EU VAT number validation, over REST/JSON.

Vatline sits in front of VIES, the European Commission's VAT validation service. It speaks JSON instead of SOAP, caches what it can, absorbs upstream outages, and tells you plainly when something failed.

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Free plan: 300 checks a month, no card. Paid plans from $9 a month. See pricing.

What it gives you

• A flat JSON response with stable, documented error codes and a retryable flag on every failure.
• Caching that survives restarts, so repeat lookups never touch upstream and a redeploy never causes a burst.
• A circuit breaker per member state — when a country saturates, you get an explicit status, not a timeout.
• Explicit name_available and address_available flags, because Germany and Spain never disclose them.
• Local format validation per member state, including check digits: malformed numbers are rejected before they ever reach VIES.
• Batch of up to 100 numbers in one call.

Example

curl -X POST https://vatline.p.rapidapi.com/v1/check \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY' \
  -H 'X-RapidAPI-Host: vatline.p.rapidapi.com' \
  -d '{"vat_number": "IT00743110157"}'

Reference

Guides: handling MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ, validating VAT numbers in Python and PHP, why VIES returns no name for Germany and Spain.

API documentation: endpoints, response fields, error codes, batch calls, examples in curl, Python and JavaScript.

VAT number formats for all 27 member states — structure, check-digit algorithms where they exist, and what each country actually discloses through VIES.

Live service status — real limits, cache state and circuit breakers.

One thing to be clear about

Vatline is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with the European Commission or any national tax administration. VIES is cited only as the upstream source of the data, and no availability or latency figure is claimed until it has been measured and published with its methodology.