How to Get a UPC Code for Your Product

If you sell a physical product, you almost certainly need a UPC code. It's the barcode on virtually every item in every store. Without one, retailers won't stock your product and most online marketplaces won't list it.

Here is the short version. UPC codes come from GS1, and only from GS1. There are two ways to get one: license a single GS1 US GTIN for $30 with no annual renewal, or license a GS1 Company Prefix from $250 with a $50 annual renewal, which gives you ten numbers you assign yourself. Which one you want depends entirely on how many separate products you sell, and most people asking this question need fewer numbers than they think.

The rest of this page is the detail: what the two options actually cover, how many numbers your product line really needs, what the process looks like end to end, and why the barcodes being sold for $5 elsewhere are not a third option.

What is a UPC code, exactly?

A UPC (Universal Product Code) is a 12-digit number assigned to a product and printed as a scannable barcode. When a cashier scans your product, the scanner reads the bars, extracts the number, and looks up the price in the store's system.

Two things follow from that, and both trip people up:

• The barcode does not contain your price, or your product name, or anything else. It contains a number. Everything else lives in the retailer's database, keyed on that number. This is why the same product can cost different amounts in two stores with the same barcode.
• The number has to be globally unique, which is the entire reason you cannot make one up. Uniqueness is not something you can assert on your own. It has to be issued by the organization that keeps the register.

That 12-digit number is a type of GTIN (Global Trade Item Number), the worldwide standard for identifying products. UPC is the format used in the United States and Canada. Europe and most of the world use EAN (13 digits), but they're both GTINs underneath.

The two ways to get a UPC from GS1

This is the decision that actually matters, and it's the part most guides skip straight past on their way to "register with GS1."

Take the single GTIN if you have one or two products and no immediate plans for more. GS1 US generates the number for you, issues a certificate of proof, and includes a lifetime subscription to GS1 US Data Hub so you can produce the barcode image. At $30 with nothing to renew, it removes the main reason people go looking for resold barcodes in the first place.

Take the Company Prefix if you have a product line, or expect one. A prefix is the thing that scales: you assign numbers yourself as you launch, you can identify cases and pallets and locations rather than only retail items, and it's what retailer and marketplace verification is really looking for when it checks whether a brand owns its own numbers. The $250 tier covers ten products.

The honest failure mode is buying a prefix you don't need yet, and the other honest failure mode is buying five single GTINs one at a time and passing $250 on the way. Count your products first. The next section is how to count them properly, because it is not the number you'd guess.

Step 1: Register with GS1

You can't invent a UPC number. Every legitimate UPC traces back to GS1, the global standards organization that manages the register.

In the United States you go through GS1 US. The registration itself takes about 10 to 15 minutes online:

1. Go to gs1us.org and choose either a single GS1 US GTIN or a Company Prefix
2. Create a GS1 US account
3. If you're buying a prefix, select a capacity tier based on how many products you need numbers for
4. Provide your company information (legal name, address, contact details)
5. Pay the fee
6. Receive a welcome email from GS1 US, which GS1 says arrives within minutes, with access to your member account

One detail worth getting right at this step, because it is expensive to fix later: register under your exact legal entity name. Marketplaces check the company name recorded with GS1 against the name on your trademark and your seller account. A mismatch as small as "Inc" versus "LLC" causes listing failures that are considerably more tedious to resolve after the fact than to avoid now.

If you're outside the US, find your country's GS1 Member Organization at gs1.org. Each country office has its own registration and pricing.

Our GS1 Company Prefix guide covers the prefix route in more depth.

Step 2: Work out how many numbers you actually need

People consistently underestimate this, and it's the single most common reason a brand outgrows its capacity tier within a year.

Every sellable variation is a separate product with its own GTIN. Not every product, every variation. Size, flavor, color, scent, and pack count each split the count:

• A hot sauce in one flavor, one bottle size: 1 GTIN
• The same sauce in three flavors: 3 GTINs
• Three flavors in two bottle sizes: 6 GTINs
• Those six, plus a three-pack gift box: 7 GTINs, because the multipack is its own trade item with its own barcode

That last one surprises people most often. A bundle of products that a customer buys as one unit needs a number of its own, distinct from the numbers on the items inside it.

