vCard QR

Overview

vCard QR is the practice of encoding a vCard electronic-business-card record inside a standard qr-code symbol so that a phone camera can read the contact and offer to add it to the address book in one tap. The payload is a complete vCard text object — beginning with BEGIN:VCARD and ending with END:VCARD — placed verbatim into the QR data [1].

vCard itself is an IETF-standardized contact-exchange format; its current version is vCard 4.0, defined by RFC 6350 [3]. The QR carrier is not part of the RFC: embedding a vCard in a QR Code is a convention documented, among others, by the ZXing project [1].

History

vCard originated as "The Electronic Business Card," developed by the Versit Consortium — a collaboration of Apple, AT&T, IBM and Siemens — in the early-to-mid 1990s [2]. The consortium proposed the initial specification in 1995, and version 2.1 became widely adopted by 1996; in December 1996 ownership passed to the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) [2].

Standardization then moved to the IETF: RFC 2426 described vCard 3.0, and RFC 6350, published in August 2011, defined vCard 4.0 and obsoleted RFCs 2425, 2426 and 4770 while updating RFC 2739 [2] [3]. vCard 4.0 is now maintained under the IETF and CalConnect umbrella [2].

Technical specification

A vCard is a line-oriented text object. ZXing's example payload for a QR-embedded card is [1]:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Owen;Sean;;;
FN:Sean Owen
TITLE:Software Engineer
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET;TYPE=WORK;TYPE=PREF:srowen@google.com
URL;TYPE=Homepage:https://example.com
END:VCARD

Each line is a property: a name, optional ;-separated parameters, a colon, and the value [1] [3]. Core properties include FN (formatted display name, required in 4.0), N (structured name: family;given;additional;prefix;suffix), TEL, EMAIL, ORG, TITLE, ADR (structured address), URL, BDAY and PHOTO [3]. The VERSION property must immediately follow BEGIN:VCARD and declares the vCard version (2.1, 3.0, or 4.0) [3].

Structured values are split by semicolons and lists within a component by commas; in version 4.0 the escape rules require backslash-escaping of \, ,, ;, and the encoding of newlines as \n within text values [3]. Long lines may be folded by inserting a CRLF followed by a space or tab — though for a single small contact in a QR Code folding is usually unnecessary [3]. In practice QR generators commonly emit vCard 3.0 because of the broadest scanner compatibility [1] [7].

Use cases

• Digital business cards. A vCard QR on a printed card, badge, email signature or website lets the recipient store all contact fields at once instead of typing them [7].
• Camera-native "add contact." On iOS (camera since iOS 11) and Android, scanning a BEGIN:VCARD payload triggers a system-level "add to contacts" action [6].
• Conference / networking badges. Rich multi-field contacts (name, org, title, phone, email, URL, photo) make vCard QR preferable where more than a name and number are needed [7].

Implementations

Project	Lang	Stars	Last active	Notes
zxing/zxing	Java	~34k	2025	Reference decoder; documents the vCard-in-QR convention and parses it to a contact result [1] [5]
iOS Camera (system)	—	—	2025	Recognizes VCARD payloads and offers "add contact" since iOS 11 [6]
Android camera / Google Lens	—	—	2025	System-level "add contact" action for vCard QR codes [6]

Comparison

• vCard vs mecard. vCard is verbose and richly structured (parameters, multiple typed values, photos), at the cost of more characters — and therefore a denser, larger QR symbol. mecard is a compact NTT DoCoMo format that carries the most-used fields in far fewer characters, producing smaller, easier-to-scan codes [1].
• vCard 3.0 vs 4.0 in QR. RFC 6350's 4.0 is the current standard, but QR generators frequently emit 3.0 for the widest reader support [3] [7].

Fun facts

• The "Versit" parent consortium that created vCard also created vCalendar, the ancestor of today's iCalendar — so the business-card and the calendar-event QR formats share a common 1990s lineage [2].

Status

Active. vCard 4.0 (RFC 6350) is the current IETF standard, and embedding vCards in QR Codes is supported natively by the system camera on both iOS and Android, which surface an "add contact" action on scan [3] [6].

Sources

1 Barcode Contents — ZXing Wiki 2 vCard — Grokipedia 3 RFC 6350: vCard Format Specification — IETF, 2011 5 zxing/zxing — ZXing project, GitHub 6 QR code mobile OS breakdown: iOS vs Android in 2026 — QRCodeKit, 2026 7 vCard QR Code Format Explained — vCardQRCodeGenerator, 2026

Deployments

No country reports mention this standard by name.

Regions / aggregations not mapped to a single country

• Universal