"EU VAT Validator & Business Lookup API — Now Live"

2026-02-27 [fintech api vat eu saas b2b]

If you've ever tried to validate a European VAT number programmatically, you know the pain: the EU VIES SOAP API is unreliable, poorly documented, and returns cryptic error codes. Today we're shipping a clean REST wrapper that makes it trivial.

What It Does

GET /vat-api/v1/validate/:vatNumber — Full VIES validation with graceful error handling. Returns whether the number is valid, the registered company name and address, request timestamp, and whether the result was served from cache.

GET /vat-api/v1/countries — All 27 EU member states with their VAT number format patterns, so you can pre-validate on the client before hitting the API.

Rate limited to 100 requests per 15 minutes per IP. No API key needed for the playground — register for higher limits.

Why VIES Is Annoying

The official VIES SOAP API returns MS_UNAVAILABLE when a member state's national registry is offline (which happens constantly). It gives no indication of which state or when it'll be back. Our API handles all of this transparently: MS_UNAVAILABLE returns a clear JSON error with a retryAfter hint. SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE (VIES itself is down) returns a 503 with an explanation. Everything else is normalized.

Response Caching

VIES responses are cached for 5 minutes per VAT number. This keeps load off the EU's infrastructure and makes repeat lookups instant — useful when validating the same vendor across multiple invoice runs.

Try It

Head to c.pixeldev.eu/vat-api for the live playground. Paste any EU VAT number and see the validated result immediately. Full API docs and curl examples are on the same page.

curl https://c.pixeldev.eu/vat-api/v1/validate/DE811428181

{
  "valid": true,
  "vatNumber": "DE811428181",
  "countryCode": "DE",
  "country": "Germany",
  "name": "EXAMPLE GMBH",
  "address": "MUSTERSTRASSE 1, 10115 BERLIN",
  "requestDate": "2026-02-27+01:00",
  "cached": false
}

Built on top of the same infrastructure as the SEPA Validator and Pay-by-Bank Widget. Part of a growing suite of EU fintech developer tools at c.pixeldev.eu.

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