAT Information Exchange System, the network through which EU tax administrations exchange VAT-registration data and information on intra-Community supplies. A query is sent over a secure network to the database of the member state that issued the number, and the reply returns within seconds; the Commission stresses that there is no EU-level VAT database.

Its coverage is 27 member states plus Northern Ireland under the XI code. Entering one's own VAT number as requester produces a unique consultation number, which the Commission advises archiving as proof of the check. A SOAP web service offers the same function to software, and a REST status endpoint reports each national database's availability.

The limits are documented by the Commission itself. Name and address are shown only where the issuing state permits; otherwise they appear as "---". Batch requests are not supported, national databases have scheduled maintenance windows, and concurrency limits can reject requests at busy times. Numbers held by businesses not registered for intra-EU trade in some states may show as invalid even when correct. GB numbers have not been covered since 1 January 2021.

"Check a UK VAT number" is the GOV.UK service run by HM Revenue & Customs for confirming that a UK VAT registration number is valid and seeing the name and address of the business it is registered to. It is the official route for GB numbers, which VIES stopped validating at the start of 2021.

A VAT-registered business that enters its own VAT number can use the service to prove when it checked a number. For software, HMRC publishes the Check a UK VAT number API on its Developer Hub. Version 2.0 is the recommended version and is labelled beta; it sits behind authentication, and production credentials are issued after testing in the sandbox and accepting the terms of use. The API returns registration status, name and address, and a reference number when used in verified check mode. Version 1 was removed on 17 February 2025.

The limitations are practical. The service cannot search by business name, cannot be used for a business still awaiting registration, and covers only UK numbers. HMRC's API registration is stated to take about two weeks and possibly longer.

The Brønnøysund Register Centre runs Norway's business registers, including the Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities (Enhetsregisteret). Norway is outside the EU, so Norwegian numbers cannot be checked in VIES; the register's open API is the official alternative. Each entity is identified by a nine-digit organisation number, and the API rejects any value that is not exactly nine digits.

For VAT purposes the important field is registrertIMvaregisteret, a boolean showing whether the entity is in the VAT register, with a companion field for the date of registration in the VAT register. The standard endpoints are published under the NLOD 2.0 open licence and the documentation's examples use no credentials; endpoints that expose personal identification numbers are secured with Maskinporten. The whole register can be downloaded as JSON, CSV or a spreadsheet, with files generated nightly at about 05:00, which makes local bulk screening possible.

The service answers a register question rather than issuing a consultation number, so the business must keep its own record of the result. Search queries are capped at 10,000 results, and the documentation recommends the download files for complete datasets.

Switzerland, like Norway, is outside VIES. Swiss VAT numbers are built from the enterprise identification number (UID), which follows the pattern CHE-123.456.789; the VAT number is the UID followed by MWST, TVA or IVA depending on language, and the Federal Tax Administration states that the English suffix "VAT" is not permitted. The official place to check a number is the UID register, operated by the Federal Statistical Office (BFS) from Neuchâtel.

The register can be searched by name or by UID, with filters for address, canton, municipality and legal form. Each entry shows its VAT-register status (active, deleted or not listed) and the start and end dates of VAT liability, as well as commercial-register status. Name search and liability dates make it more informative than a valid/invalid answer.

The register provides no consultation number. The Federal Tax Administration notes that invoices may show the number in variant forms, such as without dots or without the suffix, so automated tools must normalise input before searching.

VAT Sense is a VAT and GST compliance API that validates numbers against official registers: all 27 EU member states through VIES, with two official fallback services, UK numbers through HMRC, XI numbers through VIES, and Swiss (UID), Norwegian (MVA), Australian (ABN/GST), South African and Brazilian (CNPJ) identifiers.

