Peppol identifiers: scheme IDs, formats and how to look one up

A Peppol participant identifier is the address of an organisation on the Peppol network. It consists of a four-digit scheme code from the ISO 6523 International Code Designator list and the organisation's number in that scheme, separated by a colon — for example 0208:0123456789 for a Belgian enterprise number or 0204:991-12345-67 for a German Leitweg-ID. The full form adds the meta-scheme iso6523-actorid-upis::. The scheme codes are published by OpenPeppol in the Peppol Code Lists; the rules for forming and comparing identifiers are in the Policy for use of Identifiers.

What a Peppol identifier looks like

Every participant identifier has three parts: the meta-scheme, the ISO 6523 scheme code and the value.

iso6523-actorid-upis::0208:0308357159
│                      │    └─ value: the organisation's number in that scheme
│                      └─ scheme: 0208 = Belgian enterprise number
└─ meta-scheme (the only one used on the Peppol network)

The Policy for use of Identifiers 4.4.0 sets the rules. The value may contain letters, digits, minus, period, underscore and tilde and may be up to 130 characters long, excluding the scheme. Participant identifier values are case-insensitive — 0088:abc and 0088:ABC address the same participant — and are usually written in lower case. The scheme code must appear in the current code list and must not be deprecated or removed; a scheme with a removal date cannot be used on the network after that date.

The same code appears twice in an invoice. As the participant identifier it routes the message through the network; inside the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 document it is the electronic address of seller (BT-34) and buyer (BT-49), carried in cbc:EndpointID with a mandatory schemeID attribute:

<cac:AccountingCustomerParty>
  <cac:Party>
    <cbc:EndpointID schemeID="0208">0308357159</cbc:EndpointID>
    ...

The receiving access point will normally expect the buyer's EndpointID to match the participant identifier the message was addressed to. Party identifiers elsewhere in the invoice (cac:PartyIdentification) may use the same ICD codes but do not affect routing.

Common scheme codes by country

The Participant identifier schemes list in Peppol Code Lists v9.7 (released 2 July 2026) contains 105 rows. Codes below 1000 are genuine ISO 6523 ICDs; codes in the 99xx range were allocated by Peppol before an ICD existed and are mostly national VAT numbers. Where a country has both, the national Peppol Authority usually recommends the ICD — Belgium, for instance, requires 0208 and treats 9925 as optional.

Value formats in the table are taken from the code list descriptions and the national registers; a scheme's exact validation rule (check digits, prefixes) is the issuing agency's, and a service provider will reject a malformed value at registration. Belgian enterprise numbers are a case in point: new registrations since September 2023 begin with 1 rather than 0, so software must not assume a leading zero.

Which identifier to register — and which to send to

Register the identifier your national Peppol Authority requires, and add others only if a counterparty needs them. One organisation may hold several participant identifiers, but each identifier can only be registered with one SMP at a time; moving to another service provider means migrating the registration.

When sending, use the identifier under which the recipient is actually registered. In Belgium that is the enterprise number by default — the FPS FAQ advises suppliers not to ask customers for a Peppol ID but to address 0208: plus the enterprise number and let software apply a "Peppol first" strategy. In Germany a public authority is addressed by its Leitweg-ID, which the authority itself provides, while a German business exchanging B2B invoices is more likely registered under its VAT number (9930). A GLN or DUNS is only useful if the recipient has registered it.

The Belgian rules for participants and the German B2G rules are described on the Belgium hub and the XRechnung page; the network mechanics on what Peppol is.

How to look up an identifier

Two lookups answer two different questions.

1. Is this organisation on Peppol, and under which identifier? Search the Peppol Directory (directory.peppol.eu) by name, address, identifier or keyword. Each hit is a "business card" published by the participant's SMP with its identifiers and the document types it accepts; results can be exported as XML, JSON or CSV. Listing in the directory is optional, so absence is not proof that a participant is unreachable — but for Belgium the FPS FAQ recommends exactly this check, searching 0208: plus the enterprise number.
2. Can this identifier receive this document type? That is the SML/SMP lookup an access point performs before sending: the identifier is resolved through DNS to its SMP, and the SMP lists the supported document types, process identifiers and the receiving endpoint. Service providers expose this as a "participant lookup" or "capability check" in their user interfaces and APIs.

Neither lookup tells you whether the organisation can send; the network only publishes receiving capabilities. The Peppol identifier tool on this site helps form an identifier correctly before you search for it.

Frequent mistakes

• Using a deprecated or removed scheme — 9908 for Norway, 9956 for Belgium, 0037 for Finland — which recipients' access points reject.
• Writing the VAT prefix into an enterprise-number scheme (0208:BE0308357159) or omitting it from a VAT scheme (9925:0308357159).
• Dropping a leading zero because a spreadsheet stored the enterprise number as a number.
• Setting a different schemeID in the buyer's EndpointID than the one the message is addressed to.
• Addressing a German public body by VAT number instead of its Leitweg-ID.

How KRONENWERK handles Peppol identifiers

For a Belgian company, KRONENWERK derives the Peppol identifier from the enterprise number — scheme 0208 and the ten digits, the Belgian default — and writes it with schemeID="0208" into the seller's and buyer's EndpointID of the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 UBL invoice it generates and validates at issuance. Generation and validation are SUPPORTED. When handing an invoice to the access point, the delivery module recognises identifiers written in ISO 6523 form (0208:0417497106) or as a plain national number for the product's countries — a Belgian VAT number becomes the 0208 enterprise number, a French number its SIREN or SIRET (0002/0009), Dutch, German and Polish VAT numbers their VAT schemes (9944, 9930, 9945), a Leitweg-ID scheme 0204 — and treats anything it cannot map unambiguously as not reachable rather than guessing. Resolving an identifier on the live network — the SML/SMP lookup and the directory check — happens at the access point: KRONENWERK is not a Peppol access point and sends and receives over Peppol through an accredited access point provider (Storecove) once the company is connected in Settings → Delivery, which is SUPPORTED WITH LIMITATIONS. Developers integrating an application will find the identifier conventions on Peppol integration.