A few more rules that matter:

• Never reuse a number. Even when you discontinue a product, its GTIN stays retired. GS1 sets waiting periods before a number can be reissued, and retailers keep historical records far longer than you'd expect.
• The last digit is calculated, not chosen. It's a check digit that lets a scanner verify it read the number correctly. You can compute it with our check digit calculator.
• You assign the middle. Your prefix forms the front of every number and you fill in the item reference. GS1 US Data Hub is where you manage this.

Once your numbers are assigned, run them through our GTIN validator to confirm they're correctly formed before they reach a printer.

Step 3: Generate barcode graphics

With numbers assigned, you need the actual barcode artwork for your packaging. GS1 US Data Hub includes a barcode image generator, and it's included with both the single GTIN and a Company Prefix.

Third-party barcode software works too. Make sure the output is UPC-A format (the standard linear barcode) and that the human-readable digits printed beneath the bars match the assigned GTIN exactly.

For print, use vector formats (EPS or SVG) so the barcode stays crisp at any size, and leave the quiet zone alone. The blank margin either side of the bars is part of the symbol, not padding around it, and designers crop into it constantly. Our QR code printing guide covers the same class of print mistakes for 2D codes.

How long does the whole thing take?

The registration is fast. The part that takes real time is everything downstream of it.

GS1 US says the welcome email with your member account access arrives within minutes of purchase. It does not publish a guaranteed time for when a Company Prefix becomes usable in Data Hub, so treat same-day as likely rather than promised, and don't schedule a print run around it.

What actually determines your timeline:

• Assigning numbers and generating artwork: same day, once you're in Data Hub
• Getting the barcode into your packaging design: your designer's turnaround
• Print lead time: your printer's, and usually the longest single step
• Marketplace and retailer verification: not instant. Verification checks your number against GS1's records, and newly issued numbers are not always immediately reflected everywhere they're checked

The practical advice is to register at the point you commit to packaging, not at the point you're ready to print. There is no upside to leaving it late and a real risk in it.

How much does a UPC code cost?

These are GS1 US prices. Pricing varies by country, so check your local GS1 Member Organization if you're registering elsewhere.

What it costs in year five

The initial fee is the number everyone compares. The renewal is the number that decides what this costs you, because it repeats for as long as you sell the product.

Those totals assume the initial fee covers your first year and four renewals follow, which is how the fees are published. Two things fall out of the arithmetic, and neither is visible in the price list.

A single GTIN's advantage widens every year. It has no renewal at all, so its five-year cost is its first-year cost. A handful of them stays cheaper than the entry prefix tier for a surprisingly long time. GS1 US frames single GTINs as what you buy when you need "just a few" numbers, so this is not an argument for assembling a product line out of them, and it is not the only thing separating the two options. But if you sell two or three things and have no plans for more, the gap is real and it grows.

There is no upgrade between capacity tiers. This is the one that costs people money. If you license the ten-number prefix and then need an eleventh, you do not pay the difference up to the hundred-number tier. GS1 US: "If you exhaust the numbering capacity of your GS1 Company Prefix, you can obtain additional identification numbers in two ways. If you need several additional identification numbers, you can license another GS1 Company Prefix." For a few numbers, you buy single GTINs at $30 each instead.

So outgrowing ten numbers means another $250 and another $50 a year, not a $500 top-up. That is what makes the counting in Step 2 worth ten minutes: the tier you pick is a decision you buy again if you get it wrong, not one you adjust.

What happens if you stop paying

The renewal is not a maintenance fee on something you already own. GS1 US is direct about it: "If you allow your Prefix License Agreement to expire, your prefix will be terminated. This means you will no longer be authorized to use U.P.C.s from your prefix on your products."

The sentence after that is the expensive one: "Your company will no longer appear in the GS1 Company Database, so customers won't be able to verify your U.P.C.s, which may cause a delay in selling your products."

Barcodes already printed on stock in a warehouse keep scanning. What stops is verification, and verification is what retailers and marketplaces run when they set your product up. So a lapsed renewal does not announce itself at the till. It surfaces as a listing that will not go live or a retailer onboarding that stalls, at whatever point somebody next looks you up. Set a calendar reminder.

Registering versus buying: why cheap UPC codes fail

You'll find sites selling individual barcodes for $5 to $30. These are numbers subdivided from a GS1 Company Prefix that was issued to somebody else, years ago, and are being resold to you.

The comparison people make is "$5 versus $250." That was never the real comparison, and now it's obviously not: GS1 US will license you a legitimate single GTIN for $30 with nothing to renew. The reseller is competing against $30, not $250, and what you give up to save the difference is the only thing the number is for.