Passing the customer's own VAT number as requester_vat_number returns a VIES or HMRC reference that can be kept with invoices as evidence. Responses include the company name and address where the register provides them, and the service can match a name and address held by the customer against the register. Bulk validation by CSV upload is available in the dashboard with PDF and CSV reports, and the API also returns VAT rates for 179 countries. Servers are hosted in London.

Pricing is in pounds sterling and excludes VAT. Failed upstream lookups are not counted, and every plan includes every endpoint. The company's legal entity and founding date are not stated on the pages reviewed, and coverage outside the eight named regimes is limited to rates rather than number validation.

Vatstack is operated by Gatemill, Inc., whose copyright notice runs from 2018. Its validation API checks VAT numbers for all 27 EU member states, the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Australia and Singapore, using official government databases including VIES.

Each EU and UK check returns a unique consultation number, and Vatstack stores it automatically once the customer's own VAT number is saved in account settings. The response includes validity, format validity, active status, company name, address and type, and timestamps. Its distinctive design is the handling of outages: when a government service returns an error such as SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE, Vatstack still accepts the request, keeps retrying in the background and delivers the result to the customer's server by webhook. Bulk re-validation is available by CSV import.

Prices are shown in dollars without a currency code and exclude VAT. The Enterprise plan carries a 99.95% SLA, and data is processed in the EU. The asynchronous model needs a webhook endpoint, and coverage is narrower than VAT Sense's.

MonitorPay sells an API for verifying payees before payment, and VAT Check is one of its products alongside IBAN validation, payee name matching and account ownership checks. The VAT Check page states real-time registry data for 150 jurisdictions, sourced from official government databases such as VIES and HMRC and national registries.

A response returns validity, the registered company name and address, a VAT status of Active, Invalid, Not Found or Deregistered, a source reference and a timestamp of the check. A bulk endpoint accepts thousands of VAT numbers via API or file upload, and enterprise clients can receive webhook alerts when a verified number changes status or stops matching the entity.

Pricing is usage-based from €0.10 per check, with the first 100 checks free and no monthly minimum; the same page also mentions a free trial of three checks per day without explaining how the two offers relate. The pages reviewed do not mention a VIES or HMRC consultation number, and the operating legal entity is not named.

Lookuptax validates tax identification numbers in more than 100 countries and says it integrates only with official national databases. Its named sources include VIES, HMRC, the Australian Business Register, the Canada Revenue Agency, Italy's Agenzia delle Entrate, Spain's Agencia Tributaria, France's SIREN/SIRET register, New Zealand's NZBN, the Swiss federal administration and China's GSXT.

Business name and address are returned when the source's privacy rules permit. Users can upload tax IDs in bulk, and the service keeps an audit trail of validation history. The site displays logos of organisations including Cummins and MDPI under "trusted by teams around the world". Every plan includes access to all supported countries.

Lookuptax is more expensive per validation than EU-focused APIs: the Lite plan costs $49 a month for 200 validations. Claims of "100% accurate" validation on the home page are the vendor's own and are not independently supported. The pages reviewed do not mention consultation numbers, and the company's location and legal entity are not stated.

Fonoa is a tax technology company whose validation product, presented as Fonoa Validate, checks tax IDs against live government registries in more than 120 countries. Its footer identifies Fonoa Technologies Ltd, registered in Ireland with company number 677236 and a registered office in Dublin.

Results include current registration status, registered business name and address and tax metadata. Fonoa can search for a tax number by company name, validates up to 50,000 records in one batch, and uses fuzzy matching to flag mismatched, incomplete or outdated VAT data. Named customers on the page include Wellhub, Remote and Coda; Wellhub is quoted as reporting 33% fewer tax ID validation tickets, a figure supplied by the vendor.

Fonoa publishes no prices, does not document consultation numbers on the page reviewed, and does not name the individual registries it queries. The product is aimed at large platforms rather than small businesses checking a handful of numbers.

vatcheckapi is run by Everapi GmbH, an Austrian company. It validates VAT numbers for all 27 EU countries, the UK and Northern Ireland, returning a format check, checksum, registration status and the registered company name and address as JSON, with the time of each check. Data comes from official VAT registries.

