Which European Countries have identity cards with NFC?

One question we often get is which European countries have identity cards with NFC chips that ReadID can read. If you have one in your hand then checking if it has an NFC chip is easy: simply look for the ICAO chip logo. 

This logo can also be found on ePassports and indicates an ICAO 9303-compliant NFC chip. ICAO 9303 is the UN’s international standard for passports and identity cards.

We focus here on identity cards in Europe, and specifically on the European Economic Area (EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway), UK and Switzerland since these all follow EU standards. Identity cards are considered travel documents, and they have a standardised layout, similar to passports. But contrary to passports, the EU did not enforce usage of the ICAO 9303 standard for identity cards until 2019. As a result, there are currently at least 86 different versions of identity cards in circulation in EU, and some countries issue quite unsecure identity cards. To illustrate this, the UK decided to no longer accept EU identity cards on 1 October 2021 because of concerns about fake EU identity cards. Please note the UK does not differentiate between secure identity cards, with an ICAO 9303 NFC chip, and unsecure identity cards.

However, in August 2019 the EU decided to strengthen and standardise security features for identity cards from the different member states. Regulation (EU) 2019/1157 stipulates that all member states must follow the ICAO 9303 standards when issuing identity cards including an NFC chip with a face image inside.

Most European countries that introduced the new generation identity cards already made sure that these had an ICAO-compliant NFC chip, also before this new regulation. The new regulation ensures that countries with older and less secure identity cards will also replace these in the coming years. Member states had two years (until August 2021) to adopt the regulation and stop issuing non-compliant identity cards.

Note that the regulation does not mean that member states are obliged to issue identity cards to their citizens, but if they do, these have to be compliant.

Which countries have identity cards are compatible with ReadID?

In September 2022, 29 out of the 32 countries (EEA, UK, and Switzerland) had identity cards with an ICAO-compliant Machine-Readable Zone. Among these 29, 23 also had an ICAO-compliant NFC chip. Identity cards are normally valid for 10 years. Some countries started issuing them less than 10 years ago, so they have both the compliant and non-compliant versions in circulation. These include Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Poland.

ReadID works with all ICAO-compliant identity cards in Europe. This means that ReadID can read the contactless chip of the identity cards from 22 countries, verify their authenticity, and check for clones. One exception here is the French ID cards issued after March 2021. They are PACE-only documents and can only be read by ReadID Android, not ReadID iOS, due to the iOS platform restrictions. The map below shows which countries:

• Read & verify (Dark green): ReadID can read and verify the identity cards. We have all the needed country-signing certificates by default.
• Read & verify Android only(Light green): ReadID can read and verify the identity cards with Android mobiles..
• No chip (Light grey): identity cards have no (supported) contactless chip.
• No identity card (Dark grey): the country does not issue identity cards.

Increasing coverage

Through the above-mentioned Regulation (EU) 2019/1157, the percentage of compatible identity cards will increase over time. The ‘mixed’ countries have stopped issuing non-compatible identity cards, and they will expire in the coming years, leading to an expected increase in compliant identity cards. We would like to mention a few countries in particular:

• Belgium, Cyprus, Spain, France, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Croatia, Czech, Estonia, Romania, Austria, Finland, Slovenia, and Germany are the ‘mixed’ countries that have both ReadID-compatible and non-compatible identity cards.
• Germany has just started to issue ICAO-compliant identity cards since 2021 August 2, which can be read and verified by ReadID. Before that, the identity cards already had an NFC chip, but were not an ICAO 9303 compliant. Therefore, ReadID cannot read those older identity cards (yet).
• Netherlands released a newer version of identity cards on 2 August 2021, which removes the citizen service number (BSN) from the machine-readable zone (MRZ) and includes it in a QR code on the back side of the identity cards[1].
• The French ID cards issued after March 2021 are PACE-only documents. Their PACE implementation is incompatible with ReadID iOS PACE workaround, due to the iOS platform restrictions. Thus, the French new ID cards can be read and verified using ReadID Android SDKs, but not iOS SDKs.
• Ireland has passport cards, comparable to identity cards.

How did we create the map?

There is no authoritative source of all identity documents worldwide, and certainly not a publicly available one that contains details on the contactless chip implementation. We combined knowledge from public sources, non-public sources, our own testing data and ReadID Analytics data to make this overview. ReadID Analytics contains anonymous logging information that we use to improve ReadID, including chip characteristics and whether or not an MRZ scan or NFC read was successful.

We provide this overview as-is, without any form of guarantee. We appreciate it if you let us know if you notice mistakes or outdated information via documents@inverid.com.

If you’d like access to a list of countries and some more details, then we have a summary available that you can download. We also have a more detailed whitepaper, for our customers and partners.