EU VAT Validator — Bulk VIES Check with Audit Reference

You paste a list of EU VAT numbers and get back, per number, whether it's currently valid, the registered company's legal name and address when VIES has one, and — if you supply your own VAT number — a real official EU audit reference proving you checked. Every result comes straight from VIES, the European Commission's own validation registry, queried live on every run. Nothing is cached, nothing is guessed, and nothing is charged for a number that doesn't validate.

Who it's for

The accountable_eel catalogue sells company intelligence columns for outbound. Each actor takes a list of domains or company identifiers and returns one flat, stably-named row per input — firmographics, registry IDs, tech stack, email route, hiring activity — the shape a Clay table, an n8n workflow, or an AI agent can consume without post-processing. Pricing is pay-per-event and per-domain: a few tenths of a cent for a row that was actually found, and nothing for a miss, so a list that doesn't enrich costs you next to nothing. Where an official source exists — VIES, GLEIF, SEC EDGAR, Brønnøysund, PRH, RDAP — it is queried directly instead of scraped. No seat licence, no monthly minimum, no credit system to decode. For VAT numbers specifically, VIES is the ledger every VAT-registered EU business already reports into, so this actor mirrors that ledger exactly instead of approximating it from a third-party database.

Why this one

• Queries VIES directly, the same system tax authorities and accounting software rely on — not a third-party VAT database and not a cached copy.
• Returns the registered company name and address for a valid number, not just a yes/no — useful for confirming a supplier is who they say they are before a reverse-charge purchase.
• Generates a real, official VIES audit reference when you add your own VAT number — the specific evidence some tax authorities expect to see before a zero-rated B2B invoice.
• Explains gaps instead of hiding them. Germany and Spain's own VIES registries never return a name or address, valid number or not — countryDataNote says so on the row instead of leaving you to guess whether the lookup failed.
• Never charges for a miss. An invalid, malformed, or unrecognized VAT number costs nothing — only a genuinely valid, found result is billed.

What you get

In the default "full" mode, every row carries these fields:

Field	Type	Description
query	string	The VAT number exactly as you submitted it
found	boolean	true when VIES returned a currently-valid record for this number
status	string	OK for a found row; BAD_FORMAT or NOT_FOUND on a miss
message	string	Human-readable reason for a miss (present only when found is false)
isValid	boolean	VIES's own valid/invalid verdict for this number
countryCode	string	2-letter VIES country prefix (EL for Greece, XI for Northern Ireland)
countryName	string	Full country name for countryCode
vatNumber	string	The VAT number in the format VIES itself returns, prefix stripped
name	string or null	Registered company legal name (empty for Germany and Spain — see countryDataNote)
address	string or null	Registered company address exactly as VIES returns it, unmodified
countryDataNote	string or null	Explains why name/address are empty, when they are
requestDate	date (ISO 8601)	VIES's own timestamp for when it checked the number
auditReference	string or null	Official VIES consultation number — only populated when you supply requesterVatNumber
scrapedAt	date (ISO 8601)	When this actor made the request

Switch the mode to "Just tell me if it's valid" and a row is trimmed to query, found, status, vatNumber, countryCode, countryName, isValid, and scrapedAt — no name, address, or audit lookup, same low price.

Which countries are covered

Every VIES-recognized prefix is accepted: all 27 EU member states, plus XI for Northern Ireland under the EU's Windsor Framework arrangements — 28 codes in total. Greece uses EL, not GR; everything else follows the ISO country code you'd expect (DE, FR, IE, NL, ES, and so on). A prefix outside this list — a UK GB number after Brexit, for instance, or a non-EU country code — comes back as a free BAD_FORMAT miss rather than a silent failure, so you can tell at a glance which rows in a mixed list were never going to resolve.

Two of those 28 — Germany and Spain — are a special case worth knowing up front: their VIES registries confirm validity but never return a company name or address, for any number, valid or not. That's documented, structural VIES behavior on their end, not something this actor can work around. When it happens, countryDataNote says so explicitly on the row, so a blank name field reads as "Germany doesn't publish this" instead of "the lookup might have failed."

Price

$4 per 1,000 VAT numbers, plus a $0.005 start fee. Misses (found:false) are never charged.

