Data Sources and Methodology

Everything published on this site is either written and reviewed by our editorial team, or derived from an openly licensed public dataset that we attribute below. This page documents exactly where the data comes from and where its limits are.

BIN and IIN data

The BIN dataset behind the BIN database, the BIN Lookup tool and every country, brand and issuer page is derived from the open BIN list published at venelinkochev/bin-list-data, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. The source snapshot contains 374,788 rows with the columns BIN, Brand, Type, Category, Issuer, IssuerPhone, IssuerUrl, ISO country codes and CountryName.

We republish the data with added derived pages: one page per country, per brand and per major issuer, plus JSON chunks for client-side lookups. No rows are invented and no card numbers or personal data are present in the source.

Standards and specifications

Structural explanations on this site reference the published specifications:

• ISO/IEC 7812 — identification of card issuers, the basis of the BIN/IIN structure
• ISO/IEC 7813 — financial transaction cards, including magnetic stripe record formats
• PCI Security Standards Council — PCI-DSS requirements referenced in the compliance guides
• EMVCo — EMV application and TLV tag specifications

Test data

Test card numbers produced by the generator tools use published test BINs intended for development use, such as 4242424242424242. These are not linked to any issuing account and carry no balance.

Method and limitations

• Coverage reflects the source snapshot as of 2026-10-20.
• BIN allocations are not permanent. Issuers release and reuse ranges, so a result is a strong reference rather than a guarantee.
• Country is the country of the issuing institution, not necessarily the cardholder's location.
• Where a prefix appears under more than one issuer or country, the row reflects the source record as published.

Corrections

If you find an error, tell us with the page URL and the correction. Verified corrections are applied and the date on this page is updated.