Guide · Company data
Getting a company's name and address from a VAT number
The VAT number is the one identifier a business customer always has to hand. Turning it into a legal name and a registered address is a well-defined question whose answer changes at every border.
What comes back: legal name, legal form, national company identifier, status, registered address.
Coverage: 32 codes — the 27 EU member states, Northern Ireland, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Brazil.
The short answer
One call, one company record, whatever country the number belongs to.
curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/FR68005420120" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"200 OK
{
"data": {
"vatNumber": "FR68005420120",
"countryCode": "FR",
"nationalNumber": "68005420120",
"nationalId": "005420120",
"name": "SOCIETE DES SUCRERIES DU MARQUENTERRE",
"legalForm": "Autre SA à conseil d'administration",
"status": "active",
"address": {
"line1": "32 CHEMIN DES GARENNES",
"line2": null,
"postalCode": "80120",
"city": "SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-TOURMONT",
"country": "FR"
}
},
"meta": {
"source": "SIRENE",
"sourceDate": "2026-09-01",
"sourceSince": "2026-06-01",
"sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-02-13T11:07:03.000Z"
}
}
The address arrives split into line1, line2,
postalCode, city and country. nationalId
is the national company identifier, the SIREN here and a Business ID or a registration
number elsewhere. meta names the register that answered and the date it said
so.
What a VAT number contains
Two letters and a national number. The letters are the country. What follows is where the countries part ways: in some it is the company's registration number, unchanged; in others it is derived from it by a published formula; in others again the tax administration issues an identifier with no relationship to the company register.
Nearly every difficulty below follows from that. There is no universal rule taking you from a VAT number to a row in a company register. There are twenty-seven rules, and a few of them are "you cannot".
A well-formed number is not a real company. Most countries build a check digit into the number, so a typo can be caught offline. That check stays correct for a company struck off ten years ago. Only a register can say whether anybody is behind it today.
One country, one method
- Open data files. France publishes its whole company repertory as open files: complete, authoritative, free, and several gigabytes per edition, with the company names in one file and the establishment addresses in another. To answer one question you first load all the answers, then keep them fresh.
- A national API. Poland, Romania and Czechia each expose their own service, with its own address, request and response shape, throttling, and convention for saying "not found". Nothing is shared between them but the intent.
- Nothing at all. In Germany no register returns the company behind a VAT number. Coverage there comes from weaker sources, and what they say is an indication rather than a register entry.
The country pages go through this one country at a time: the format of the number, the national identifier it does or does not contain, and where the company behind it can be reached.
The shape of what comes back
- The address is free text. Usually one string, sometimes two, written the way that country writes addresses: postal code before the town in most of Europe and after it in Ireland and Malta, the province appended in Italy, house numbers mixed into the street line in the Netherlands, the largest unit first in Latvia. Splitting that into fields reliably is a parser, not a regex.
- The legal form is not harmonised. It comes back in the country's own language and vocabulary, with no European enum to map it onto.
- Fields are missing, legitimately. Some registers publish no city, only a territory code; some publish no street. An empty field is usually the register's answer.
- Freshness varies by an order of magnitude. One register republishes daily, another monthly, another answers live. A record without a date on it cannot be reasoned about.
What "no name" means
Some member states publish whether a number is registered and disclose nothing else. For those, an empty name is the complete and correct answer, and no service can do better. Anyone promising a name for every country in Europe is guessing, or substituting a lower-quality source.
If you are building a form, a workflow or a report on this data, the empty case is a normal outcome in a predictable set of countries, and the design has to accept it from the start.
Consulting a register is not redistributing it
Public registers are public in the sense that you may look things up in them. Republishing their contents is a different permission, and building and selling a permanent derived database is a third. The terms differ per country, and some are explicit about it.
If you plan to ingest national registers yourself, read each source's terms before the data reaches a customer-facing product. It is the part of the project with no technical difficulty and real consequences.
Three ways to get there
| Approach | Good for | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| By hand, one number at a time | A handful of checks a month | Time; not repeatable, nothing recorded |
| Integrate the registers yourself | One or two countries, high volume, full control | One integration per country, storage and refresh for the bulk files, an address parser, and the licence reading above |
| One API across countries | Selling across borders | A per-call price, and a dependency you should be able to leave |
Vatlas is the third. One endpoint, one envelope and one authentication for 32 codes, with the input normalised whatever the punctuation, the address already split into fields, and every answer carrying the register it came from and its date. The free plan is 100 calls a month, enough to try it against your own list; Pro is 29 € for 5,000.
Where the limits are. A few member states disclose no name, and no API
changes that. German coverage rests on a self-declared source rather than a register, so
those answers carry a status of unknown. There is no United
Kingdom and no Switzerland today.
Frequently asked
Name and address from a VAT number, in short
Can you find a company's address from its VAT number?
In most countries, yes. The registered address is held by an official register that the VAT number can reach, directly or through the national company identifier. A few member states publish validity only, and there the address is not available.
Is there a single European database of companies?
No. There are twenty-seven national registers, plus separate ones outside the Union, each with its own scope, format, publication rhythm and licence. Anything that looks like a single database has integrated them one by one.
Is the VAT number the same as the company registration number?
Sometimes. In some countries they are the same digits, in others the VAT number is derived from the registration number by a published formula, in others they are unrelated identifiers issued by different administrations. The country pages say which is which.
Why does the name come back empty for some numbers?
Because that country's administration has chosen to disclose whether the number is registered and nothing more. It is the correct answer for that country.
Is the data free?
The underlying registers are largely free to consult, and some publish open data files. What costs money is reaching them reliably: one integration per country, gigabytes to ingest and refresh, an address parser, and the licence terms to read before any of it reaches a customer.
How fresh is the answer?
It depends on the register: daily for some, monthly for others, live for those with an API. Every answer we return carries the source that gave it and the date it said so, rather than an undated fact.
Can I store the results?
For your own records, such as an invoice, a customer file or an audit trail, this is ordinary. Building and redistributing a derived database of a national register is governed by that register's licence, and worth reading before you start.
Keep reading
Last updated 9 September 2026.