Countries

Status of the national bank code registry for all 36 SEPA countries. Every URL marked verified was fetched successfully on 2026-09-02 and returned the stated content type and size.

The question this table answers is narrow: is there a free, machine readable list that maps the bank code inside an IBAN to a bank and its BIC? That is a different question from whether a country publishes a list of licensed banks. Most do; far fewer publish the bank code mapping in a form software can read.

Summary

Tier A covers the countries where a bank lookup can be offered today. Countries outside it still get full structural IBAN validation, plus BIC level enrichment from the pan-European sources at the end of this document.

Tier A: machine readable, verified live

Implemented so far: DE, AT, CZ. The rest are pending a spreadsheet reader; see "Why the spreadsheet countries are not implemented yet" below.

Traps in these files

• DE is fixed width in characters and encoded windows-1252. Decoding it as UTF-8, or slicing bytes rather than runes, shifts every column after an umlaut and moves BICs onto the wrong institution.
• AT is ISO-8859-1 with five lines of legal notice and a query date above the header row. Locate the header by content, not by counting lines.
• CZ is served with Content-Type: text/html although the body is CSV. Never gate parsing on the content type.
• DE download URLs carry a content hash that changes with every quarterly release, so the link must be resolved from the landing page at run time.
• LV puts the year in the filename, so that link needs resolving too.

Tier B: published, but PDF only

These are usable with pdftotext -layout plus a parser, the same route used to extract the check digit vectors in docs/check-digits.md. A PDF layout can change without warning, so any such parser needs a row count assertion to catch a silent format change.

Tier C: subscription or commercial only

For these three, an IBAN still validates structurally, and the BIC level enrichment below still applies. Only the bank code lookup is unavailable.

Tier D: not located yet

BG, HR, CY, DK, EE, GR, IE, LT, LU, MT, PL, PT, RO, SK, SI, IS, MC, SM, AD, VA.

What is known about them:

• PL publishes the EWIB register of settlement numbers at ewib.nbp.pl, but the site is a JavaScript application and no direct file endpoint was found.
• DK points at registreringsnumre.dk, operated by Mastercard Payment Services. The page responds but exposes no data file link.
• BG, RO, LT have central bank pages that respond, but none carried a downloadable file. LT returns 403 to non browser clients.
• SK, SI, HR central bank pages moved; the previously documented paths 404.
• MC is covered by the French FIB and therefore inherits the French situation. SM, AD, VA are small enough that no national register was expected.
• IE, PT, GR, CY, MT, EE, LU, IS were checked at their obvious sources without a machine readable result. Several return 403 to scripted requests, so some of these are worth a second look through a browser.

Tier D is a research gap, not a statement that no source exists. Each entry needs one focused look at the national central bank or payment association.

Pan-European sources

These cover every SEPA country but are keyed by BIC or LEI, so they enrich an answer rather than replacing a national registry. None of them carries a national bank code.

Notes worth knowing before relying on them:

• The ECB MFI file has no BIC column, only LEI. Reaching a BIC means joining MFI to LEI to GLEIF. It is also UTF-16 and tab separated, not UTF-8 CSV. Coverage is 5,370 institutions across all 27 EU countries, updated daily.
• The EPC exports do not share a column layout: 8 columns for sct and sdd_*, 9 for oct_inst, 10 for vop. Resolve columns by header name.
• EPC BICs are 11 characters. Join on the full BIC, not an 8 character prefix.

Why the spreadsheet countries are not implemented yet

Six of the nine Tier A countries publish XLSX or XLS. Reading XLSX needs a library such as excelize, and the Swiss file is the older binary XLS format which excelize does not read at all.

The service currently has one dependency, a PostgreSQL driver. Adding a spreadsheet library for five countries, and a second one for Switzerland, is a real trade against the goal of a small auditable binary. The sources.Source interface makes each country a self contained plug in, so the decision can be taken per country rather than all at once.

A cheaper route worth trying first: several of these publishers also expose CSV or XML variants that are not linked from the obvious page, exactly as the Bundesbank does. Germany was moved off fixed width parsing that way.

Licensing

Terms differ per source and matter for redistributing a populated snapshot.

• GLEIF is CC0 and unrestricted.
• OeNB (AT) states in the CSV header that the data is provided solely under its own disclaimer and copyright terms.
• Bundesbank, SIX, NBB, Betaalvereniging, CNB, MNB, Bits, Latvijas Banka, EPC, ECB each publish their own terms of use.

Review these before shipping a container that embeds the data commercially. See NOTICE for the code side, which is a separate question.