EU VAT guide

Is VIES down?

VIES availability can change during the day. A failed VAT check can come from the EU gateway, a national registry, rate limits, or a timeout.

What this status can tell you

The live check below tests whether the VIES technical service appears reachable from VAT Validate.

It does not guarantee every member-state VAT registry is online, because each country can fail independently.

How to interpret downtime

If the gateway is reachable but your VAT check returns MS_UNAVAILABLE, the issue is likely with the relevant national registry.

If the gateway is not reachable, retry later and avoid marking customer VAT numbers as invalid based only on the outage.

Live gateway check

Checking VIES...

Checking whether the VIES technical service is reachable.

Pending

Check a VAT number

You can paste the full VAT ID with country prefix, or choose the country and enter the local number.