What does an FCC ID mean?

Every wireless device has one — a phone, a router, a doorbell, a pair of headphones. It is two things joined together: a grantee code the FCC assigns to a company, then a product code the company assigns to the device. This reads it from 47 CFR 2.925 and 2.926.

It will not tell you where one ends and the other begins, and that is the interesting part: the regulation that creates the identifier does not say.

The two elements

2.926(a) says a grant lists the identifier “consisting of the grantee code assigned by the FCC … and the equipment product code assigned by the grantee”. 2.925 requires both on the label, in that order.

2.926(d) puts that second element on a leash: it “shall consist of a series of Arabic numerals, capital letters or a combination thereof, and may include the dash or hyphen”, and the total “shall not exceed 14”.

The length is not in the regulation

This is the whole of what 2.926(c) says about the shape of a grantee code:

“A grantee code may consist of Arabic numerals, capital letters, or other characters. The format for this code will be specified by the Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology.”

No length. And “or other characters” is not a closed set either. The regulation creates the identifier, names its two parts, and hands the shape of the first one to a different office.

So the boundary — the first thing any decoder has to find — is not derivable from the document that defines the identifier. This page therefore does not split your FCC ID, and would rather say that than repeat a convention it cannot point at a source for.

The Office of Engineering and Technology publishes the format, and fcc.gov returns 403 on its robots.txt — so under RFC 9309 its rules are unknown and this site fetches nothing from it. That is a refusal honoured, not an obstacle worked around.

The third regulation here to do exactly this

It is starting to look like a habit rather than an oversight:

In each case the law fixes the structure and leaves one field’s contents to a register that is maintained elsewhere and changes without amending the law. A decoder that fills those gaps silently is guessing three times over, and looking authoritative while it does it.

What can still be worked out

Not nothing. The product code is capped at 14 characters, so on a long identifier the grantee code has a minimum length that follows by subtraction — a 21-character identifier must have a grantee code of at least 7, because 21 − 14 = 7.

And the product code’s character set is closed where the grantee code’s is not, so any character a product code may not contain must belong to the grantee code, which pushes the boundary at least that far in.

Both are floors rather than answers, and both come out of the regulation rather than out of convention. The tool above states whichever is larger, and says plainly when neither binds — which, on a typical ten-character identifier, is the case.

What the label has to do

• The identifier must be “preceded by the term FCC ID in capital letters on a single line”.
• It must be “legible without the aid of magnification”.
• It may be shown electronically instead of printed, which is why a phone often carries it in a settings menu and nowhere on the case.
• A device with separate transmitter and receiver sections may carry two, prefixed TX FCC ID and RX FCC ID.

Where the real answer is

The FCC publishes the grants themselves, searchable by identifier. That is the authority on which company holds a grantee code and what was authorised: https://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/fccid.

This page does not reproduce that database. It could not be kept current, and the point of this page is the part the database does not tell you: what the law says, and where it stops.

What it is not

Not a date. There is no year anywhere in an FCC ID. The grant has a date; the identifier does not carry it.

And not proof of anything. An identifier printed on a label is a claim that a grant exists. Whether it does is what the FCC’s own search is for.