EU VAT number validator
Check an EU VAT number's format, and whether the European Commission's VIES service has an active registration for it. The trading name comes back too, where the member state discloses it. No signup.
One at a time is the demo. A list is the job.
Checking one value tells you about that value. The reason anyone does this at all is the other few thousand — last week’s signup export, the list you inherited, the file nobody has opened since. Paste or upload it and every row is scored: emails, phone numbers, IPs and domains mixed together, duplicates removed and counted first.
Check a whole list — free, no signup →Same check from your code
VAT validation runs against the Commission's VIES service, not our data, so it is not an API endpoint. What the API scores on a B2B signup is everything around the VAT number — the email, the IP, the phone number and the company domain.
curl "https://www.layercall.com/v1/score/user?email=finance@example.com&domain=example.com" \ -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"
1,000 lookups a month free, no card. Get a key or read the docs.
What each signal means
Format
The member state's own VAT number structure — nine digits for Germany, eleven for Italy, a B-block for the Netherlands.
Computed here, so it always answers even when VIES does not. A format failure is the common case and is usually a digit dropped from a copy and paste.
VIES registration
Whether the European Commission's VIES service has an active registration for the number.
This is the part that distinguishes a well-formed number from a real business. A B2B customer claiming a VAT exemption with an unregistered number is either mistaken or trying it on.
Trading name
The registered name, where the member state discloses it through VIES.
Lets you check the number belongs to the company that gave it to you rather than one they copied off an invoice. Some states return nothing by design, which is a policy choice rather than a missing record.
Registry unavailable
VIES could not be asked — reported as its own state, never as a failure.
Member states take their databases offline for maintenance and VIES answers isValid:false with an error code alongside. Treating that as 'not registered' would tell you to refuse a legitimate company, so it is shown as amber and never as red.
Questions
What does 'registry unavailable' mean?
VIES federates to each member state's own database, and individual countries take theirs offline routinely. When that happens VIES still replies, with isValid set to false and an error code such as MS_UNAVAILABLE explaining why. We read the error code, so an outage shows as amber rather than as a red 'not registered' — those are opposite pieces of advice and collapsing them is the classic bug in VAT checkers.
Is VIES the official source?
Yes. It is the European Commission's own service and the same one every other VAT checker queries. Nobody has a better source, which also means nobody can validate an EU VAT number while VIES is down for that country.
Does a valid VAT number mean the customer is legitimate?
It means the company is registered. VAT numbers are public and appear on every invoice a business issues, so anyone can copy one. It is a useful signal about the company and almost no signal about the person filling in your form.
Do you support UK VAT numbers?
Northern Ireland numbers, which carry the XI prefix and remain in VIES, yes. Great Britain left the VIES scheme after Brexit and GB numbers are checked through HMRC's own service instead, which we do not query.