EU VAT Validator (VIES): Verify & Bulk-Check VAT IDs
Validate individual or bulk EU and Northern Ireland VAT numbers with the official VIES service.
In plain language.
Checks EU and Northern Ireland VAT numbers through VIES, the European Commission's search service over national VAT databases — not a cached guess.
Returns a per-number result, check time and any business name or address supplied by the national source. Add your requesting VAT number when you need VIES to return a consultation number for the validation record.
Built for bulk lists as easily as a single lookup, at human or agent speed.
The distinction that matters most is between invalid and unavailable. A member state taking its VIES system offline for a few minutes is routine, and a naive check treats that outage as a failed validation — so a valid customer gets billed VAT they should not have paid, or an invoice is blocked for no reason.
Every lookup is retried up to four times before a number is reported as unavailable, and that outcome is returned as its own state rather than folded into “invalid”. It is the case you retry, not the case you reject.
Supply your own VAT number and each valid result carries an official consultation number — the reference a tax authority may ask for when you zero-rate an intra-EU supply. VIES issues it against the identity you supply, so it must be your own registered number.
Some member states do not disclose trader name and address through VIES. A blank name on an otherwise valid number is that country’s disclosure policy rather than a failure of the check.
Lookups run at a deliberately modest concurrency. VIES is a shared public service, and hammering it gets an address throttled — which would degrade every subsequent check you make, not just the one that caused it.
Who it's for
- For finance teams. Before filing a VAT return, check the customer VAT column and get a per-row valid, invalid or temporarily-unavailable verdict, so a zero-rated intra-EU sale is defensible if the return is queried.
- For accountants. Re-run a client’s supplier ledger each quarter and catch the numbers deregistered since onboarding — the ones that fail an audit two years from now, not today.
- For operations. Clean a newly acquired customer list before it enters billing, so bad VAT numbers are fixed at import rather than surfacing as failed invoices.
- For developers and AI agents. Branch on the three states inside an onboarding flow and escalate to a human only when VIES reports the number genuinely invalid.
Pricing
$0.005 per VAT number checked.
No subscription. Failed or empty inputs are never charged.
Fewer knobs. Better defaults.
Official source only
Every check queries the official VIES service, which retrieves current information from national VAT databases.
Validation record
Retain the checked value, timestamp, result and optional consultation number as evidence of the check performed.
Bulk without the wait
Feed in a list once instead of checking numbers one at a time.
Design VIES validation as a state machine.
Learn why valid, invalid and temporarily unavailable need distinct workflow actions, and which fields may be absent from a legitimate response.
Same tool, callable as an MCP server.
EU VAT Validator runs on Apify, which means it's exposed as a remote MCP tool with no extra setup. Point any MCP-compatible agent (Claude, Cursor, and others) at the endpoint below.
View full API reference on Apify{ "vatNumbers": ["IE6388047V"], "requesterVat": "IE8256796U" }