Free VAT Number Verification: Direct From Government Registries

A VAT number is the simplest piece of company data to verify — and the most misleading one to verify badly. Plug a VAT number into VIES and you get back a single word: valid or invalid. That's it. No company name. No registered address. No status. No way to tell whether the entity behind the VAT number is the same entity sitting on the invoice in front of you.

That gap is where invoice fraud, missing-trader carousel scams, and supplier-substitution attacks happen. A "valid" VIES response confirms the number exists. It doesn't confirm the company you think you're dealing with is the company that owns it.

This guide explains how to verify a VAT number for free across the EU, UK, and 100+ jurisdictions — and why the right tool depends on whether you need *yes/no* or *who, where, and is the company still active*.

🔒zephira.ai

One search field — six identifier types

VAT works as a primary search input on Zephira, alongside company name, registration number, LEI, and ticker. Filter by jurisdiction or query EU + UK + the rest of the world in one go.

What a VAT number actually tells you

A VAT (Value Added Tax) number is a unique identifier issued by a country's tax authority to a business that is registered to charge and reclaim VAT. The format varies by country — UK numbers start with GB and run nine digits; German numbers start with DE and run nine digits; French numbers start with FR and run eleven characters including a two-digit check key.

What a valid VAT number tells you:

• The business is registered for VAT in the country indicated by the prefix.
• The business is currently active for VAT purposes at the time of the check.
• For intra-EU transactions, the business is registered to trade cross-border within the EU (in some jurisdictions this requires a separate registration even if the entity already holds a domestic VAT number).

What a valid VAT number doesn't tell you:

• That the entity holding the VAT number is the same entity invoicing you.
• That the entity is solvent, active in the company registry, or has any operational substance.
• That the address on the invoice matches the registered address of the entity.
• Whether the directors named on contracts are the directors actually appointed.

This is the gap that registry-grade verification fills. A VAT number tells you a tax authority has registered an entity. A registry profile tells you what that entity actually is.

The VAT-group exception

One reason a VAT number and an invoice can legitimately show different company names: VAT-group registration. Several EU member states — including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ireland — allow two or more legal entities under common control to register as a single taxable person. The group receives one VAT number; the individual entities continue to operate under their own legal names and registration numbers but invoice using the group VAT.

The practical consequence: an invoice from Subsidiary X Ltd might carry the VAT number of Parent Group Holdings Ltd. A naive check that flags this as fraud will reject legitimate invoices from large corporate groups. The right validation logic is to (a) confirm the VAT number itself is valid, (b) check the group VAT registration in the registry, and (c) confirm the invoicing entity is part of that group. Zephira's corporate-linkage data resolves this in one query — paid plans include the group structure mapping that links subsidiary entities to their VAT-group parent.

The three free tools — and what each one returns

There are three legitimate free routes to verify a VAT number. They return different data because they pull from different sources.

VIES and HMRC are the official primary sources, and you should always use them when you need a state-issued confirmation for tax-audit purposes. Zephira is what you use when you need to understand the entity behind the VAT number — not just confirm it exists.

How to verify a VAT number on Zephira

The workflow takes about five seconds.

1. Go to zephira.ai and select the Companies tab on the homepage search.
2. Paste the VAT number into the search box — with or without the country prefix. DE151116749, GB243609761, or FR40123456789 all work.
3. Optionally filter by jurisdiction. Leave it on All Jurisdictions if you want to confirm the country prefix matches.
4. Click Search. The matching company profile opens.
5. Verify the legal name, registered address, and status against your invoice. If anything doesn't match — different name, different address, or status of Dissolved or In Liquidation — the VAT number is technically valid but the entity behind it is not who you think it is.

Worked example — HORNBACH Baumarkt AG (DE151116749)

Here's what a real VAT verification looks like end to end. The example uses a German VAT number; the workflow is identical for any covered jurisdiction.

🔒zephira.ai · Search

Step 1 · Search

Paste the VAT number

Country prefix optional. Works with EU, UK, Swiss UID, Norwegian Org-nr, and more.

→

🔒zephira.ai · HORNBACH Baumarkt AG

Step 2 · Verified

Get the full entity profile

VAT number, legal name, registration number, address, legal form, status, and incorporation date — sourced directly from the German Handelsregister.

What this profile confirms in one screen:

• VAT number DE151116749 belongs to HORNBACH Baumarkt AG.
• The company is Active in the German commercial register.
• Its commercial registration number is HRB 2311 Landau — the local court (Amtsgericht) registry reference.
• It was incorporated on 20 August 1992.
• The registered address is Hornbachstraße 11, Bornheim, Germany.
• The legal form is Joint Stock Company (Aktiengesellschaft, AG).

If your invoice shows the same VAT number under a different company name, a different address, or a UK trading address while the registry shows Germany — the discrepancy is the signal. The VAT number is valid; the invoice is suspicious.

Where this data actually comes from

The single most important question to ask any company-data provider is: who is your source. Aggregators that buy from other aggregators end up multiple steps away from the truth, with no way to explain why a record looks the way it does.

Zephira is built on a different principle. Every record is sourced directly from the official government registry or national tax authority of the company's home jurisdiction. No VIES proxy. No third-party aggregator in the middle. No data-vendor reseller chain. When a company's filings change at the source, Zephira's record updates from the source — not from someone else's copy of it.

For the VAT verification covered in this guide, three categories of direct government source feed the data.

