Rule BR-09
The seller postal address must contain a country code
The seller's address carries a country, as a two-letter ISO 3166-1 code.
Business term BT-40, Seller country code. Source: EN 16931. Our wording, not the normative text, which is published in the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 rule list and was checked against it on 2026-08-16.
Why it fires on invoices that look fine
Almost nobody hits this rule because they forgot the field exists. They hit it because something between their system and the document dropped it, changed its shape, or filled it with a value that is right somewhere else. These are the causes worth checking first.
- The country is spelled out: "France", "FRANCE" or "Frankreich" where the field takes FR.
- A three-letter code was sent. FRA is ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 and this field takes alpha-2.
- The country was never captured because every seller in the system is domestic, so it is implied everywhere and stored nowhere.
- The code is lowercase. The field is case sensitive, so fr is rejected where FR is accepted, and a lowercasing step somewhere in the export is easy to miss.
What to change
- Send the two-letter uppercase ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: FR, DE, IT, ES, NL. Nothing longer, nothing spelled out, nothing lowercase.
- Greece is EL in some European contexts and GR in ISO 3166-1. This field is the ISO one. The EL form belongs to VAT identifiers, not to addresses, and mixing the two is a specific and common source of this failure.
- Map country names to codes once, at the edge of your system, rather than per integration.
The validator runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and you can confirm that yourself with the network panel open.
Rules you are likely to hit next
A document that breaks BR-09 usually breaks one of these too, because the same mapping gap tends to affect neighbouring fields.
Questions people actually ask
- What does BR-09 mean?
- The seller's address carries a country, as a two-letter ISO 3166-1 code.
- Which field does BR-09 apply to?
- BT-40, Seller country code. That is the name the semantic model uses, which is what you search for in your own system's mapping when the identifier alone does not tell you which field to look at.
- Does our validator check BR-09?
- Yes. Paste your invoice data into the free validator and it reports this rule with the value it actually saw, without the document leaving your browser.