VAT Number Checker for UK and EU Numbers

What a VAT Number Looks Like

Every UK and EU VAT number starts with a two-letter country code. The UK uses GB, Northern Ireland businesses trading goods with the EU use XI, and Greece uses EL rather than GR. The checker accepts spaces, dots and lowercase, and tells you the right format before it calls a registry.

UK VAT numbers

A standard UK VAT number is GB followed by 9 digits, for example GB123456782. The last two digits are check digits worked out from the first seven (HMRC's mod 97 and mod 9755 methods), so the checker catches most typos before asking HMRC. Branches of a group can have 12 digits. Government departments use GD and health authorities HA, each followed by 3 digits. A VAT-registered UK business that imports or exports usually has the EORI number GB, the same 9 digits, then 000, which is why the checker tries that EORI for you.

Ireland, Belgium and Malta also issue the EORI from the VAT number, so the checker tries those too. Other EU countries, Germany and France among them, issue the EORI from a different register, so it cannot be worked out from the VAT number: check it on its own with the EORI checker.

When to Check a VAT Number

• Before you zero-rate a sale of goods to an EU business, or apply the reverse charge on services.
• When you set up a new supplier, so the VAT on their invoices is reclaimable.
• Before a customer master clean-up, migration or ERP go-live: run the whole list and fix the rows that come back not valid or wrong format.
• When an invoice or purchase order shows a VAT number you have not seen before.

If orders and invoices from these partners still arrive as PDFs and emails, the free invoice extractor and PO extractor pull the VAT number and line items out for you. For UK retail EDI, the EDIFACT inspector reads EANCOM and other EDIFACT files.

Why the Peppol Check Matters for UK Businesses

Peppol is the network businesses use to send e-invoices and electronic orders between each other's systems. The UK government has said it will require e-invoicing for all VAT invoices from April 2029, with Peppol as the core network. A supplier or customer that shows as "On Peppol" here can already receive documents through any Peppol access point, without a separate connection.

Read more in our guides to the UK e-invoicing mandate for 2029 and Peppol in the UK, or look up any participant with the free Peppol lookup.

Where the Answers Come From

• UK VAT numbers (GB): HMRC's Check a UK VAT number API, the same register behind the GOV.UK service.
• EU and Northern Ireland VAT numbers (XI): the European Commission's VIES, which asks each member state's own system. GB numbers left VIES on 1 January 2021.
• GB EORI numbers: HMRC's Check EORI number API. EU and XI EORI numbers: the European Commission's EORI validation service.
• Peppol: the Peppol SML and each participant's SMP, the same data access points use to route documents.

Each check is live at the moment you run it. We cache a registry's answer for up to 10 minutes so repeat checks do not hit the registry twice, and we do not store or log the numbers you check.