That's $0.004 per validated number on the FREE plan, dropping to $0.0024 on GOLD — you only pay for numbers VIES actually confirms as valid; a typo, a deregistered number, or a format VIES doesn't recognize is a free row. Run 1,000 VAT numbers through this actor and, if every single one validates, you're looking at roughly $4 total — less if some of them don't. Run the same 1,000 rows through a credit-based enrichment platform instead and you're typically paying $80–$400 for the privilege of it being one column among many.

How to use

1. In the Apify Console. Open the actor page and click Start — the vatNumbers field is already pre-filled with a working example. Results land in the run's dataset as soon as each item is found.
2. Via the API. Call it directly with a POST request — no Console needed once you have an API token:

   curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~eu-vat-validator/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>" \
     -X POST \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"vatNumbers":["IE6388047V","FR40303265045"]}'
   

3. On a schedule. Save this actor as an Apify Task with the input you want, then add a Schedule (hourly, daily, weekly) so it runs on its own — no server of your own required.

1. Open the Input tab and paste your VAT numbers into the list box, one per line, country code attached (IE6388047V, FR 40 303 265 045, NL004495445B01 — spaces and dashes are fine). Apify's "Bulk edit" button also accepts pasting a whole spreadsheet column at once.
2. Leave mode on "Valid + company name and address" unless you only need a boolean, in which case switch to "Just tell me if it's valid."
3. Optionally open "📋 Audit trail (optional)" and add your own VAT number — every row in that run then gets a real VIES consultation number in auditReference.
4. Run the actor. Turn on "Hide rows with no result" first if you only want to see the hits in the dataset.
5. Pull results from the Dataset tab, or via the API for a script, workflow tool, or agent (see below).

Other input options

A few advanced fields sit lower on the Input tab, off by default, for when you need them:

• testRun — caps the run at the first 5 VAT numbers so you can sanity-check the output before committing a full list. Turn it off to process everything.
• columns — pick exactly which output fields you want back, if you don't need all of them (for example, just vatNumber, isValid, name). Leave it blank for the full field set above.
• onlyFound — same as "Hide rows with no result" in the Input tab UI; drops miss rows from the dataset entirely instead of recording them with found: false.
• maxResults — stops the run once this many rows have been written, useful for capping spend on a very large list without turning on testRun.
• maxConcurrency — how many VAT numbers are checked in parallel; the default of 5 is reasonable for VIES's own rate limits, and raising it aggressively is more likely to trigger retries than to finish faster.
• proxyConfiguration — Apify Proxy is used by default; override it here if you have your own proxy group, though VIES doesn't require one.

Input

{
  "vatNumbers": [
    "IE6388047V",
    "FR40303265045"
  ]
}

One VAT number per line, with the 2-letter country code in front. Accepted formats: IE6388047V, FR 40 303 265 045, NL004495445B01, spaces and dashes are fine.

Sample output

query	found	status	isValid	countryCode	countryName	vatNumber	name	address	countryDataNote	requestDate	auditReference	scrapedAt
IE6388047V	true	OK	true	IE	Ireland	6388047V	GOOGLE IRELAND LIMITED	3RD FLOOR, GORDON HOUSE, BARROW STREET, DUBLIN 4		2026-08-23T06:00:52.436Z		2026-08-23T06:00:53.094Z

An invalid, malformed, or unrecognized VAT number gets a row with found: false and a status / message explaining why (BAD_FORMAT for a typo, NOT_FOUND for a number VIES doesn't recognize) — and is never charged.

Use it from Clay, n8n, Make, or an AI agent

This actor runs synchronously over plain HTTP — call it directly from a script, a workflow tool, or an AI agent, no Apify Console needed once you have an API token.

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~eu-vat-validator/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"vatNumbers":["IE6388047V","FR40303265045"]}'

n8n. Add an HTTP Request node: Method POST, URL https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~eu-vat-validator/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>, Body Content Type JSON, JSON Body {"vatNumbers":["IE6388047V","FR40303265045"]} (swap in an expression from an earlier node for a real value).

Clay. Add an "HTTP API" column: Method POST, URL https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/accountable_eel~eu-vat-validator/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>, Body {"vatNumbers":["{{VAT number}}"]}, mapping the row's VAT number into the vatNumbers array.

MCP. In Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client with the Apify MCP server, ask for "EU VAT Number Validator — Bulk VIES Check API" — the agent will find and run this actor.

