Comment by sam_lowry_

1 day ago

Belgian National Number is your birth date, then an increment from 1 to 999 for every baby born that day, then a base-97 checksum.

Are there never more than 1k babies born in a day?

  • With a population of 12M and life expectancy of 80 years (give or take), probably not, as that needs ~400 newborns a day to maintain, and the birth rate is probably well below that, like in most Western countries.

Not sure if still the case: odd numbers for males and even numbers for females.

This also means a person’s Belgian RRN can change.

  • Yep, but they do not change on sex change, IIRC.

    • I wrote a system for a medical lab decades ago and IIRC I did actually have to change some RRN's manually. It's been a while so I'm not 100% sure, but I do think the changes were due to switching gender.