13 and 19 digit VISA cards - are they in use?

[enoughsoup]

Hi! I'm looking into bank card number validation and I've stumbled upon some articles stating that VISA issues 19-digit cards, but most of these articles are some weird gossip from 2016. This wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number says that 13-digit VISAs also exist. Is it true & do we need to change our implementation to accommodate 13, 19-digit cards or both?

[API_Products · Accepted solution]

Hi @enoughsoup,

For your use case, I recommend you to use the Payment Account Validation (PAV) API because this API is used to check if the account is in good standing or it is used for account verification primarily. You would only use PAV if you were interested in validating that an account is active/in good standing prior to sending an authorization. You can optionally check different attributes (AVS, ANI, CVV2), but it's always with the intention of pre-validating the account before a financial transaction is initiated. Here's the link to the Payment Account Validation documentation here: https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/pav 

Visa is not moving to 19 digit PAN numbers at this time. Visa plans to continue to use 16 digit PANs.

No credit cards are going to 19 digits. All PAN length’s will remain at 16 digits (except VPAY in EU – they are the only product that has 19 digit PANs). I pulled the below screenshot for you to see how it works and what’s changing. There is a ton of information on Visa Online (VOL) – just search for “numerics”.

[EnoughSoap]

You did not specify if 13 digit numbers are still valid.  Are they still in use today from Visa cards?

[API_Products · Accepted solution]

Hi @EnoughSoap,

PAN is 16 digits for USA. PAN can have a range between 16-19 digits outside of USA for VISA. Visa does not use 13 digits for PAN.

[eduardogarcia]

Hi Support team!

I just came here with same question made more than a year ago by someone else, are VISA cards still going with 16 and 19 digits only?
The 13 digits ones are discarded, are they?

thanks

[API_Products]

Hey @eduardogarcia,

According to the Visa Developer platform and community forums, Visa cards are widely issued with 16 and 19 digits. The 13-digit Visa cards are no longer in use and have been discontinued. Visa primarily uses 16-digit card numbers, but 19-digit numbers are also used in some instances.