The potential 16-digit credit card combinations provide far more account numbers than could ever be used, according to Cris Poor, a mathematics professor at Fordham University. Poor says the 16-digit card numbers have 10 quadrillion possibilities.
By comparison, the world population is a mere 6 billion.
“So each person in the world could have more than a million potential credit numbers, and I don’t know anybody who has anywhere near that many credit cards,” Poor said.
To understand why we’re not going to run out of numbers, you need to know how the distribution of credit card numbers works.
All card numbers guidelines are laid out by the International Organization for Standardization and the American National Standards Institute, which also sets standards around things such as the size and shape of credit cards. The first digit signifies the network and industry, so for example, all Visas start with a “4,” while AmEx cards start with a “3.” That allows the merchants to identify who is ultimately responsible for payment of charges.
The first digit, along with the five that follow it, are collectively known as the Bank Identification Number, or BIN. They’re assigned to the individual payment networks (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), which then distribute them to card issuers (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.).
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So the six digits on every Chase Sapphire card, for example, would be the same as would the first six digits of every Capital One Venture Rewards Card. The next nine digits on your card are given out to individual users by the issuers, and are unique to your account.
That means that each issuer has millions of individual consumer account numbers that they can distribute.
“Typically, a financial institution wouldn’t want to exhaust all the numbers in their range, though,” said Lou Grilli, AVP Product Development with Trellance, a credit union service organization. “They want to hold onto some to re-issue, and for growth or if they decide to add another card number to the family.
“Realistically, they giving out about 50 percent of their numbers would be acceptable, and most BINs out there are only around 10 percent utilized,” he added.
Even so, the networks don’t want to see their BIN capacity tested. MasterCard BINs always started with the number 5, but in 2017, the network began issuing a 2 series of cards in order to increase the number of available cards and numbers.
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