--- title: "VAT number" summary: "A VAT number is a tax registration identifier issued by a national tax authority, checkable against the EU's validation service for member states, and a strong but imperfect proxy for company identity." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/vat-number last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # VAT number > A VAT number is a tax registration identifier issued by a national tax authority, checkable against the EU's validation service for member states, and a strong but imperfect proxy for company identity. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/vat-number Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Identifiers ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under identifiers](https://entitybind.com/glossary#identifiers). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What VAT number means A VAT number is the registration a national tax authority issues to a business for value-added tax. It is attractive for matching because these numbers are widely captured in procurement and finance systems, they are structured, and for EU member states they can be validated against the Commission's VIES service, which returns the registered name and address for a valid number. The caveats are real. A VAT number identifies a tax registration rather than a legal person: VAT groups let several companies share one registration, so an agreeing VAT number does not always imply the same legal entity. Numbers are deregistered and can be reissued. A company may hold registrations in several member states. And validation services answer about current validity rather than about history, which makes them a poor source for a historical join. Format checking is worth doing before any lookup — each member state has its own structure and check digit rules — because a malformed number is a data-entry error rather than a company that cannot be found. Entity Bind accepts VAT numbers as typed, scoped identifiers, sources them from home registers where those publish them, and treats them as strong evidence rather than as an automatic deterministic decision, precisely because a VAT registration and a legal person are not always one to one. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [VAT registration number (VAT number)](https://entitybind.com/identifiers/vat-number): A registration for tax, which is not the same unit as a company. A VAT group registers several legal entities under one number. - [Supplier master and AP](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/supplier-master-and-ap): Vendor codes, payment routing and the identifiers a finance system actually holds. - [Register coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Company number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/company-number): A company number is the identifier a register assigns to a company at incorporation, and it is unique only within the register that issued it — never within a country and never globally. - [EUID (European Unique Identifier)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/euid): The EUID is the identifier assigned under the EU Business Registers Interconnection System, combining a country code, a register code and the national registration number into one pan-European key. - [Deterministic matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deterministic-matching): Deterministic matching decides a pair by an explicit rule — usually agreement on a strong identifier — and produces the same verdict every time with no score in between. - [Crosswalk](https://entitybind.com/glossary/crosswalk): A crosswalk is a mapping between the identifier schemes that name the same company in different systems — LEI to company number to CIK to ticker — so that data joined on one key can be joined to data keyed on another. - [SIREN and SIRET](https://entitybind.com/glossary/siren): SIREN is the nine-digit identifier France assigns to a legal unit and SIRET is the fourteen-digit identifier of one of its establishments — the same company at two different levels of granularity. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [KYB data requirements](https://entitybind.com/guides/kyb-data-requirements) (Guide): What a know-your-business onboarding flow actually needs, field by field, and which step is identity resolution. Explicitly not a screening, scoring or eligibility tool. ## The other 8 terms on this shelf The keys company data is joined on, who issues each one, and where each stops being unique. - [Crosswalk](https://entitybind.com/glossary/crosswalk) - [LEI (Legal Entity Identifier)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/lei) - [Company number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/company-number) - [CIK (Central Index Key)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cik) - [Ticker symbol](https://entitybind.com/glossary/ticker) - [SIREN and SIRET](https://entitybind.com/glossary/siren) - [D-U-N-S number](https://entitybind.com/glossary/duns) - [EUID (European Unique Identifier)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/euid) Previous, alphabetically: [u-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/u-probability) · Next, alphabetically: [Wilson interval](https://entitybind.com/glossary/wilson-interval) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/vat-number, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.