OFAC SDN List Download: Format, Frequency, and a Faster Alternative

The OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list is available as a free download directly from the U.S. Treasury. OFAC publishes it in three formats — plain-text (SDN.TXT, pipe-delimited), CSV (SDN.CSV), and XML (SDN.XML plus the more detailed SDN_ADVANCED.XML) — all fetched from ofac.treasury.gov. For most integrations, SDN_ADVANCED.XML is the right choice: it includes structured aliases, features (dates of birth, nationalities, ID documents), addresses, and program tags in a single schema.

The list is updated frequently — sometimes multiple times per week, occasionally more than once in a single day during periods of geopolitical action. Any team downloading the file needs a job that polls the source at least daily; weekly refreshes are almost certainly out of date. OFAC also publishes a companion Consolidated Sanctions List (Non-SDN programs like Sectoral Sanctions Identifications). Serious compliance workflows ingest both.

Downloading the file is the easy part. The hard part is turning it into a screening system. You need to parse the XML into a normalized name index, strip accents and honorifics, build alias and word-boundary logic, add fuzzy matching with tunable thresholds, deduplicate against the OFAC Consolidated list, and then repeat the whole pipeline for the EU, UK, and UN lists — each with different formats, update cadences, and quirks. Miss any of those steps and you either produce a wall of false positives or, worse, miss real matches.

This is why most compliance teams have stopped downloading the SDN list. The engineering cost of maintaining the pipeline exceeds the cost of an off-the-shelf screening tool, and every hour spent on file parsing is an hour not spent on analyst review — which is where regulators actually look.

If you still need the raw file — for example to build an offline reference, populate a lookup table, or feed a legacy system — the canonical URLs are sdn.xml, sdn_advanced.xml, sdn.csv, and sdn.pip on ofac.treasury.gov/downloads/. Cache the ETag or Last-Modified header to avoid re-parsing when the file hasn't changed. Store timestamps for every ingested version so you can prove which version of the list you screened against on any given date — that audit trail matters more than the search itself when regulators come knocking.

SanctionsScreening ingests the full OFAC SDN and Consolidated lists every few hours from the source feeds, plus EU, UK, and UN data, and exposes a single fuzzy-matched search interface — no downloads, no parsers, no cron jobs. Run a free search at sanctionsscreening.io, or see the pricing page for API access if you need programmatic screening without maintaining your own pipeline.