The same quota covers EORI number validation, IBAN validation and e-invoice validation for XML, ZUGFeRD and Factur-X files; one VAT, EORI or IBAN check uses one validation, a ZUGFeRD or Factur-X PDF two. Failed calls do not count. Paid plans can enable overage up to a spending cap; otherwise the API returns HTTP 429 at the limit. The vendor states it is used by over 2,000 businesses and developers.

Consultation numbers are not mentioned on the pages reviewed, and coverage stops at the EU and UK. Sandbox keys and team management start on the Medium plan, and IP allow-listing on the Large plan.

Abstract API Inc. offers a VAT Validation & Rates API as one of a family of developer APIs. It states full European Union coverage for validation and says it relies primarily on the European Commission's VIES system, supplemented with additional data and validation. VAT rates are available for non-EU countries that use VAT.

The sample response contains the VAT number, a validity flag and company name, address, country and country code; in the published sample the country and country code values appear swapped, so integrators should rely on the full documentation. The Standard plan costs $99 a month billed annually and includes 60,000 requests at three requests per second, although the page labels this quota both per month and per year in different places. Enterprise adds a 99.99% uptime SLA, SSO and an account manager.

The API does not cover GB numbers, consultation numbers are not documented, and the entry price is high for a VIES wrapper compared with vatcheckapi or vatlayer.

VATcomply is a free API service that needs no key or authentication. Its /vat endpoint validates European VAT numbers against VIES, and companion endpoints return EU VAT rates from the Commission's TEDB database, European Central Bank exchange rates, IBAN validation and IP geolocation. The code is published under the MIT licence on GitHub, so a business can run its own copy.

Requests are limited to two per second per IP address. For developers prototyping a checkout, or small businesses that want a JSON interface to VIES without writing a SOAP client, it is the lowest-cost option in this list. Because answers come directly from VIES, the same member-state rules apply: name and address appear only where the issuing state permits, and national maintenance windows still produce unavailability errors.

It adds nothing to VIES in terms of coverage or evidence: GB numbers, consultation numbers, retries and bulk processing are not documented, and as a free service it carries no published service-level commitment.

VATFind is a company identity lookup service whose main function is the reverse of a classic checker: it finds a company's VAT number from its legal name and country, checks whether a VAT or EIN number links to a company record, and finds US EINs by company name. VIES cannot return a number from a name, so this fills a real gap.

Access is by web, API and an MCP interface for AI agents, with monitoring of company changes and VAT status included in paid plans. VATFind names customers including London Stock Exchange Group, Trustpair, Experian and Kroll. Its search lists 249 selectable jurisdictions, but the coverage page states that selectable does not mean every company or identifier is available.

The service draws on a licensed company-data source, with details cached for up to 15 minutes, and its own documentation states that results are not a live authority response and that the issuing authority should be checked when a decision depends on a number. It does not issue consultation numbers, and the Starter plan works out at $0.20 per check, more than most EU-focused APIs.

vatlayer is an APILayer product combining EU VAT number validation, EU VAT rates and VAT-compliant price calculation. Its documentation describes validation across EU member states using official EU databases and member-state systems, without naming VIES.

Plans are priced in US dollars, from a free plan of 100 requests a month to an Enterprise plan of 20,000 requests at $99.99 a month, with discounts of 10–15% for yearly billing and published per-request overage rates. The pricing FAQ states that 256-bit HTTPS encryption is included with paid plans, and the free plan is excluded from commercial use. Optional annual Platinum Support costs from $479.88.

Overage is billed per request, from about $0.04 on Basic to $0.02 on Enterprise. The documentation reviewed does not list response fields, does not mention consultation numbers or UK coverage, and offers no bulk or retry features, which places it last on the methodology's criteria despite its low entry price.