The New Zealand Business Number

The format

An NZBN is thirteen digits and nothing else — no letters, no separators, no prefix on the number itself. It is a GS1 Global Location Number, which is what gives it its shape: the leading digits are a GS1 country prefix, and the thirteenth is the ordinary GTIN check digit — weights 1 and 3 alternating from the left, and the digit that rounds the total up to the next multiple of ten.

That check is real arithmetic and not a formality, so a mistyped NZBN is caught before anyone is asked: Vatlas rejects it offline rather than spending a call on it. The register does the same, and says so in plain words — Checksum 4 is invalid for number 942904190421.

The NZBN is not the GST number

This is the one to be clear about. New Zealand's tax number is the IRD number, issued by Inland Revenue, and it is the number a GST-registered business puts on its invoices. It is not public and will not become so: there is no IRD equivalent of VIES, and no lookup anywhere returns it as a matter of course.

The NZBN is the other number — the identifier a New Zealand business is actually quoted by, across government and between businesses. It is the one that plays the part here, the same arrangement as Singapore's UEN or Australia's ABN.

So a lookup tells you who the entity is: legal name, entity type, whether it is live, and its current addresses. It does not tell you whether the entity charges GST. Registration is compulsory above NZD 60,000 of turnover in a year and voluntary below it, and nothing on this site will pretend the NZBN proves it.

Who has one

Everything registered with the Companies Office has been allocated an NZBN automatically — registered companies, incorporated societies, charitable trust boards, building societies, credit unions, limited partnerships. Everyone else applies, and the register is the better for it: sole traders, partnerships, trusts and charities are all in there alongside the companies.

• NZ Limited CompanyThe bulk of the register, and the richest rows in it: registered office, address for service, directors, industry codes.
• Sole TraderSelf-employed, registered on application. Often the thinnest row in the register — see the pitfalls below.
• Charitable Trust / Incorporated SocietyBoth carry a registered address, filed by the register that holds them rather than by the Companies Office.

Finding the entity behind the number

The NZBN API

The register answers one number at a time over a public API at api.business.govt.nz, free, but keyed: a subscription key granted on the spot when you register at the portal. One request resolves a number outright, because the endpoint is keyed by the NZBN itself.

What comes back

More than most registers publish: the legal name, the entity type and its description, the registration status, the registration date, every current address, and — where the entity has filled them in — trading names, industry classifications, a website, a phone number and an email.

Several addresses, not one

An entity holds its addresses side by side rather than in one field: registered office, address for service, postal, delivery, office. The historical ones stay in the list with an end date on them, which is exactly what makes the register worth reading — and what makes it easy to quote an address the entity left five years ago. Vatlas takes the registered office where there is one, and only ever among the addresses that have not ended.

New Zealand-specific pitfalls

• The NZBN is not the IRD number. The tax number is not published, and nothing here returns it. An NZBN is not proof of GST registration.
• The register has no 404. A well-formed number that belongs to nobody comes back as a 400 saying Could not find NZBN Number. Read literally, every miss looks like an outage.
• Most of the thirteen-digit space is unissued. Which makes that miss the commonest answer there is, not an edge case.
• A sole trader may publish nothing. The number resolves, the entity is real, and the name is a private individual's — so it is often withheld, along with every address. Nine of ten sole traders sampled came back with no name at all.
• The town is not always in the same field. The companies register files it one line up from where the charities register does. A record read by fixed position loses the city on one of the two.
• Removed is not the only way to stop. The register states receivership, liquidation and statutory management separately; all of them are reported as inactive here.

One API, one response shape

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

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/NZ9429040402543" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "NZ9429040402543",
    "countryCode": "NZ",
    "nationalNumber": "9429040402543",
    "nationalId": "9429040402543",
    "name": "AIR NEW ZEALAND LIMITED",
    "legalForm": "NZ Limited Company",
    "status": "active",
    "address": {
      "line1": "185 Fanshawe Street",
      "line2": null,
      "postalCode": "1010",
      "city": "Auckland",
      "country": "NZ"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "NZBN",
    "sourceDate": "2026-09-17",
    "sourceSince": "2026-09-17",
    "sourceUpdatedAt": "2026-03-11T01:28:07.000Z"
  }
}

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

• Australia
• Singapore
• Japan
• Taiwan
• Norway
• All countries

Last updated 17 September 2026.