The RUT

If you’ve been in Chile more than half an hour, you’ve probably heard the word RUT. This is a national ID number that is equivalent to the Social Security number in the U.S., albeit much more frequently used in daily life. RUT stands for Rol Unico Tributario (Tax ID) and every taxpaying person and company has one.

This number is often confused with the RUN (Rol Unico Numérico), which every resident (including newborns and foreign students) is assigned when he or she begins said residency. If you look at your Cédula de Identidad Extranjeros, your marriage certificate or your baby’s birth certificate, you will see that the ID number is labeled RUN.

The two get confused because, if you are a person, they are the same number (whereas if you are a company you have a RUT but not a RUN). You’re not actually assigned a RUT until you open for business, either as an employee, independent contractor or business owner. When you complete this trámite, called inicio de actividades, the SII will reward you by sending you a card (pictured above) that says “Rol Unico Tributario” on it, with your name and your brand-new… RUN. While nothing will have changed, really, from then on, you can proudly recite your “RUT” to clerks in pharmacies and department stores everywhere, free of the shame that comes with pretending your RUN is something it’s not.

So when talking about live human beings, RUNs and RUTs are essentially interchangeable. That is, all residents have a RUN, and all legal workers also have an identical RUT. For reasons that I unknow*, RUT became the blanket term to refer to both of these numbers, so I refer throughout this article and this site to one’s RUT when the proper name is RUN.

RUTs are numeric and sequential, created and doled out as needed. Most working-age Chilean adults have one in the range of 5 million to 16 million; the low-RUT recordholder among my personal acquaintences is in the 1 millions, and my children, born in 2002 and 2006, have RUTs in the 21 and 22 millions, respectively. Foreigners are assigned a RUT upon obtaining any visa other than a tourist visa.

Nowadays, Chilean babies are assigned a RUT a few days after their birth, when Dad takes the hospital birth record to the Registro Civil. Up until 20 or 30 years ago, it was only assigned the first time the child required a cédula, usually for international travel. So Chileans born in the 1970s or earlier can have much higher or lower RUTs than their peers, depending on when this particular moment in their lives arrived. Sometimes, I’ll be standing in line to do some trámite, and I’ll hear the Chilean guy in front of me recite his RUT to the customer service rep. It’s close to mine, and he kind of looks the same age as me, which means he got his RUT at around the same time I did. So I spend the next 30 seconds trying to imagine this person growing up in Santiago and somehow not needing any kind of ID until age 20 (one’s interesting-things-to-think-about threshold is lowered in trámiteland, in case you were wondering).

Because the RUT has no internal format, they come with a dígito verificador (control character) at the end, separated from the number itself by a hyphen. That means your RUT will have the format:

NN.NNN.NNN-N

That is, a number in the tens of millions, with a period as the thousands separator, followed by a hyphen and the dígito verificador. The dígito verificador can be any digit from 0 to 9 or the letter K, which represents the number 10. Every RUT has exactly one possible dígito verificador, which is used to validate RUTs and reduce copying or dictation errors. If you’re interested in the validation algorithm itself, read the pseudocode on this blog post.

No RUT, no service?

If you’re a visitor to Chile, you’ll discover quickly– perhaps even before you arrive– that it’s tough to get things done without a RUT. There are many large- and small-scale information systems in Chile that simply do not recognize the existence of non-immigrant visitors to Chile, despite the fact that the companies who use them do. This hinders visitors’ ability to perform basic transactions, which at best annoys the visitor, and at worst relieves the company of a potential new customer.

If you’re a new resident, the very first thing you should do is make a trip to the Registro Civil, by way of Policía Internacional, to get your RUT.

* The English word unknown translates to desconocido in Spanish. Only Spanish, however, provides a corresponding verb (desconocer) that you can use transitively, in the present tense, like any other. So in Spanish it’s perfectly fine to say “por razones que desconozco.” I think it’s a beautiful construction, so I hearby nominate it for import into English. ⇑