How are BIN/IIN databases maintained and how often do issuer ranges change?
Executive summary
BINs/IINs are the leading digits of payment card numbers governed by ISO/IEC 7812 and managed through a mix of official registries and commercial aggregators; there is no single static public list because networks and issuers change ranges frequently and vendors update at different cadences (daily, weekly, monthly or ad hoc) depending on their data feeds and customer needs [1] [2] [3]. Practical maintenance is therefore a continuous pipeline: official assignments originate from ISO/ANSI and card networks, while BIN databases sold or offered as services are refreshed by scraping network feeds, partner APIs, tokenization maps and merchant telemetry, producing update schedules that range from twice a year to daily for high-coverage commercial products [4] [5] [6].
1. How BIN/IINs are assigned and the official sources behind them
Issuer Identification Numbers (IINs, formerly BINs) are standardized by ISO/IEC 7812 and the pools are administered via national registrars such as ANSI and distributed through bodies like the American Bankers Association, meaning an authoritative source exists for assignment even if it is not freely consumable as a static dump [7] [4]. Major card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover) also control scheme-level assignment policies — for example Visa and ISO coordinated a transition to eight‑digit IINs with Visa ceasing new six‑digit assignments after April 2022 — and networks publish implementation guidance that issuers and processors must follow [3] [8].
2. Commercial BIN/IIN databases: aggregation, APIs and business models
Because official registry access is limited and commercial users need real‑time routing and fraud controls, a market of BIN database vendors and open projects has emerged that aggregate IIN metadata (issuer name, country, card type, token ranges) into APIs and downloadable files; services like BinDB, Binlist, BinCodes, Pagos and pulse-style offerings advertise daily, weekly or subscription update models and provide REST APIs and SaaS datafeeds to keep clients synchronized [9] [2] [1] [10] [6]. Some open-source efforts publish large CSV snapshots (e.g., Binlist.io’s public BIN collection), but most vendors caution that static dumps quickly become imprecise and instead offer managed feeds or recurring files with explicit update windows [11] [2].
3. How frequently issuer ranges change and why
Issuer ranges change for operational reasons — new product launches, sponsorship arrangements, tokenization, mergers, and the industry-wide migration to longer IINs — and those changes can be frequent and uneven across issuers and networks; there is no uniform cadence because issuers control when to expand or deactivate ranges and networks publish releases on variable schedules [8] [5]. Empirical vendor practice shows variability: some legacy aggregators historically updated semi‑annually (per practitioner notes), others maintain weekly or even daily pulls from network feeds and issuer behavior, and specialist providers explicitly track weekly added/removed ranges because the most‑active issuers can issue many changes in a single week [4] [5] [6].
4. Practical maintenance patterns used by merchants and processors
Payments businesses mix strategies: critical systems consume live API lookups for per-transaction resolution, while reconciliation and analytics use scheduled downloads (daily/weekly) to reconcile token ranges and BIN-to-issuer mappings; some vendors sell a “data file plus 12 months of updates” model for offline consumers while higher-volume gateways subscribe to streaming or nightly syncs from networks to avoid routing errors and fraud false positives [10] [9] [5]. Providers warn that missing an update window can materially affect routing and fraud controls because active issuers may change ranges unpredictably, so high-risk or high-volume merchants often demand daily or real‑time updates [5].
5. Limits, tradeoffs and what reporting doesn’t settle
Reporting from vendors and community projects makes clear there is no single truth: commercial databases vary in coverage, update cadence and provenance (some relying on network feeds, others on crowd-sourced or merchant telemetry), and open-source dumps are useful but transiently accurate; where sources do not state exact SLA‑level frequencies for every network or issuer, it is not possible to assert a single universal update interval beyond the documented practices of specific vendors and network policies [11] [2] [5]. Users should therefore evaluate vendors’ feed sources (direct network vs aggregator), advertised refresh cadence (daily/weekly/monthly) and whether they support extended lengths (8–9 digit ranges and token mapping) to choose the appropriate maintenance posture for their risk tolerance [3] [12].