VIES VAT Checker — Bulk VAT Number Validation

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🎯 What this scrapes

A customer hands us a list of VAT numbers — glued, spaced, or structured pairs, mixed together — and we return one row per number: validity, the registered company name and address where the member state discloses it, and a clear skip reason for anything we can't parse or that VIES can't complete. Think of it as a VIES VAT checker and EU VAT validator in one: built for a recurring compliance/onboarding batch job running VAT number validation against a customer list, not a one-off lookup — the product optimizes for cheap, high-volume, fault-isolated throughput. One bad entry in a 5,000-row batch never fails the run — it lands as its own explained row and everything else still ships.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🧾 Any input shape, one clean pair — glued (DE811907980), spaced (DE 811907980), or structured ({"country":"DE","number":"811907980"}) all normalize to the same (country, number) before we ever call VIES.
• 🧱 Bounded, polite concurrency — VIES is a shared EC service that throttles hard under load, so we cap in-flight requests and back off automatically on 429/5xx instead of hammering it.
• ✅ Clean negatives are not errors — an invalid VAT number is a normal, useful answer. Every entry — valid, cleanly invalid, or unparseable — lands as its own row with a clear status, so one bad number never fails your whole batch.
• 🕵️ Optional service-status pre-flight — turn on checkServiceStatus to see which member states are down before you burn a run against unavailable infrastructure.
• 🧊 Typed, validated dataset rows — Pydantic-checked, one row per requested number, every time — the row count you get back always matches the row count you sent in.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — priced for volume, not per-lookup margin. You always know what a batch costs before you run it.

💡 Use cases

• Customer onboarding — validate a new B2B customer's VAT number before invoicing them without VAT.
• Recurring compliance sweeps — re-validate an entire customer list on a schedule to catch deregistered numbers.
• Invoice/AR cleanup — batch-check VAT numbers on file before a VAT audit.
• CRM/ERP enrichment — attach the registered company name and address VIES discloses to existing records.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
vatNumbers	array	yes	['DE811907980', 'IE 6388047V', {'country': 'NL', 'number': '810462215B01'}]	VAT numbers to validate, one per list item. Each item is either a glued string ('DE811907980'), a spaced string ('DE…
checkServiceStatus	boolean	no	False	If enabled, calls the VIES check-status endpoint once at the start of the run and surfaces any member-state outage…
maxConcurrency	integer	no	3	Cap on concurrent requests to VIES. Kept low by design — VIES is a shared public EC service that rejects excessive…
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{}	Apify Proxy configuration. Present per org standard — VIES is a public keyless API, so no proxy is used unless you…

Example input

{
  "vatNumbers": [
    "DE811907980",
    "IE 6388047V",
    {
      "country": "NL",
      "number": "810462215B01"
    }
  ],
  "checkServiceStatus": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
countryCode	string	Parsed from input / echoed from VIES.
vatNumber	string	Normalised input (country prefix stripped, whitespace removed).
isValid	boolean	VIES response 'valid'/'isValid' field. Only null for skipped rows.
name	string	VIES response 'name'; the literal '---' (DE/ES policy) is normalised to null.
address	string	VIES response 'address'; same '---' normalisation as name.
requestDate	string	VIES response 'requestDate', ISO-8601 passthrough.
skipped	boolean	True when the input entry could not be parsed or the request could not complete after retries.
skipReason	string	Human-readable reason, only set when skipped=true.

Example output

{
  "countryCode": "IE",
  "vatNumber": "6388047V",
  "isValid": true,
  "name": "GOOGLE IRELAND LIMITED",
  "address": null,
  "requestDate": "2026-09-06+02:00",
  "skipped": false,
  "skipReason": null
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.2	One-off warm-up charge per run
vat-number-checked	$0.001	PPE event

Example: 1 000 VAT numbers checked at the rates above ≈ $1.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• VIES covers EU member states only — no UK post-Brexit, Norwegian, or Swiss tax-ID formats.
• Some member states (confirmed: DE, ES) never return a registered company name or address by policy — those fields come back null for those countries even on a valid VAT number, not a scraping gap.
• Concurrency is capped at 5 requests in flight by design — VIES is a shared public EC service and rejects excessive parallel load.
• No caching or dedup of previously-seen VAT numbers across runs — every run re-checks every number you send.

❓ FAQ

Why do some rows have a null name and address even though the VAT number is valid?

A handful of EU member states (Germany and Spain, confirmed) never disclose the registered company name or address through VIES, by that country's own policy — we normalize their internal '---' placeholder to null so it's clear this is a policy limit, not missing data.

Is an invalid VAT number a failed run?

No. A VAT number VIES reports as invalid is a normal, useful answer — the run still succeeds, and that row simply says isValid: false.

What happens if one VAT number in my batch is malformed?

It lands as its own row with skipped: true and a human-readable skipReason explaining why — the rest of your batch is processed normally.

Can I check if VIES itself is having an outage before I run a large batch?

Yes — enable checkServiceStatus and we call VIES's own status endpoint once at the start of the run and surface any member-state outage.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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