The Ecuadorian RUC

The format

A RUC is thirteen digits, and every group of them means something.

• 17The province the taxpayer was registered in — 17 is Pichincha, 09 Guayas. It runs 01 to 24, with 30 for Ecuadorians registered abroad.
• 9The kind of taxpayer. Under 6 is a natural person, 6 the public sector, 9 a private company.
• 001691The serial, ending on a check digit.
• 001The establishment. 001 is the head office; a branch is numbered after it.

There is a check digit, but its published rule does not hold: applied to 1790016919001 — Corporación Favorita, one of the largest companies in the country — it produces the wrong digit. Vatlas therefore does not reject an Ecuadorian number offline. A typo costs one lookup rather than a wrongly refused customer.

Active, suspended, closed

The SRI states the taxpayer's standing in one word. ACTIVO is a live registration. SUSPENDIDO is one the administration has suspended, and PASIVO one the taxpayer has closed. The last two are numbers that should not be on an invoice today, and both are common.

The register also publishes when it last touched the record, which Vatlas passes through — so you can see not only what the SRI holds but when it last changed its mind.

Finding the company behind the number

The SRI's own service

The catastro is readable over the REST service the SRI's online portal calls: open, no account, no quota. It answers with the razón social, the taxpayer class, the standing and the principal economic activity.

Two endpoints, one answer

The address is not in that answer. Ecuador keeps the premises in a second endpoint, one row per establishment, with the head office flagged — so a full lookup is two calls, and Vatlas makes both. A company with several hundred branches returns several hundred rows; the head office is the one that answers "where is this company".

How an Ecuadorian address is written

As a path: PICHINCHA / RUMIÑAHUI / COTOGCHOA / AV. GENERAL ENRIQUEZ S/N — province, cantón, parroquia, then the street. The cantón is what most systems mean by the city.

Ecuador-specific pitfalls

• Thirteen digits, always. A ten-digit cédula is not a RUC; the RUC adds the establishment number.
• The last three digits are the establishment. 001 is the head office, and they are part of the number.
• No reliable offline check. The published check-digit rule contradicts real companies, so nothing is rejected before asking.
• SUSPENDIDO and PASIVO are real states. Existing in the catastro is not being registered today.
• Addresses end in S/N. Sin número — an address without a street number, and perfectly normal.

One API, one response shape

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

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/EC1790016919001" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "EC1790016919001",
    "countryCode": "EC",
    "nationalNumber": "1790016919001",
    "nationalId": "1790016919001",
    "name": "CORPORACION FAVORITA C.A.",
    "legalForm": "SOCIEDAD",
    "status": "active",
    "address": {
      "line1": "AV. GENERAL ENRIQUEZ S/N",
      "line2": "COTOGCHOA",
      "postalCode": null,
      "city": "RUMIÑAHUI",
      "country": "EC"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "SRI",
    "sourceDate": "2026-09-15",
    "sourceSince": "2026-09-15",
    "sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-09-10T14:11:00.000Z"
  }
}

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

Business numbers in other countries

• Peru
• Costa Rica
• Brazil
• Spain
• Vietnam
• All countries

Last updated 15 September 2026.