1. National tax authorities — the VAT layer

Zephira does not query VIES to verify VAT numbers. VIES is a search engine the European Commission operates over national VAT databases — it's what consumer VAT checkers and most third-party tools rely on. Zephira goes one step deeper: directly to each member state's tax authority registry. The result is more complete data (no GDPR-stripped fields), better availability (no dependency on the VIES gateway being up), and the same audit-grade authority as the underlying source.

2. Commercial registries — the entity layer

VAT data alone tells you a tax authority has registered an entity. To verify which entity, Zephira joins the VAT record to the underlying commercial registry of the company's home jurisdiction. This is what allows the platform to return the legal name, registration number, registered address, status, legal form, and incorporation date — even for jurisdictions like Germany and Spain where the VAT-layer feed alone wouldn't expose those fields.

Coverage extends to 100+ jurisdictions in total — the table above is illustrative, not exhaustive. The full list is published on the Zephira data sources page.

3. Public disclosure feeds — the change-event layer

For real-time monitoring (paid plans), Zephira ingests the official gazettes and disclosure feeds that publish change events as they happen — director appointments, address changes, dissolutions, insolvency notices, and capital amendments.

• UK: Companies House feed (filings as they're lodged)
• France: BODACC (Bulletin Officiel des Annonces Civiles et Commerciales)
• Spain: BORME (Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil)
• Germany: Bundesanzeiger (Federal Gazette)
• Italy: Registro Imprese update feed
• Japan: Kanpo (Official Gazette) and EDINET filings (FSA) for listed companies
• Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland and other EU jurisdictions: equivalent national gazette feeds

VIES vs Zephira — what the data actually shows

The same VAT number, queried two ways, returns very different output. Below is what each tool shows for DE151116749.

For an EU country that doesn't release name and address through VIES — Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and several others — Zephira is the only free tool that joins VAT-registered data to the underlying commercial registry, in one query, in English.

VAT number formats by country

Recognising whether a VAT number is structurally valid before you query is the first sanity check. Country prefix + length + character set should match the issuing country.

Zephira accepts VAT numbers with or without the country prefix, with or without dots and dashes. Spaces and stray punctuation are normalised automatically.

Why VAT verification matters for fraud prevention

The reason every B2B finance team should verify VAT numbers — and why the verification needs to go beyond yes/no — is that VAT identifiers sit at the centre of the most common cross-border invoice frauds.

Missing-trader (carousel) fraud. A fraudster registers a real entity in one EU country, obtains a real VAT number, raises invoices for goods, collects VAT from the buyer, and disappears before remitting it to the tax authority. The VAT number on the invoice is genuinely valid at the time of the check. The way to catch it is to look at the registry: was the entity incorporated last week with a single director and no operating history? That's the signal a yes/no checker can't surface.

Supplier-substitution fraud. A fraudster intercepts an email exchange and replaces a legitimate supplier's bank details — or the entire supplier identity — on an invoice. The VAT number on the swapped invoice may be valid for some other entity. A VIES "valid" response confirms the number exists; only a registry profile confirms whether it belongs to the company you actually contracted with.

Shell-entity onboarding. A counterparty submits a VAT number alongside a contract. The VIES check passes. But the company was incorporated three months ago, has one director, no website, and an address that's a virtual office shared with 400 other entities. The VAT number is valid; the substance is missing. Director-level data in a registry profile surfaces this in one screen.

For procurement, AP, compliance, and KYB teams — the workflow that actually reduces risk is: check the VAT number, then check the registry profile, then check the directors. Zephira covers all three in a single query.

Trusted by enterprise teams

Free VAT verification is the entry point. The same data infrastructure underpins payment-risk, KYB, and supplier-onboarding workflows at scale across some of the largest B2B platforms in the world.

When to use the Zephira API instead

The free search is built for ad-hoc verification — a procurement officer checking a single supplier, an AP analyst validating a one-off invoice, a compliance team running a manual check. (For general entity verification beyond VAT — checking a company's registration number, status, registered address, or director appointments — see the free company verification guide.)

For volume, the same data is available via REST API. Use the API instead of the free search when you need to:

• Validate VAT numbers at scale — onboarding pipelines, supplier-master refresh cycles, marketplace seller verification.
• Embed verification in your product — vendor portals, invoicing software, accounting platforms. Resale rights are included on every paid plan.
• Monitor for status changes — automated alerts when a VAT-registered entity is dissolved, struck off, or enters insolvency.
• Bulk-validate large supplier lists — delivered via S3 or SFTP at enterprise tier.

Pricing starts at $99/month for the Starter plan and scales to enterprise contracts with unlimited API calls and bulk feeds.

Example API response

Querying the API with a VAT number returns a structured JSON profile. Here's a real example for DE151116749:

$ curl https://api.zephira.ai/v1/companies/search?vat=DE151116749 \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $ZEPHIRA_API_KEY"

{
  "vat_number": "DE151116749",
  "valid": true,
  "company": {
    "legal_name": "HORNBACH Baumarkt AG",
    "registration_number": "HRB 2311 Landau",
    "country": "DE",
    "status": "active",
    "legal_form": "Aktiengesellschaft",
    "incorporation_date": "1992-08-20",
    "registered_address": {
      "street": "Hornbachstraße 11",
      "city": "Bornheim",
      "country": "Germany"
    },
    "website": "hornbach.com"
  },
  "data_provenance": {
    "source": "Handelsregister · Amtsgericht Landau",
    "last_updated": "2026-04-22T09:14:00Z"
  }
}

The same endpoint accepts company name, registration number, LEI, or ticker as the lookup key. Bulk verification (CSV input, JSON or CSV output) is available via S3 or SFTP delivery on the Business and Enterprise tiers.

Frequently asked questions