Ireland · IE
The Irish VAT number
Ireland publishes its entire company register daily, for free, under an open licence — and it is of no help at all in finding a company from its VAT number.
Format: IE + 7 digits + 1 letter, or + 2 letters
Example: IE0006286E
Issued by: Revenue, the Irish tax authority.
The format
Irish VAT numbers come in three shapes, all eight or nine characters after the prefix, and all still in circulation.
- 1234567TThe classic form: seven digits and one letter.
- 1234567FAIssued since 2013: seven digits and two letters.
- 1X23456TAn older form with a letter,
+or*in second position.
The trailing letter is a check character, computed over the digits with a weighted modulus 23 and mapped onto the alphabet. The older + and * forms date from before 2013 and are gradually disappearing, but a validator that rejects them is wrong.
The VAT number and the Tax Reference Number
The Irish VAT number is the company’s Tax Reference Number with IE in front. That same number is used for corporation tax and PAYE, so a business has one identifier at Revenue and uses it everywhere.
What it is not is the CRO number — the sequence the Companies Registration Office assigns on incorporation. The two are issued by different bodies at different times, and nothing connects them arithmetically. A company can be incorporated with a CRO number and never register for VAT at all.
This is the Irish problem in one sentence. The CRO publishes the whole register daily under CC BY 4.0 — free, complete, well documented, exemplary open data. And it is keyed by CRO number, so no row in it can be reached from a VAT number. A register that publishes everything except the key buys you nothing.
Finding the company behind a number
The CRO register
core.cro.ie gives free company search and free daily bulk files. Use it when you have a company name or a CRO number; it cannot help you from a VAT number.
Revenue
Revenue does not publish a directory of VAT numbers and does not offer a public lookup that returns a trader’s name.
VIES
Ireland discloses the name and the address through VIES, which makes it the only route from an Irish VAT number to a company. The address comes back as one long free-text line rather than in separate fields — often with a C/O and a contact name in it, as in the example below — so nothing can be split out of it reliably.
Ireland-specific pitfalls
- The VAT number is not the CRO number, and neither can be computed from the other. This is the single most common wrong assumption about Ireland.
- Three formats coexist. A regular expression written for the post-2013 shape alone will reject perfectly valid older numbers.
- Older numbers can contain
+or*in second position — characters most validators strip as punctuation. - Addresses arrive as one unsplit line. Ireland has no uniform postcode in VIES output, and Eircode rarely appears, so postcode and city cannot be separated with confidence.
- Being registered with the CRO says nothing about VAT. Many Irish companies never register for VAT at all.
One API for 27 member states
Vatlas turns a European VAT number into a company record: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Ireland shows the honest limit of that promise — the name comes back, the address arrives as a single line, and no national identifier is available at all:
curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/vat/IE0006286E" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"Response:
200 OK
{
"data": {
"vatNumber": "IE0006286E",
"countryCode": "IE",
"nationalNumber": "0006286E",
"nationalId": null,
"name": "UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK",
"legalForm": null,
"status": "active",
"address": {
"line1": "C/O CORMAC MCSWEENEY, FINANCE OFFICE MAIN QUADRANGLE, WESTERN ROAD, CORK",
"line2": null,
"postalCode": null,
"city": null,
"country": "IE"
}
},
"meta": {
"origin": "vies",
"source": "VIES",
"sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-08-28T10:16:52.797Z",
"checked": ["database", "VIES"]
}
}Rather than guess at where the town ends and the street begins, the whole string stays in line1 and postalCode and city stay null. Inventing a split would be worse than admitting there is none.
meta.origin says where the answer came from: database for a register imported locally, source for a national API queried live, vies as a last resort. The shape of the response never changes from one country to the next.
Free to try. An email address creates an account — no credit card, no sales call — with 100 requests a month and a working key in about a minute.
Frequently asked
The Irish VAT number in short
How many characters does an Irish VAT number have?
Eight or nine after the IE prefix: seven digits followed by one or two letters.
Is the Irish VAT number the same as the CRO number?
No, and one cannot be derived from the other. The CRO number comes from the Companies Registration Office on incorporation; the VAT number comes from Revenue on VAT registration.
What does the letter at the end mean?
It is a check character computed from the digits with a weighted modulus 23. It catches typing errors and nothing more.
Why do some Irish VAT numbers contain + or *?
They are pre-2013 numbers. The characters are part of the number and must not be stripped as punctuation.
Can I download a list of Irish VAT numbers?
No. The CRO publishes the company register daily for free, but it holds CRO numbers, not VAT numbers, and Revenue publishes no directory.
VAT numbers in other countries
Last updated 28 August 2026.