What is a codice fiscale?

The codice fiscale is the Italian tax code for people: 16 letters and digits that the Agenzia delle Entrate gives every resident, and every foreigner who deals with the Italian tax office. You need it to rent a flat, open a bank account, see a doctor or buy a SIM card. It isn't random. It is built from the surname, first name, birth date, gender and birthplace, so most of it can be read back.

The characters follow the pattern SSSNNNYYMDDPPPPC:

  • SSS is 3 letters from the surname, mostly its consonants.
  • NNN is 3 letters from the first name, the 1st, 3rd and 4th consonant when it has four or more.
  • YY is the birth year.
  • M is a letter for the month: A, B, C, D, E, H, L, M, P, R, S, T for January to December.
  • DD is the day of birth, plus 40 for women. A woman born on the 10th has 50.
  • PPPP is the birthplace, a letter and three digits: the cadastral code of the Italian municipality, or Z and three digits for a foreign country.
  • C is the check character. Each of the other 15 characters gets a value from one table for odd places and another for even places, and the sum mod 26 picks a letter from A to Z.

When two people would get the same code, which Italians call omocodia, the tax office swaps digits for letters, starting from the right: 0 becomes L, 1 M, 2 N, 3 P, 4 Q, 5 R, 6 S, 7 T, 8 U and 9 V. That code is just as valid.

Tool description

Paste a codice fiscale and the tool checks the check character, the birth date and the place code. For a valid code it shows the surname and name codes, birth date, gender, birthplace and province, or the country for people born abroad, whether it is an omocodia code and the check character. If only the last character is off, it tells you which one the first 15 characters give.

Municipality and country names come from the official list in Italian, written the way the tax office writes them. The code keeps only two digits of the year, so the tool picks the most recent year that isn't in the future: someone born in 1925 shows up as 2025.

The code is decoded in your browser and never sent anywhere.

Features

  • Checks the check character, the birth date and the place code
  • Reads birth date, gender, birthplace and province, or the country of birth
  • Decodes omocodia codes, where letters replace digits