A Dutch IBAN is always 18 characters long. Here is what each part of it means, with a real example broken down field by field — and a checker that runs on your machine.
The Dutch IBAN is unusual: the bank is identified by four letters rather than digits — ABNA for ABN AMRO, INGB for ING, RABO for Rabobank, SNSB for SNS. If you are reading an IBAN off a scanned invoice, those letters are exactly where character recognition is most likely to slip, so they are worth a second look.
The two digits straight after NL are not part of the account — they are a checksum over everything else. Move the first four characters to the end, turn every letter into a number (A=10 … Z=35), divide the result by 97, and a genuine IBAN always leaves a remainder of exactly 1. That is what the box above is doing, on your machine, with nothing sent anywhere.
If the number is on a scanned PDF you cannot select, retyping 18 characters is where mistakes get made. Snip2Field sits on your Windows desktop: press a hotkey, drag a box over the IBAN, and it reads the field, runs this exact checksum and copies it — ready to paste into your books or a transfer form. Fully offline.
See Snip2FieldExactly 18, always. That is NL, two check digits, and 14 characters of account detail. Anything longer or shorter is not a valid NL IBAN, whatever else is right about it.
It is the 4 characters directly after the check digits. In the example NL91 ABNA 0417 1643 00, that is ABNA.
You can tell whether it was written down correctly: the check digits catch a single wrong character or two swapped ones. You cannot tell whether the account exists — only the receiving bank knows that, which is what the recipient-name check does when a transfer is made.