French VAT Number, SIREN, SIRET and VIES Explained

These identifiers answer different questions. The safest starting point is not 'which number looks official?' but 'am I identifying the legal person, a physical or administrative establishment, or its VAT status?' A system may legitimately request more than one number because it is checking more than one layer.

The DGFiP describes the SIREN as the unique company identifier, the SIRET as the identifier of an establishment and the intra-Community VAT number as the individual tax number allocated by the business tax office. The European Commission describes VIES as an electronic validation system. VIES therefore returns a status; it does not replace any of the identifiers it checks.

INSEE defines the SIREN as a nine-digit identifier allocated to each legal unit. The first eight digits do not encode business characteristics and the ninth is a control digit. INSEE also states that the number is allocated once and is not reused after the legal person disappears. It is the stable identity key that connects company, tax and administrative records.

A SIREN is not evidence that the entity is currently VAT-registered, has a French fixed establishment or owns the marketplace account where the number was entered. Foreign businesses with French activity can be recorded in Sirene, and the SIEE registration form uses the French activity to allocate a SIREN. The existence of that administrative identifier must not be turned into a conclusion about VAT establishment without a separate factual analysis.

Use the legal name and SIREN as the master key in an entity file. Then attach the relevant SIRETs, VAT number, authority correspondence and marketplace accounts to that same record. Our French SIREN and SIRET checker helps confirm the public company and establishment record before a VAT check.

INSEE defines the SIRET as a 14-digit establishment identifier. The first nine digits are the legal unit's SIREN. The final five are the NIC: a four-digit establishment sequence followed by a control digit. A company with a head office and two operating sites can therefore have one SIREN and three SIRETs.

The SIRET follows the establishment record. Service Public states that it changes when the address of the company or establishment changes, while the SIREN portion remains the same. An old SIRET can therefore be structurally correct and still refer to a closed or moved establishment. Check status and address, not only the digit count.

For a non-established foreign business, the presence of a French administrative establishment identifier does not by itself prove a fixed establishment for VAT. Tax establishment depends on the underlying resources and activity, not on the last five digits of a registration record. Keep the identifier check separate from the VAT-establishment analysis.

DGFiP and BOFiP describe the French intra-Community VAT number as a 13-character identifier: the country prefix FR, a two-digit computer key and the nine-digit SIREN. In a schematic example, FR KK 123456789 means that KK is the tax key and 123456789 is the SIREN. The 14-digit SIRET is not appended to FR.

The tax office allocates the VAT number. Deriving a plausible key from a SIREN, finding the number in a commercial directory or seeing the right character count does not prove that the number is active. BOFiP states that the identifier is national, unique, invariant and verifiable. Verification is therefore a separate control, not a formatting exercise.

Before using the number, compare it with the official registration or welcome letter and the legal entity's SIREN. Then run the exact number through the official VIES service or our French VAT number checker, which relies on the official validation route. Preserve the unspaced value in master data and format it only for display.

The European Commission's VIES FAQ explains that a query is sent to the relevant national database through a secure connection. The response is valid or invalid. Depending on national data-protection rules and the record available, the response may also show a name and address. The national tax administrations maintain the data and must correct it; the Commission does not edit national records.

VIES confirms current status only. The FAQ states that it cannot confirm validity for a past date and cannot find a VAT number from a name or address. Save the result, query date, exact input and any request identifier when relying on the check for an intra-EU transaction. This creates evidence of the control performed at that time, not permanent proof for all future transactions.

An invalid response has several possible causes: the number was mistyped, the national service is unavailable, the VAT number is not active, or the holder is not registered for the relevant intra-EU validation. Do not replace diagnosis with repeated submissions to a marketplace. Separate the technical result from the entity and document match.

Most identifier problems are mapping problems. A finance system may store the legal entity under SIREN, an invoice may need legal and establishment details, a CA3 return uses the VAT identity, and a marketplace may compare all of them. One master record should preserve every identifier as a distinct field rather than a single generic 'company number'.

Do not silently truncate a SIRET to nine digits or build a VAT number inside a spreadsheet. If a source provides one identifier and a target requests another, resolve the legal entity and obtain the corresponding official record. A transformation that preserves digits can still create the wrong legal conclusion.

When a number is rejected, start with the legal entity, not the error message. Confirm which company owns the stock, signs the customer contract, issues the invoice and holds the seller account. Then compare the SIREN embedded in the French VAT number with the legal-unit record. Only after that should you investigate the establishment address or platform formatting.

Keep one evidence pack: current registry or Sirene record, relevant establishment record, DGFiP VAT evidence, dated VIES result and the complete rejection notice. Repeatedly uploading the same certificate cannot fix a sister-company mismatch or an obsolete SIRET.

If the French VAT number itself is missing or attached to the wrong scope, review the transaction trigger through our French VAT registration decision tree and then use the foreign-company registration guide to prepare the correct file.

A German company stores its own goods in France and makes French taxable sales. It remains the same German legal person, but its French VAT registration also creates French administrative identifiers for that activity. The French SIREN identifies the registered legal unit in French systems, the relevant SIRET identifies the administrative establishment record and the VAT number combines FR, its key and that SIREN. None of those facts turns the company into a French-incorporated subsidiary.

The marketplace account, warehouse contract and invoices must all name the German company that owns and sells the stock. The team verifies the SIREN and SIRET in the French public record, copies the VAT number from DGFiP evidence and checks it in VIES. If the marketplace belongs to a sister company, the valid French number cannot simply be reused there.

This is an illustrative control example, not a client case. The VAT-registration trigger and any fixed-establishment conclusion must be decided from the actual contracts, people, assets and transactions.