Enter the first 6 or 8 digits of any Visa, Mastercard, Amex or Discover card to look up the issuing bank, card type and level, prepaid status and country.
A BIN checker (also called a BIN lookup or IIN lookup) tells you who issued a payment card from the first 6 or 8 digits of its number. Those leading digits are the Bank Identification Number (BIN), known in the ISO standard as the Issuer Identification Number (IIN). Under ISO/IEC 7812, every card number starts with an IIN that identifies the card network and the issuing institution, followed by the cardholder's account identifier and a single check digit.
Our free BIN checker reads that prefix and returns the card network (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, UnionPay, Mir and others), the card type (credit, debit or prepaid), the card level (for example Classic, Gold, Platinum or Business), the issuing bank with its website and phone number when known, and the issuing country and currency. It works with both 6-digit and 8-digit BINs, needs no signup and runs on any device.
Enter 8 digits when you have them. Since the industry moved to 8-digit BINs, two cards that share the same first 6 digits can belong to different issuers, so 8 digits gives a more precise answer. To share a result, add the BIN to the page address, for example /tools/bin-checker?bin=457173.
Never type a full card number, expiry date or CVV into any BIN checker, including this one. A BIN lookup only needs the first 6 to 8 digits, and those digits on their own cannot be used to make a payment.
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Scheme / network | The card brand that routes the payment: Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, JCB, UnionPay, Mir, Maestro, RuPay and so on. |
| Type | Credit, debit or charge. Merchants use it to estimate fees and refund behaviour. |
| Brand / level | The product tier, such as Visa Classic, Visa Platinum, Mastercard World Elite or a business, corporate or purchasing card. |
| Prepaid | Whether the card is funded in advance rather than linked to a credit line or current account. Many virtual cards are prepaid. |
| Issuing bank | The institution that issued the card, with its website, phone number and city when the database has them. This is the bank to contact about a decline or a dispute. |
| Country and currency | Where the card was issued (ISO 3166 country code) and that country's currency. This is not necessarily where the cardholder lives. |
| Card number length | How many digits a full card number in this range has, for example 15 for American Express and 16 for most Visa and Mastercard cards. |
Issuer details come from the open binlist.net database. If a BIN is not in that database, the card network can still be identified from the official number ranges shown further down this page.
Take the widely used Visa test number 4111 1111 1111 1111. It is not a real account and is safe to use as an example.
| Digits | Part | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
4 | Major Industry Identifier (MII) | The first digit. 4 and 5 mean banking and financial cards. |
4111 11 or 4111 1111 | BIN / IIN | The 6- or 8-digit issuer prefix. This is what a BIN checker looks up. |
1111 111 | Account identifier | Chosen by the issuer for the individual account. ISO allows card numbers of up to 19 digits. |
1 | Check digit | Calculated with the Luhn algorithm so that typing errors can be caught. |
How the Luhn check works: starting from the right, double every second digit, add the digits of any result above 9, then add everything up. For the number above, the eight undoubled digits add up to 8 and the doubled digits (seven 1s become 2s and the leading 4 becomes 8) add up to 22. The total is 30, which divides evenly by 10, so the number passes. The Luhn algorithm, patented by IBM's Hans Peter Luhn in 1960 and specified in ISO/IEC 7812-1, catches every single-digit mistake and most swapped adjacent digits. It was designed against accidental errors, not fraud, so passing it says nothing about whether a card exists. You can run the check yourself with our credit card validator.
For decades a BIN was 6 digits long, which allows at most one million prefixes across every issuer in the world. To relieve that shortage, the 2017 revision of ISO/IEC 7812 defined a new 8-digit IIN. Visa required acquirers and processors to support 8-digit BINs from its April 2022 business release and now assigns every newly requested issuing BIN as 8 digits, while issuers move their existing ranges on their own timelines.
In practice this means a 6-digit lookup can return the wrong bank, country or card type when one 6-digit block has been split between several issuers. One BIN data vendor reports that roughly one lookup in fifteen gives a different answer at 8 digits than at 6 (vendor figure). That is why this tool is an 8-digit BIN checker as well as a 6-digit one.
