EU VAT Number Validation (VIES) - Three Honest Answers

Verified official source - never hallucinated. This Actor validates EU VAT numbers in real time against VIES, the European Commission's VAT Information Exchange System - not with an AI model's guess and not with a scraped snapshot of somebody's website. And unlike most validators, it tells the truth when the source is down.

Validation is performed in real time against the European Commission's VIES on the customer's behalf. A valid response is one piece of evidence, not a guarantee - see the VIES disclaimer and the VIES Data Protection Notice. No company or personal data is stored by the service.

Why this Actor?

VIES is free at the source - but notoriously flaky. Member state registries drop out independently and unannounced, Germany never returns names, Greece is coded EL (not GR), and hidden per-country concurrency limits throw errors that most wrappers silently translate into "invalid". That silent lie is dangerous: it blocks good suppliers and stops correct reverse-charge invoices.

This Actor is the boring, reliable shell around a shaky source:

• Three-state answers: valid, invalid or unknown_source_unavailable. A registry outage is never reported as invalid - and never charged.
• Format check before the call. Every number is validated against its country's official VAT pattern first, so typos never reach the API and never cost you anything.
• Country-code traps handled: GR is auto-corrected to EL (Greece's VIES code), Northern Ireland works as XI, and GB is rejected with a clear Brexit explanation instead of a confusing error.
• Retry with backoff (3s/6s/9s) on VIES concurrency errors - Germany's infamous MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ is absorbed, not exposed.
• Per-country queues in batch runs: one country being down never blocks validation of the others, and a down country is not hammered with further calls.
• Official audit receipt: provide your own EU VAT number and each valid lookup returns the EU's consultation number - the Commission's own proof for VAT audits that you checked the number that day. Receipts are always fetched fresh, never from cache.
• No AI in the loop. Pure, predictable code. Same input, same output, every time.

Use cases

• Reverse-charge invoicing: confirm your customer's VAT number before zero-rating an intra-EU B2B invoice, and store the consultation number as audit evidence.
• AI agents that must not hallucinate: a grounded, three-state VAT check instead of a guess - the unknown_source_unavailable state lets the agent retry later rather than draw a false conclusion.
• Supplier and customer onboarding (KYB): verify counterparties across all 27 EU member states plus Northern Ireland in one call.
• ERP and CRM hygiene: batch-validate up to 50 stored VAT numbers per run, with per-row source and timestamp for your compliance trail.

Input

{
    "vatNumbers": ["SE556042722001", "DE129273398", "EL123456789"],
    "requesterVatNumber": "SE556999999901",
    "confirmLegitimateUse": true
}

confirmLegitimateUse is required: you attest that every lookup supports your own VAT compliance as a legitimate user of VIES (the exemption the VIES disclaimer grants), and that you will not use the Actor to build registers, republish data or look up individuals. Runs without the attestation are rejected before any call is made.

Output (dataset items)

{
    "input": "SE556042722001",
    "ok": true,
    "status": "valid",
    "vatNumber": "SE556042722001",
    "countryCode": "SE",
    "name": "H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB",
    "address": "MASTER SAMUELSGATAN 46 A, 106 38 STOCKHOLM",
    "checkedAt": "2026-07-12T10:00:00.000Z",
    "consultationNumber": "WAPIAAAAY6mrqctG",
    "fromCache": false,
    "chargeable": true,
    "evidenceNote": "A valid VIES response is one piece of evidence...",
    "disclaimerLinks": { "vies_disclaimer": "...", "vies_data_protection": "..." },
    "source": "VIES, European Commission (ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies)"
}

When a country withholds names (Germany always does), the item says so honestly in notes - the validity verdict still stands. When a registry is down, status is unknown_source_unavailable with the exact VIES error code in sourceError, so you can retry later.

Pricing (pay-per-event)

Event	Price	When
actor-start	$0.005	Per run
vat-validation	$0.01	Per completed validation only (a valid or invalid verdict)
Source down	$0.00	unknown_source_unavailable answers are free
Cache hit / format reject	$0.00	Repeated numbers within 24h and typos are free

We do not charge for answers we could not give. The nearest competitor charges $0.04 per validation regardless; here an EU outage costs you nothing.

FAQ

Is there a free API for EU VAT validation? Yes - VIES itself, and this Actor never hides that. You pay for the shell: format checks, the EL/XI traps, retry and backoff against hidden concurrency limits, three-state honesty, per-country batch queues and the consultation receipt - $0.01 per completed check.

What is the consultation number and why do I want it? If you supply your own EU VAT number, VIES issues a unique consultation number per valid check - the EU's own evidence in a VAT audit that you verified your counterparty on that date. Receipt requests always go fresh to the EU, never to the cache.

Why did I get "unknown" instead of valid/invalid? Because the member state's registry (or all of VIES) did not answer. Spain, Germany and France drop out most often, and VIES has a Monday night maintenance window (UTC). The honest answer is "unknown, retry later" - never "invalid" - and it is free.

Does it return company names and addresses? When the member state provides them, yes. Some countries (notably Germany) only confirm validity - the item then carries an explicit note instead of silently empty fields.

Can my AI agent use this? Yes - that is the primary design goal. Call it via the Apify API or MCP. The three-state output is small, flat JSON that maps cleanly onto agent decision logic: proceed, reject, or retry later.

How fresh is the data? Every verdict comes from VIES at lookup time (repeated numbers within the same 24h may be answered from a status-only cache, marked with the original check time and never charged; receipts always bypass the cache).

GDPR & privacy by design

A VAT number can be personal data (a Swedish sole trader's VAT number contains their personal identity number - this applies to your own requester number too). Therefore:

• No database is built. Names and addresses are passed through to you and never stored or cached.
• The 24h cache stores only a validity status against a SHA-256 hash of the number, marked with the original check time.
• Logs never contain plain-text VAT numbers - only hashes and country codes.
• There is no search function: numbers in, never "find people or companies".

Permissions & security

This Actor runs with Apify's limited permissions model: it reads its own input, writes to its own default dataset and calls the Commission's official API over HTTPS - nothing else. No API key or login is needed anywhere in the chain.

Data source & license

Data comes from VIES, operated by the European Commission with data from the 27 member state registries plus Northern Ireland. The VIES disclaimer permits retrieval and use of the data as needed to support the activity of a legitimate user - which is exactly, and only, what this Actor does: real-time pass-through on your behalf, no storage, no republication (the standard industry reading of the license terms; see the disclaimer linked above). This Actor is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Commission.

Terms of use

• Business use only. This Actor is intended exclusively for use in the course of business (B2B). By using it you confirm you are acting as a business, not a consumer, and that the legitimate-use attestation you give in the input is true.
• As is. The service and all data are provided "as is", without warranties of any kind - no guarantee of accuracy, completeness, timeliness or availability.
• Liability cap. Total aggregate liability for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid for the service in that period. No liability for indirect or consequential damages, lost profits, lost data or tax assessments resulting from registry errors or outages. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
• Fair use. No bulk harvesting, no register building, no circumventing rate limits (the Commission actively blocks bulk traffic), no use that conflicts with the VIES disclaimer.

Versioning & support

Versions are locked - the Actor never silently changes behaviour under you. Changes are released as new versions with a changelog entry.

Part of the Nordic Data Tools family: Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish company lookup, company financials, new registrations, procurement search, statistics and EU contract awards - all built on official European data sources.

Changelog

• 0.1 - initial release: three-state validation for all 27 EU member states plus Northern Ireland (XI), per-country format checks, EL/XI trap handling, retry with backoff, per-country batch queues, consultation-number receipts (always fresh, never cached) and honest handling of countries that withhold names.