The Singapore Unique Entity Number

The three formats

A UEN comes in one of three shapes, and which one you have says who issued it:

• nnnnnnnnXBusinesses: eight digits and a check letter. 00022100K.
• yyyynnnnnXLocal companies: the year of incorporation, five digits and a check letter. 201512345A.
• TyyPQnnnnXEverything else: a century letter, the year, a two-letter entity type, four digits and a check letter. T09LL0001B.

The leading letter of the third form is T for this century, S for the last and R for the one before. The two-letter code in the middle names the kind of entity — LL for a limited liability partnership, CC for a charity, and so on.

A UEN is not a GST registration

This is the point to be clear about. IRAS reuses the UEN as the GST registration number for entities registered with ACRA, so the number on a Singapore tax invoice is usually the UEN. But holding a UEN says nothing about GST: registration is compulsory above a turnover threshold and voluntary below it, and most of the two million entities on the register are not registered.

ACRA's open data — which is what Vatlas imports — publishes identity, not GST status. A lookup here tells you who the entity is: name, legal form, registration date, address, and whether it is live or struck off. It does not tell you whether it charges GST, and nothing on this site will pretend otherwise. For that, IRAS runs its own GST-registered business search.

Finding the entity behind the number

ACRA open data

ACRA publishes the register monthly on data.gov.sg, free for personal or commercial use, with no key: twenty-seven CSV files, one per initial plus an "others". Some two million entities, with the full address — block, street, level, unit, building and postcode — the entity type, the status and the incorporation date.

The empty cell

Worth knowing before you parse it yourself: an unset column in this dump is the two letters na, not a blank. Read naively, a struck-off company with no address on file comes back living at na na.

Singapore-specific pitfalls

• A UEN is not proof of GST registration. The two are related and not the same.
• Not every UEN comes from ACRA. Some thirty agencies issue them; the third format is where the others live.
• Struck off is not dissolved. The register distinguishes several ways of ceasing to exist, and all of them are reported as inactive here.
• The check letter is real but unpublished. The syntax can be validated; the check character cannot be recomputed from any official rule.
• Old numbers are short. A business registered in 1975 has an eight-digit UEN with leading zeros. They are part of the number.

One API, inside Europe and out

Vatlas turns a business tax number into a company record: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Same call, same shape, for a UEN and for a French VAT number.

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/SG00031800X" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "SG00031800X",
    "countryCode": "SG",
    "nationalId": "00031800X",
    "name": "A M ABDULLAH SAHIB & CO",
    "legalForm": "Partnership",
    "status": "inactive",
    "address": {
      "line1": "93 MARKET STREET",
      "line2": "#10-01",
      "postalCode": "0104",
      "city": "Singapore",
      "country": "SG"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "ACRA",
    "sourceDate": "2026-08-14"
  }
}

meta.sourceDate is the day ACRA published the edition, not the day you asked.

Get a free key Read the documentation

Business numbers in other countries

• Australia
• Japan
• Brazil
• France
• Germany
• All countries

Last updated 8 September 2026.