OFAC SDN List Explained: What Compliance Teams Need to Know in 2026
A practical guide to the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list — how it's structured, how often it changes, and how to screen against it effectively.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list — commonly called the SDN list — is the single most important sanctions dataset for any organization with U.S. exposure. If you onboard customers, move money, ship goods, or process payments, your compliance program almost certainly needs to screen against it.
The SDN list identifies individuals, companies, vessels, aircraft, and even crypto wallet addresses whose assets must be blocked and with whom U.S. persons are generally prohibited from dealing. It is published by the U.S. Treasury and updated multiple times per week, sometimes daily during periods of geopolitical action.
Each SDN entry includes a primary name, often dozens of aliases (a.k.a.s and f.k.a.s), date and place of birth, nationality, identification documents, physical addresses, and one or more sanctions programs that justify the designation — for example SDGT (terrorism), RUSSIA-EO14024, IRAN, or NARCOTICS-EO14059.
The most common compliance failure isn't missing an entry — it's matching on the wrong one. Names from non-Latin scripts are transliterated inconsistently, dates of birth are partial, and aliases overlap with common names. A serious screening workflow needs fuzzy matching with controllable thresholds, word-boundary logic to avoid substring false positives, and the ability to corroborate with secondary identifiers like passport numbers or nationality.
OFAC also publishes the Consolidated Sanctions List, which contains non-SDN programs (such as Sectoral Sanctions Identifications). Mature programs screen against both, plus the EU, UK and UN consolidated lists, so that a single search returns a deduplicated view of every relevant designation against the same person or entity.