EU VAT Insights
Patterns and curiosities found in real EU VAT number validations – company ages, founding habits, legal structures, and more.
Last updated: 4 Oct 2026, 12:57 UTC
910,275
Total validations
unique live requests
90%
Valid VAT numbers
of non-cached checks
468,535
Unique companies
distinct valid VAT IDs
28
Countries covered
EU member states
Who's having a birthday?
Companies validated through vatnode whose registration date falls near today. Dates come from the national registries that share them; only registered companies – sole traders and other natural persons are left out.
Today
4 Oct · 60 companiesRecord Holders
The oldest and most recently registered companies among those validated through vatnode – not the absolute oldest in the EU. Registration dates come from countries whose registries share them – see coverage.
Among companies validated through vatnode – not the absolute oldest/newest in the EU.
When do founders file?
Do companies prefer January fresh starts, or is it all random? Registration dates from national registries.
By Month
unique companies
By Day of Week
Mon–Fri vs weekends
Company Age Distribution
How many companies from each decade are still active and being validated today?
Registrations by Decade
companies still active
By Country
Which EU countries see the most validation requests, and how reliable are their VAT registries?
Most Validated
share of total checks
VIES Reliability
% of live checks that got a response
The Great Legal Form Debate
GmbH vs SRL vs OY vs Ltd — which corporate structure wins Europe?
Top Legal Forms
share of top 10
What do these companies actually do?
Industry data from countries whose registries share it – see coverage. Non-English labels are mapped to canonical NACE Rev. 2 English equivalents.
Top Industries
VIES Response Time by Country
Average round-trip to each country's VAT registry.
Average Response Time
ms · fastest → slowest · 10+ calls only
About this data — Statistics computed from anonymised VAT validation logs and refreshed automatically, at most a few hours stale. Cached results excluded. Registration dates, legal forms and industries are aggregated from the national registers named below, each credited to its publisher: Finland – PRH open data (CC BY 4.0); Estonia – Äriregister open data (CC BY 4.0); France – Annuaire des Entreprises (Licence Ouverte 2.0); Romania – ANAF; Czech Republic – ARES; Denmark – CVR API; Sweden – Bolagsverket; Lithuania – JARS; Belgium – CBE. Latvian and Slovenian values in older records came from JARS and AJPES respectively. Coverage per country is listed at /docs/coverage.