France · FR
The French intra-community VAT number
Thirteen characters carrying exactly one piece of information: the company's SIREN. Everything else is a check key that can be recomputed.
Format: FR + key (2 characters) + SIREN (9 digits)
Example: FR95884831538 — key 95, SIREN 884831538
Issued by: the company's local corporate tax office (SIE), part of the DGFiP.
The format in detail
A French intra-community VAT number is always 13 characters, with no spaces or dots:
- FRThe country code. Always FR — Monaco included.
- 95The two-character check key.
- 884831538The SIREN, the company's identifier at INSEE.
The key is almost always numeric. A handful of older numbers carry an alphabetic or mixed
key (FR2A123456789); they remain valid, but no published rule derives them, so
nothing can check them offline.
How the key is computed
The key is not arbitrary — it follows from the SIREN:
key = (12 + 3 × (SIREN modulo 97)) modulo 97
For SIREN 884831538: 884831538 mod 97 = 60, so
(12 + 3 × 60) mod 97 = 192 mod 97 = 95, giving FR95884831538. The
result is zero-padded to two digits: SIREN 000325175 yields key 08.
A correct key proves nothing. The check is syntactic: it establishes that the number is well formed for its country, never that the company exists or is still VAT registered. Only VIES or a register can say that.
SIREN, SIRET and the rest
The SIREN is a 9-digit number INSEE assigns to every legal unit — company, association, sole trader — at registration. It never changes, and survives changes of name, legal form and address.
The SIRET is 14 digits: the SIREN plus a 5-digit NIC identifying one establishment. A company has one SIREN and as many SIRETs as it has sites. The VAT number is built on the SIREN, never on the SIRET.
The RCS number is the SIREN prefixed by the registry court's town ("RCS Paris 884 831 538") — same digits, different presentation. The VAT number is issued by the tax administration rather than by INSEE, which is precisely why it appears in no INSEE file.
Finding the company behind a number
The good news: the SIREN is the last nine digits, so you get it without querying anything. The bad news: you then have to look it up somewhere, and the VAT number itself is published nowhere.
The SIRENE database
INSEE publishes its whole register as open data under the Licence Ouverte, on
data.gouv.fr. Two files matter:
StockUniteLegale (companies: name, legal form, activity, administrative status)
and StockEtablissement (establishments, and therefore addresses). The second is
several gigabytes compressed — by far the longer half of any import, and the only one that
carries the head-office address.
For one-off lookups, annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr exposes the same data in a readable interface.
VIES
The European Commission's service confirms that a number is registered for intra-community trade, and France is one of the member states that disclose the name and address. It is the only source that answers "is this number valid today?".
Its limits are real: no national identifier in the response, no legal form, a free-text
address you have to split yourself, and availability that depends on each national
administration. France in particular caps concurrent calls tightly and regularly answers
MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ.
| Source | Keyed by | What you get | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| SIRENE open data | SIREN | Name, legal form, activity, status, address | Multi-gigabyte files, monthly refresh, no VAT number at all |
| Annuaire des entreprises | SIREN or name | The same data, one record at a time | A human interface, not a feed |
| VIES | VAT number | Validity, name, free-text address | Slow, tight quotas, frequent outages |
France-specific pitfalls
- The VAT number is in no public file. It is computed from the SIREN; going the other way is just taking the last nine digits.
- Having a SIREN does not mean having an active VAT number. A company under the small-business VAT exemption, or one that has been struck off, keeps its SIREN and will not come back as valid from VIES. A number VIES rejects does not mean the company does not exist.
- Historic alphabetic keys cannot be recomputed; a strict validator will wrongly reject them.
- The address lives in a different file from the name. In SIRENE the name is in the legal units and the address in the establishments; a partial import produces records with no address.
- Monaco uses the FR prefix. Monegasque businesses are treated as French for intra-community VAT.
One call, for France and for the other 26
Everything above is the work for one country. The other 26 each have their own register, format, check key and access conditions. Vatlas does that work once: you send a European VAT number, you get a company record back, always in the same envelope.
curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/vat/FR08000325175" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"Response:
200 OK
{
"data": {
"vatNumber": "FR08000325175",
"countryCode": "FR",
"nationalNumber": "08000325175",
"nationalId": "000325175",
"name": "THIERRY JANOYER",
"legalForm": "1000",
"status": "active",
"address": {
"line1": "51 RUE MARX DORMOY",
"line2": null,
"postalCode": "13004",
"city": "MARSEILLE",
"country": "FR"
}
},
"meta": {
"origin": "database",
"source": "SIRENE",
"sourceUpdatedAt": "2025-12-06T09:43:55.000Z",
"checked": ["database"]
}
}
meta.origin tells you where the answer came from — database for
France, whose register is imported locally, source for a national API queried
live, vies as a last resort. The shape of the response does not change from one
country to the next.
Try it on your own numbers. An email address is enough to create an account: no credit card, no sales call, 100 free requests a month, and a working key in about a minute.
Frequently asked
The French VAT number in short
How do I find a company's VAT number from its SIREN?
Compute the key: (12 + 3 × (SIREN mod 97)) mod 97, zero-padded to two
digits, then prefix FR. SIREN 884831538 gives FR95884831538. The arithmetic is reliable,
but it does not tell you whether the company is actually VAT registered.
How many digits does a French VAT number have?
Thirteen characters in total: the letters FR, two key characters and the nine digits of the SIREN.
What is the difference between SIREN, SIRET and the VAT number?
The SIREN (9 digits) identifies the company, the SIRET (14 digits) identifies one of its establishments, and the intra-community VAT number is the SIREN preceded by a check key and the FR code. SIREN and SIRET come from INSEE, the VAT number from the tax administration.
Does a valid VAT number mean the company still exists?
No. The key checks out offline and stays correct even for a company that has been struck off. Only a VIES lookup attests that the number is registered for intra-community trade at the time of the request.
Why does VIES reject a number I know is valid?
Three possible causes: the company is not registered for intra-community operations, it has been struck off, or the French service was briefly unavailable. The last case is common and shows up as a technical error rather than a "not registered" answer.
Is there a public file of French VAT numbers?
No. INSEE publishes SIRENE, which holds SIRENs and no VAT numbers at all. You either rebuild the number from the SIREN, or go from the number back to the SIREN.
VAT numbers in other countries
Last updated 28 August 2026.