VIES Status for France

Last 24 hours

100.00%

Last 7 days

100.00%

Last 30 days

99.89%

Rank among member states

#6 of 28

Figures cover 30 days of our samples (2836 for FR), capped at 30 days — not a full month yet unless it says so. All member states averaged 97.79% over the same window.

When France Was Unavailable

1 separate outage, 45 min of observed downtime in total. Times are UTC. Sampling is every 15 minutes, so each window is accurate to within one interval on each side.

Day by Day

One column per UTC day. The number above a column is the percentage of readings that failed that day; a blank means every reading came back.

The Hours France Goes Quiet

In our samples, the weakest hour is 17:00–18:00 UTC at 97.54% across 122 readings, and the weakest day is Wednesday at 99.21%. That is a description of what we recorded, not a schedule – treat it as a hint about when to retry, not a promise.

By hour of day (UTC)

By weekday

Weekday × Hour

FR availability by UTC weekday and hour, across 30 days of samples. Dark green is healthy; red is a slot where the node regularly fails to answer.

Hours are UTC. Hover a cell for the exact figure.

France VAT Number Format and Checks

VIES prefix

FR

Format

FR + 2 alphanumeric + 9 digits

Example

FR81775670417 — LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE

Standard VAT rate

20% — Taxe sur la valeur ajoutée (TVA)

Questions People Ask

Is VIES down for France right now?

No. At our last reading the FR node was answering VIES requests. The reading is at most 15 minutes old, and a member state can drop out between samples.

Why does a valid French VAT number fail to validate?

If the number is well-formed and the FR node is unavailable, the failure is upstream, not in the number. VIES returns a service error rather than "invalid", and any provider that turns that into "invalid" is lying to you. vatnode returns a distinct VIES_UNAVAILABLE error with HTTP 503 so your code can retry instead of rejecting a real customer.

Does France publish a VIES maintenance schedule?

The Commission publishes a general VIES maintenance notice, but member states take their own systems down without announcing it to API consumers. That is why this page exists: the recorded history shows when the FR node was actually unreachable, whatever the schedule says.

Can I still validate a French VAT number during an outage?

Not against VIES. What you can do is queue the check and retry — vatnode's monitoring re-runs a subscription's checks through the day and tells you when the answer finally lands, so a customer is not blocked by a member state's downtime.

Where does this data come from?

From the European Commission's own check-status endpoint, sampled every 15 minutes and kept. It is the Commission's view of its member states, not an independent probe, so it can lag a node going down and it describes reachability rather than whether one particular number validates.

Other Member States

Or see every member state at once.