Tips

• Turn on "Hide rows with no result" if you only want the hits in your dataset — misses are free either way, this just keeps the output shorter.
• Add your own VAT number under "Audit trail" once per run and every row gets a real VIES consultation number — worth doing ahead of invoicing season rather than re-running per invoice.
• VIES is free and unauthenticated, but it rate-limits repeated hits and occasionally has downtime of its own; the actor retries automatically, but a very large single run may take longer than usual if VIES itself is slow that day.
• Use "Just tell me if it's valid" mode when a boolean is all you need — same low price, fewer columns to map downstream.
• Re-run periodically for customers you invoice repeatedly. A VAT number valid last quarter can be deregistered by the time you invoice again — this queries VIES fresh on every run, never a cached answer.

vs. alternatives

	What it costs	What you get	Trade-off
This actor (eu-vat-validator)	$0.004 per validated VAT number (less on paid tiers), $0.005 actor start, nothing for a miss	One row per VAT number — valid/invalid, registered company name and address, and an optional official VIES audit reference	Germany and Spain's own VIES registries never return a name or address, valid number or not — this actor can't fetch what VIES won't send, it just tells you why the field is empty.
VIES directly	Free	The same data, from the same source	It's the same source — this actor exists for the batch: hundreds of VAT numbers in, one row out per number, VIES's own rate limits and occasional downtime handled with retries, in a format your table already reads. One number, once? Use the portal.
Clay	$0.08–$0.40 per enriched row in credits, on top of a seat	A whole enrichment workspace — waterfalls across dozens of providers, plus the table and the sequencing around it	If you want one place that does everything and you're not counting rows, that's Clay. This is one column, priced per column, callable from Clay via its HTTP step.
Doing it yourself	Your time + VIES's per-number rate limits, occasional downtime, and 27 states' worth of slightly different response shapes	The same data	The retry logic, the country-code handling, and the batching this actor already does

Prices for third-party tools are their published list prices as of August 2026 and are not tracked here — check the vendor before relying on the comparison.

FAQ

Why is a row empty / why does found say false? Either the format doesn't look like a VAT number (status: BAD_FORMAT), or VIES doesn't currently recognize that number as valid (status: NOT_FOUND). Neither case is charged.

Can I get just a yes/no without the company name and address? Yes — set "What do you need back?" to "Just tell me if it's valid" in the Input tab.

What is auditReference? An official VIES consultation number, only generated when you supply your own VAT number in the "Audit trail" section. It's the EU's own audit evidence, not something generated locally.

Is the data live, or cached from a previous run? Live. Every VAT number is checked against VIES at the moment the run executes — nothing is stored or reused between runs.

Does VIES ever rate-limit or go down, and what happens then? Yes, occasionally — it's a free, unauthenticated EU government service, not a commercial API with an uptime guarantee. The actor retries automatically on a failed request; a row that still fails after retries comes back as a free REQUEST_FAILED miss rather than a charge.

Do I need to configure a proxy? No — Apify Proxy is used by default. You can supply your own proxy configuration in the Input tab if you have one, but it isn't required for VIES.

Is checking a VAT number a GDPR issue? No — a VAT number and the registered company name/address behind it are public B2B business registry data, not personal data about an individual. VIES publishes this information itself for exactly this purpose.

Can I schedule this to run automatically, or call it from an AI agent? Yes to both. Use Apify's built-in Schedules (cron-based) to re-check a customer list on a recurring basis, or call the actor directly over the API — see "Use it from Clay, n8n, Make, or an AI agent" above, including MCP for agent clients.

Can I limit which fields come back, or cap how many rows I pay for? Yes — set columns in the Input tab to just the fields you want (see "What you get" above), and set maxResults to stop the run after a fixed number of rows. Both are optional; leave them blank for the full field set with no cap.

What does "Try it first" do? It's the testRun input — it processes only the first 5 VAT numbers in your list so you can check the output shape before running (and paying for) the whole thing. Turn it off for the full run.

Does this work for VAT numbers outside the EU, like a UK GB number? No — VIES only covers the 27 EU member states plus Northern Ireland (XI). A prefix it doesn't recognize comes back as a free BAD_FORMAT miss rather than a guess.

Related actors

• Company Registry Unified Lookup
• GLEIF LEI Lookup
• BRREG Company Lookup