What is the OFAC SDN list? A practical guide

If you work in compliance, banking, payments, or run a business that deals with international counterparties, you've almost certainly heard of "the SDN list." It's the single most-referenced sanctions list in the world, and understanding what it actually is — not just that you're supposed to check it — makes every downstream compliance decision easier.

What SDN stands for

SDN stands for Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons. It's maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury. OFAC administers and enforces US economic and trade sanctions programs, and the SDN list is its primary tool for identifying who those sanctions apply to.

Being on the SDN list means the US government has determined that an individual, company, vessel, or other entity is a target of US sanctions — usually because of a connection to terrorism, narcotics trafficking, weapons proliferation, a sanctioned country's government, human rights abuses, or a similar designated activity. As of 2026 the list runs to well over ten thousand entries once you count every individual, company, aircraft and vessel entry.

What "blocked" actually means

The practical consequence of an SDN designation is severe: US persons — which includes US citizens, permanent residents, companies incorporated in the US, and anyone physically in the US — are generally prohibited from doing business with a listed party. Any assets of a listed person that come within US jurisdiction must be "blocked" (frozen), not just declined. This is a stricter standard than simply refusing a transaction; a US bank that discovers it's holding funds belonging to an SDN-listed party is required to freeze those funds and report the block to OFAC, not just return them.

This is why SDN screening isn't optional for regulated businesses. Financial institutions, money service businesses, and increasingly fintechs, payment processors and even some marketplaces are expected to screen counterparties against the SDN list as part of a Bank Secrecy Act / anti-money-laundering (BSA/AML) compliance program.

Who ends up on the list

SDN designations happen under specific legal authorities — usually an Executive Order or a statute tied to a particular sanctions program. Common program categories include:

• Country/regime-based programs — e.g. sanctions tied to specific governments or conflicts (Russia/Ukraine-related designations, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela).
• Counter-terrorism — individuals and organizations designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT).
• Narcotics trafficking — under programs like the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.
• Weapons proliferation — entities tied to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (NPWMD).
• Cyber-related sanctions — individuals and groups tied to malicious cyber activity.

Every SDN entry lists the program(s) it falls under, which matters — a designation under one program can carry different prohibitions and available exemptions than another.

What each SDN entry contains

An SDN entry is more than just a name. A typical individual entry includes:

• The primary name, plus any known aliases (a.k.a., f.k.a., n.k.a.)
• Date and place of birth, where known
• Nationality and known addresses
• Identification numbers (passport, national ID) where available
• The sanctions program(s) the designation falls under
• The date the designation was published

Entity entries (companies, vessels, aircraft) carry equivalent identifying details — registration numbers, flags, addresses, and, for companies, sometimes a note about ownership structure, since OFAC's "50% Rule" extends blocking to entities majority-owned by an SDN-listed party even if the entity itself isn't separately listed.

SDN vs. the Consolidated list

It's worth knowing that OFAC also publishes a separate Consolidated (Non-SDN) list, covering sectoral sanctions and other narrower restriction programs that don't carry a full asset block. A name can appear on the Consolidated list without triggering the same blocking obligation as an SDN hit — the program matters as much as the fact of a hit. A thorough screen checks both lists, plus relevant multilateral lists like the UN Security Council Consolidated list, since obligations can differ by jurisdiction and counterparty.

How to actually check a name

OFAC publishes the SDN list as downloadable data files (XML, CSV and other formats) that update as designations happen — sometimes several times a month. In principle you could download the raw file and text-search it, but in practice that's a poor way to actually screen a name: raw string matching misses aliases, transliteration variants, reordered names and punctuation differences, and produces either too many false positives or misses true matches entirely.

That's the gap a dedicated screening tool closes — normalizing names, expanding aliases, and scoring matches with a documented, repeatable method rather than a raw substring search. You can try this yourself: screen a name against the OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated and UN Security Council lists for free, no account required, and see exactly which entry and program a hit is cited against.

The bottom line

The SDN list is the backbone of US sanctions enforcement: a continuously updated register of individuals and entities that US persons are broadly prohibited from transacting with. Understanding what's in an entry, what "blocked" actually requires, and how designations tie to specific programs turns SDN screening from a compliance checkbox into something you can actually reason about when a possible match shows up in your queue.