Every network owns fixed number ranges, so the first digits alone reveal the brand even before any database lookup. The table below uses the ranges listed in the payment card number reference.
| Network | BIN range (starts with) | Card length |
|---|---|---|
| Visa | 4 | 13, 16, 19 |
| Mastercard | 51–55 and 2221–2720 | 16 |
| American Express | 34, 37 | 15 |
| Discover | 6011, 644–649, 65 | 16–19 |
| JCB | 3528–3589 | 16–19 |
| UnionPay | 62 | 16–19 |
| Diners Club International | 30, 36, 38, 39 | 14–19 |
| Maestro | 5018, 5020, 5038, 5893, 6304, 6759–6763 | 12–19 |
| Mir | 2200–2204 | 16–19 |
| RuPay | 60, 65, 81, 82, 508 | 16 |
A Visa BIN checker or Mastercard BIN checker is therefore the same tool: the range tells you the network, and the BIN database adds the issuing bank, card level and country. Note that Mastercard numbers starting with 2 (the 2-series) are just as valid as those starting with 5.
Card fraud is concentrated in online, card-not-present (CNP) payments, and the BIN is one of the first signals a merchant can check. The numbers behind that:
Typical BIN checks include comparing the card's issuing country with the customer's IP address and billing address, flagging prepaid cards on subscriptions with free trials, routing a payment to the cheapest processor for that card type, and deciding when to require 3-D Secure. BIN data is one signal among many and should never be the only reason to decline an order.
If a merchant rejects your card, a BIN lookup shows how the merchant sees it: which country it was issued in, whether it is flagged as prepaid, and its card level. A mismatch between the card's issuing country and the store's region is one of the most common reasons for an international decline. Our guide to virtual cards for online purchases covers what to do next.
Checkout forms use the BIN to show the right card logo as the customer types, validate the expected number length, and prepare for 8-digit routing tables. Developers can test the Luhn check separately, and finance teams can model dispute costs with our chargeback vs refund calculator.
Searches for a "live BIN checker", a "BIN balance checker" or a "BIN generator and checker" all expect something no BIN lookup can deliver. A BIN identifies a range of cards, not a single card, so it cannot tell you:
Numbers produced by "BIN generators" may pass the Luhn check, but they are not real accounts, and using generated or stolen card numbers to make purchases is fraud. Payment networks and merchants actively detect this kind of card testing. If you need a working card for an online payment, use a legitimate virtual card issued in your name.
No BIN database is complete. Banks merge, ranges are reassigned and new 8-digit ranges are created every month. Public providers describe databases ranging from about 300,000 to more than 3 million records (vendor claims from BIN Codes and BIN Lookup API), and binlist.net notes that its own data is not perfect. Treat a BIN result as a strong indication rather than proof, use 8 digits where you can, and confirm anything important with the issuing bank.
This tool checks one BIN at a time and is built for quick manual lookups. If you need to screen thousands of BINs in bulk or call a BIN checker API from your own checkout, use a commercial BIN data provider with a service-level agreement and a regularly updated 8-digit database. Look for 8-digit support, prepaid and commercial-card flags, update frequency and clear data sources before you choose one.
Yes, as long as you only enter the BIN. The payment industry itself treats the BIN as low-risk information. The PCI Security Standards Council allows businesses to keep at most the first 6 or 8 digits and 4 other digits of a truncated card number, depending on the card length and BIN size. This tool only ever sends the first 6 to 8 digits to the lookup service. It never sees your full number, expiry date or CVV.
Because merchants can read the prepaid flag and issuing country from the BIN, some of them block prepaid cards or cards issued abroad, especially for subscriptions and ad platforms. Before you buy a virtual card, run its BIN through this checker to see the country, type and level a merchant will see. You can compare options in our guide to the best virtual card providers, see how to buy a VCC with crypto, or browse our reloadable Visa and Mastercard virtual cards with their BINs listed.