OFAC SDN List Download — XML, CSV and PIP Files
Every official OFAC download URL in one place, with the format differences that actually matter. The files below come directly from the U.S. Treasury and are free to use.
Prefer not to build a parser? Search the same data below — no signup, no download.
What we currently have indexed
Live record counts from our own ingestion of these feeds — useful as a sanity check when validating your own parser output.
Official OFAC download files
Standard SDN list in XML. Names, aliases, programs, addresses. Good for simple integrations.
Full structured schema — features (DOB, nationality, ID documents), relationships, program tags. The right file for a real screening pipeline.
Comma-delimited primary entries. Aliases and addresses are in the companion ALT.CSV and ADD.CSV files.
Legacy pipe-delimited fixed-format file. Still used by older core-banking systems.
OFAC's Consolidated (non-SDN) list — SSI, FSE, PLC and EO 13599 programs. Screen this alongside the SDN list.
Alias file and address file that pair with SDN.CSV via the entity number (ent_num) key.
Files are hosted and maintained by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. We link to the canonical URLs rather than mirroring them, so you always get the current version.
Before you build the pipeline
Poll at least daily, not weekly
OFAC publishes two to four times a week and occasionally twice in a day. Cache the ETag or Last-Modified header and only re-parse when it changes.
CSV is not the whole list
SDN.CSV holds primary entries only. Aliases live in ALT.CSV and addresses in ADD.CSV — join them on ent_num or you will miss most name variants.
Normalize before you match
Strip accents, punctuation and honorifics, sort tokens, and apply word-boundary logic. Naive substring matching on names like "Ali" produces hundreds of false positives.
Version every ingest
Store a timestamp and file hash for each version you ingest. Regulators ask which snapshot you screened against on a given date — that audit trail matters more than the search itself.
SDN alone is not coverage
You also need OFAC Consolidated, EU, UK OFSI and UN — each with a different format, cadence and quirks, and each requiring cross-list deduplication.
Skip the parser entirely
We ingest OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated, EU, UK and UN continuously, deduplicate across regimes, and expose one fuzzy-matched search with PDF audit reports and an API.
SDN list download FAQ
Where can I download the OFAC SDN list?
Free from ofac.treasury.gov/downloads, in four formats: sdn.xml, sdn_advanced.xml, sdn.csv and sdn.pip. The Consolidated (non-SDN) list is published separately under /downloads/consolidated/.
Which SDN file format should I use?
SDN_ADVANCED.XML for any real screening pipeline — it is the only format carrying structured dates of birth, nationalities, ID documents and relationships.
How often should I re-download the SDN list?
OFAC updates it two to four times a week, sometimes twice in a day. Poll at least daily and diff on the Last-Modified or ETag header.
Is the OFAC SDN list free to download and use?
Yes. It is U.S. government public data with no licence fee or API key required.
Do I need to download it to screen against it?
No — you can search the same data here for free, including EU, UK and UN coverage, with no pipeline to maintain.