Methods and systems for verifying a hardware design for a component that implements a permutation respecting function. The methods include formally verifying that an instantiation of the hardware design produces the correct result to the function for a subset of the valid input vectors; and formally verifying that an instantiation of the hardware design is permutation respecting for each of one or more input vector permutations (i.e. that the instantiation of the hardware design produces the permutation related outputs for an input vector and the permutation of that input vector) over a set of input vectors. The subset and the input vector permutations are selected so that any valid input vector that is not in the subset can be generated from an input vector in the subset via a combination of the one or more input vector permutations.