What actually goes wrong:

• The registered owner isn't you. This is the whole problem in one line. Verification doesn't check whether the number is well formed, it checks who GS1 says it belongs to. A resold code passes a check-digit test and fails the check that counts.
• Marketplace rejection. Amazon has required GTINs obtained from GS1 since 2016 and validates them against the GS1 registry. Resold codes surface as suppressed or rejected listings rather than a helpful warning. Our Amazon barcode guide covers exactly how that failure appears.
• Retailer rejection. Major grocery and big-box retailers verify brand ownership during product setup. Our Walmart, Kroger and Whole Foods guides go through their individual requirements.
• The prefix can lapse out from under you. You're depending on a stranger continuing to pay their GS1 renewal indefinitely. If they stop, the numbers you printed go with them.
• Duplicates. Nothing stops a reseller selling the same number twice. Two products sharing a barcode is a problem that surfaces in someone else's inventory system, months later, as your problem.

The failure is not that the barcode won't scan. It scans fine. It fails at the moment a retailer or marketplace asks whose it is, which is generally after your packaging is printed.

There is more to say here than belongs in one section, including where a resold code genuinely does work and what to do if you've already printed one. Cheap UPC codes: what you actually get for $5 covers it in full.

Do I need a UPC to sell on Amazon?

For most new listings, yes. Amazon requires a GTIN to create a listing in the majority of categories and checks it against the GS1 database to confirm it belongs to you.

There are two legitimate ways around it, and neither is a workaround: a GTIN exemption, which Amazon grants for specific categories and situations, and matching an existing listing, where you're reselling a product someone has already listed and you attach to their detail page rather than creating your own.

If you're the brand owner creating new product pages, plan on needing real GTINs. Our full Amazon guide covers exemptions, the FNSKU rules, and the GS1 documentation Amazon asks for during Brand Registry enrollment.

Selling somewhere other than Amazon? We have per-marketplace guides for Shopify, Etsy, Faire, TikTok Shop and Square, because the requirements genuinely differ.

UPC vs EAN vs GTIN: what's the difference?

These get confused constantly. The short answer is that they're all GTINs.

• UPC (UPC-A) is a 12-digit GTIN used primarily in the US and Canada
• EAN (EAN-13) is a 13-digit GTIN used in Europe and most of the rest of the world
• GTIN is the umbrella term covering all of them, including UPC-12, EAN-13, EAN-8 and GTIN-14

Any UPC converts to a 14-digit GTIN by adding leading zeros. The UPC 012345678905 becomes 00012345678905 in GTIN-14 form, and you can do the conversion with our UPC to GTIN converter. Retailers increasingly use the 14-digit format internally even for products carrying a UPC barcode.

Worth being clear about what isn't in this list: a SKU is your own internal code, which you invent, which means nothing outside your business, and which no retailer will accept in place of a GTIN. An ASIN is Amazon's identifier for a listing, issued by Amazon, and is not a substitute either. Only the GS1 numbers are recognized across companies.

When you register with GS1 you get numbers that work for all the GTIN formats. There is no separate registration for UPC versus EAN.

For a deeper look, see our full GTIN explainer.

The next step: GS1 Digital Link QR codes

UPC barcodes have worked for 50 years, but retail is moving on. The Sunrise 2027 initiative is an industry transition from traditional linear barcodes to 2D codes, specifically QR codes carrying a GS1 Digital Link URL. It's a milestone the industry is working toward rather than a legal deadline, but the direction is settled.

These QR codes still carry your GTIN, and they also link to product information, traceability data and more. One code works at checkout and gives a shopper something to scan with their phone.

The useful part: if you've followed the steps above, you're already ready. Your GTINs carry over directly. The only thing that changes is the barcode format on the packaging. See do I need a 2D barcode for whether that's a now problem or a later one for your product.

You can see what one looks like by trying our QR code generator with one of your GTINs.

Related

• What Is a GTIN?
• Where to Find the UPC on a Product
• Cheap UPC Codes: What You Get for $5
• How to Get a GS1 Company Prefix
• GS1 Barcodes for Amazon
• GS1 Barcodes for Whole Foods Market
• GS1 Barcodes for Kroger
• GS1 Barcodes for Costco
• Do I Need a 2D Barcode?
• Sunrise 2027: Timeline and Deadlines
• GTIN Validator Tool
• Check Digit Calculator
• Pricing Plans