Regular Expression to validate UK National Insurance Number

Question

I have the following regular expression which validates the British National Insurance Number

^([a-zA-Z]){2}( )?([0-9]){2}( )?([0-9]){2}( )?([0-9]){2}( )?([         


        

Answer 1

• Just found this when I was digging around to find a proper regex. So just thought of sharing this DWP NINO format-validation.
• Under the hood, they are using the following regex "(^(?!BG)(?!GB)(?!NK)(?!KN)(?!TN)(?!NT)(?!ZZ)[A-Z&&[^DFIQUV]][A-Z&&[^DFIOQUV]][0-9]{6}[A-D ]$)"
• I found this very useful and works as expected older version of maven also supports NINO with ending character as space.
• List item

Nino Validator meets all the following criteria.

• Must be 9 characters.
• First 2 characters must be alpha.
• Next 6 characters must be numeric.
• Final character can be A, B, C, D or space.
• First character must not be D,F,I,Q,U or V.
• Second characters must not be D, F, I, O, Q, U or V.
• First 2 characters must not be combinations of GB, NK, TN or ZZ (the term combinations covers both GB and BG etc.)

Answer 2

Actually, NIN doesn't allow D, F, I, Q, U or V for the first two letters and doesn't allow O for the second letter; on top of this, the prefix letters can not be BG, GB, NK, KN, TN, NT and ZZ. Also the suffix letter is either A, B, C or D, but may be represented by a space if unknown. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Insurance_number#Format

As such, a more valid check would be (I have only supplied a version with capital letters, can easily be altered for lower-case):

^(?!BG)(?!GB)(?!NK)(?!KN)(?!TN)(?!NT)(?!ZZ)(?:[A-CEGHJ-PR-TW-Z][A-CEGHJ-NPR-TW-Z])(?:\s*\d\s*){6}([A-D]|\s)$