EAN-13 Barcode Generator

EAN-13 numbers are issued through GS1, the organisation behind the global barcode standard. Companies license blocks of numbers from a GS1 member organisation and assign individual numbers from that block to their own products, so the number identifies a specific product from a specific company rather than being chosen freely.

The digits at the start of the code are a GS1 prefix that identifies which member organisation issued the number, historically tied to a country or region. That prefix is about the issuer, not the manufacturer: a product with a prefix associated with one country can easily be made somewhere else entirely, since companies keep the prefix from wherever they first registered.

The 13th digit of an EAN-13 code is not part of the product identity. It is a check digit, calculated from the 12 digits before it with GS1's mod-10 formula: starting from the rightmost of those 12 digits, alternate digits are multiplied by 3 and 1, the results are added together, and the check digit is whatever number brings that sum up to the next multiple of ten.

Working through an example makes it concrete. For the 12 digits 400638133393, the alternating sums come out so that the total needs 1 more to reach a multiple of ten, so the check digit is 1 and the full code is 4006381333931. This tool does that arithmetic for you: enter the 12-digit body and it appends the correct check digit, or enter all 13 digits and it confirms the check digit matches.

A retail EAN-13 code needs enough size and a clear quiet zone, the empty margin on either side, for a point-of-sale scanner to read it reliably. Print at or near 100% of the standard size where possible, avoid placing text or artwork inside the quiet zone, and prefer the SVG download for packaging artwork that will be resized in another program.

For product lists rather than a single code, paste one number per line, 12 digits to have the check digit computed or 13 to have it verified, and download every result at once as a PNG or SVG zip.