Rule BR-CL-14
Country codes must be ISO 3166-1 alpha-2
Every country on the invoice, seller and buyer alike, is identified by its two letter ISO 3166-1 code rather than by its name or a longer code.
Business term BT-40 and BT-55, Seller and Buyer country code. Source: EN 16931. Our wording, not the normative text, which is published in the Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 rule list (EN 16931 rules) 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 three letter alpha-3 code is sent instead of the two letter one, so FRA arrives where FR belongs. Both are ISO 3166-1 and only the short one is accepted here, which makes this the most frustrating version of the failure.
- The country name is written out, in the sender's language: "France", "Frankreich", "Allemagne". Perfectly clear to a person, invalid to the rule.
- Greece is sent as EL. EL is the VAT number prefix Greece uses and it is correct there; the country code is GR, and the two are not interchangeable.
- The United Kingdom is sent as UK. The ISO code is GB, and UK is not an ISO 3166-1 code at all despite being the ordinary abbreviation.
- The code is a subdivision rather than a country, so a region, a state or a canton appears where the country belongs.
What to change
- Store the alpha-2 code as the canonical value in your own data and derive names for display from it, rather than the other way round.
- Convert alpha-3 to alpha-2 once, at export, if your system speaks alpha-3 internally. A lookup table of the countries you actually invoice is short and stops the whole class.
- Remember GB for the United Kingdom and GR for Greece, and treat EL as a VAT prefix that never appears in a country field.
- Check both parties. Seller country tends to be a constant that was set correctly years ago; buyer country is the one filled from customer records and is where this rule usually fires.
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-CL-14 usually breaks one of these too, because the same mapping gap tends to affect neighbouring fields.
Questions people actually ask
- What does BR-CL-14 mean?
- Every country on the invoice, seller and buyer alike, is identified by its two letter ISO 3166-1 code rather than by its name or a longer code.
- Which field does BR-CL-14 apply to?
- BT-40 and BT-55, Seller and Buyer 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-CL-14?
- 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.