ITF-14 (carton barcode)
ITF-14 is the barcode printed on cardboard cartons and cases. Its 14 digits identify a box of a product, not a single item: the first digit says which packing level it is, and the rest is the item’s own product number with a new check digit.
Easily confused with
How to read it
GS1 uses ITF-14 for trade items that aren’t meant to pass through a shop’s checkout, and says it suits printing straight onto corrugated board. The 14-digit number is a GTIN-14: an indicator digit, then the GTIN of the item inside (less its check digit), then a check digit for the whole. The company picks indicators 1 to 8 for up to eight different groupings of the same item, and 9 is reserved for variable measure items, whose quantity varies from pack to pack. GS1’s example is 1 061414112345 9, a grouping of the item 061414112345.
Also searched as: bearer bar, carton barcode, case barcode, gtin-14, interleaved 2 of 5, itf 14, itf-14, shipping box barcode.
These pages say what each code and its parts mean under the standard that defines it. A barcode identifies an item; it doesn’t say where the item was made or whether it is genuine, and the label and the maker are the place to look for that.
The thick frame
The heavy border around the bars is the bearer bar. GS1 gives two reasons for it: it evens out the pressure of the printing plate, and it stops a scanner’s beam that crosses the barcode at a slant from reading only part of it. Keyence’s guide explains the first: corrugated cardboard isn’t flat, so a flexographic press doesn’t press evenly and the bars can come out distorted.
Interleaved 2 of 5
Each digit is five bars or five spaces, two of them wide, GS1’s specification says; in ITF, Keyence explains, the first digit of each pair is in the bars and the second in the spaces between them, so the number of digits is even.
Look-alikes
A GS1-128 label on a carton holds more than the product number: dates, batch and quantity, each after an Application Identifier in brackets.
Read next
- Next in Barcodes and QR codesCode 128 and GS1-128Code 128 is a barcode that can hold any letter, digit or keyboard symbol, so it turns up on shipping and warehouse labels. GS1-128 is the GS1 version, where each piece of data starts with an Application Identifier printed in brackets.
- The same shape in Asian flagsFlag of IranIran’s flag has three equal stripes of green, white and red, with the national emblem in red in the centre and the words “Allahu akbar” (“God is greatest”) written 22 times in white along the edges of the green and the red. Iran’s constitution names the colours, the emblem and the motto but gives them no meaning; the art historian Kimia Maleki writes that the 22 marks the day the revolution of 1979 won, the 22nd day of the 11th month of the Iranian calendar.
More barcodes and QR codes
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with letters and numbers, lines or squares and rectangles.
Sources
- GS1 General Specifications Standard, Release 26.0, ratified January 2026, GS1 AISBL, §2.1 Table 2-17; §5.1.1; §5.3.1; §5.3.2.4
- ITF and Standard Distribution Code | Basics of Barcodes, Barcode Information & Tips, KEYENCE Corporation, ITF; bearer bar
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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