The Croatian VAT number

The format

A Croatian VAT number is always thirteen characters: the country code and eleven digits. Those digits are the OIB, unchanged.

• HRThe country code.
• 1357939202Ten digits of the OIB.
• 3The check digit.

The check digit follows ISO 7064, MOD 11,10, the same standard Germany uses. The OIB carries no internal meaning: the digits say nothing about the type of entity or its location.

OIB, MBS and MB

The OIB (personal identification number) is assigned by the Tax Administration to every legal and natural person. It was introduced in 2009 precisely to replace a scattering of older numbers, and it succeeded: the same OIB is used with the tax administration, the pension and health funds and the court register.

There is also the MBS, the court register subject number, and the MB, the number from the register of business entities. Both are older and increasingly rare, but they still appear on documents. The MBS is what Vatlas returns as nationalId for Croatia, padded to its full nine digits: the OIB is already the VAT number, and repeating it would say nothing new.

Finding the company

The court register

Sudski registar is public and free, searchable by OIB, name or MBS. It holds the name, seat, legal form, share capital, authorised representatives and annual financial statements.

Alongside the web interface there is sudreg-data.gov.hr, an official API with OAuth access. Credentials are granted free of charge on request by email, with no company registration required. It is the source Vatlas reads for Croatia, both as a nightly bulk import and live, number by number.

The API is the register's own schema laid out table by table: the subject row carries the OIB, the status and the dates, while the name, the seat and the legal form each live in a table of their own, joined on the MBS. It publishes a fresh snapshot every working night and keeps a few days of them, so a dataset can be read whole without changing edition halfway through.

The Tax Administration

The Tax Administration publishes the VAT register, which is the only source that confirms an OIB actually carries VAT status.

VIES

Croatia discloses the name and the address. The address arrives as one comma-separated line, and the place name is often repeated, once on its own and once alongside the postcode.

The two sources do not carry the same fields. The court register knows the legal form and the registered short name, which VIES never returns; VIES carries a postcode, which the register records for only about one seat in ten. Neither is a subset of the other, and GET /v1/lookup-all/:vatNumber is how you see both answers side by side.

Croatia-specific pitfalls

• The OIB is not the VAT number. The digits match, but the HR prefix only applies once the entity is in the VAT register.
• MBS and MB are not the OIB. They are older, still appear on documents, and the OIB cannot be computed from either.
• The OIB carries no internal meaning: nothing about the entity type or location can be read from the digits.
• The place name is repeated in the address VIES returns.
• The court register rarely publishes a postcode. Roughly nine seats in ten carry a street, a town and no postal code at all: the field is optional in the register, and VIES is the source that has it.
• The registered name is not the trading name. A Croatian full company name spells out the whole business purpose and often runs past two hundred characters; the short name is the one on the invoice.
• The court register API needs OAuth credentials, free though they are.

One API, one response shape

Vatlas turns a business tax number into a company record: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Croatia: the same call and the same response as for every other country covered.

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/HR13579392023" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "HR13579392023",
    "countryCode": "HR",
    "nationalNumber": "13579392023",
    "nationalId": "080160489",
    "name": "HRVATSKI ŠUMARSKI INSTITUT - javni institut za znanstvenoistraživački rad u šumarstvu Hrvatske",
    "legalForm": "ustanova",
    "status": "active",
    "address": {
      "line1": "Cvjetno naselje 41",
      "line2": null,
      "postalCode": null,
      "city": "Jastrebarsko",
      "country": "HR"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "SUDREG",
    "sourceDate": "2026-09-11",
    "sourceSince": "2026-09-04",
    "sourceUpdatedAt": null
  }
}

meta.source names the register that answered (SIRENE, ARES, VIES…) and meta.sourceDate the day it said so: the publication date of the file for a register we import, the day of the call for one we query live. The shape of the response never changes from one country to the next.

Get a free key Read the documentation

VAT numbers in other countries

• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Spain
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• All countries

Last updated 3 September 2026.