Key:addr

The various addr keys are used to provide address information for buildings and facilities. See Addresses for more details on usage.

How to map

Where to add the address

The address tagging should be added to

• the object of a point of interest;
• the polygon representing an area (building or campus/site outline) if the address is valid for the whole object (e.g. a detached house, an individual terraced house, a school campus);
• to a particular node sitting on the site outline or building outline (e.g. entrance, gate) or contained within the object if the address applies to this point, in particular when an object has multiple addresses such as an apartment building with several entrances;
• to a node if you are unsure about the extent of the address.

What to add

As a minimum, please add

• addr:housenumber=* (or addr:housename=* when this is part of the postal address)
• addr:street=*

If you know them and if they exist, please add:

• addr:city=*
• addr:postcode=* (adding to single elements might depend on local mapping practices)
• addr:country=* (depending on the mapping practices in your country)

If they are part of the postal address, please add:

• addr:suburb=*
• addr:state=*
• addr:province=*
• addr:floor=*

Example addresses rendered on map in OSM Carto style:

Loading map...

{"tileLayer":"//{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png","attribution":"\u0026copy; \u003Ca href=\"http://osm.org/copyright\"\u003EOpenStreetMap\u003C/a\u003E contributors","center":{"lat":52.49832,"lon":13.43601},"zoom":"17","minzoom":"13","maxzoom":"18"}

OpenStreetMap.org/#map=19/52.49832/13.43601

Higher-level tags such as addr:city=* are often redundant, since they could be calculated from the respective boundary relations they are contained in (if present and valid).

The focus on the usage of addr:country=* differs across national communities, some consider it as necessary part of tagging (Germany), some as unwanted tag (Poland).

Collection methods

• Rapid Address Collection describes methods of collecting addresses rapidly.

Commonly used subkeys

Key	Value	Element	Comment	Rendering	Photo
Tags for individual houses
addr:housenumber	user defined		The house number (may contain letters, dashes or other characters). Addresses describes ways to tag a single building with multiple addresses. Please do not only tag addr:housenumber=*, but also add at least addr:street=* or addr:place=* for places without streets (or map the belonging to a street with a relation using associatedStreet relation or street relation.)
addr:housename	user defined		The name of a house. This is sometimes used in some countries like England, Spain, Portugal, Latvia instead of (or in addition to) a house number.
addr:flats	user defined		The unit numbers (a range or a list) of the flats or apartments located behind a single entrance door.
addr:conscriptionnumber	user defined		This special kind of housenumber relates to a settlement instead of a street. Conscription numbers were introduced in the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and are still in use in some parts of Europe, sometimes together with street-related housenumbers which are also called orientation numbers.
addr:street	user defined		The name of the respective street. If the street name is very long or nonexistent, the ref of the respective street. A way with highway=* or a square with place=square and the corresponding name should be found nearby. The belonging to a street can alternatively be represented by a associatedStreet relation or street relation. The keys addr:housenumber=* and addr:street=* in principle are the only necessary ones if there are valid border polygons. If you are not sure if it is so, just add addr:city=*, addr:postcode=* and addr:country=*.
addr:place	user defined		This is part of an address which refers to the name of some territorial zone (usually a place=* like island, square or very small village) instead of a street (highway=*). Should not be used together with addr:street=*.
addr:postcode	user defined		The postal code of the building/area. Some mappers prefer to rely on boundary=postal_code
addr:city	user defined		The name of the city as given in postal addresses of the building/area. (In some places the city in the address corresponds to the post office that serves the area rather than the actual city, if any, in which the building is located.) Some mappers assume it can be derived from a boundary=administrative relation.
addr:country	user defined		The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two letter country code in upper case. Example: "DE" for Germany, "CH" for Switzerland, "AT" for Austria, "FR" for France, "IT" for Italy. Caveat: The ISO 3166-1 code for Great Britain is "GB" and not "UK". More or less favoured in different national communities.
addr:postbox	user defined		Use this for addressing postal service Post Office Box (PO Box, BP - Boîte Postale, CP - Case Postale, Поштански преградак, Поштански фах, Поштански претинац) as alternative to addressing using street names. Example: "PO Box 34"
addr:full	user defined		Use this for a full-text, often multi-line, address if you find the structured address fields unsuitable for denoting the address of this particular location. Examples: "Fifth house on the left after the village oak, Smalltown, Smallcountry", or addresses using special delivery names or codes (possibly via an unrelated city name and post code), or PO Boxes. Beware that these strings can hardly be parsed by software: "1200 West Sunset Boulevard Suite 110A" is still better represented as addr:housenumber=1200 + addr:street=West Sunset Boulevard + addr:unit=110A.
For countries using hamlet, subdistrict, district, province, state, county
addr:hamlet	user defined		The hamlet of the object. Not used in Russia and other exUSSR countries
addr:suburb	user defined		If an address exists several times in a city. You have to add the name of the settlement. See Australian definition of suburb.
addr:subdistrict	user defined		The subdistrict of the object.
addr:district	user defined		The district of the object.
addr:province	user defined		The province of the object. For Canada, uppercase two-letter postal abbreviations (BC, AB, ON, QC, etc.) are used. In Russia a synonym {{{key:addr:region}}} is widely used
addr:state	user defined		The state of the object. For the US, uppercase two-letter postal abbreviations (AK, CA, HI, NY, TX, WY, etc.) are used.
addr:county	user defined		The county of the object.
Tags for interpolation ways
addr:interpolation	all/even/odd/ alphabetic		How to interpolate the house numbers belonging to the way along the respective street. See detailed description.
addr:interpolation	Number n		Every nth house between the end nodes is represented by the interpolation way.
addr:inclusion	actual/estimate/potential		Optional tag to indicate the accuracy level of survey used to create the address interpolation way. See detailed description.

This section is a wiki template with a default description in English. Editable here.

Detailed subkeys

More detailed information as approved here: Proposed features/addr keys (2011-04)

Key	Value	Element	Comment	Photo	Taginfo
Tags for parts of a building
addr:door	user defined		The door number (or name) of an apartment/flat/office/room. Could also be called differently in some countries (In Austria for example it is sometimes referred to as "Top"). If a room has more than one door, you can tag them separately. See also: room=*
addr:unit	user defined		The number, letter, or name of a single unit or flat that exists within a larger complex. While a big building could have only one entrance, sometimes the way inside divides into different units or staircases, where certain apartments/flats/offices can only be reached through a specific unit. Useful for apartment, suite, or office numbers. Information necessary for postmen, for example. In the United States, there is no consensus on how to represent secondary unit designators, however according to taginfo it is far more popular to omit the designator and only include the identifier: there are only a few thousand "Apartment/Unit/Suite A" entries versus 46,000 "A" entries as of 2021.
addr:flats	user defined		A list of flat numbers accessible in a building or behind a door.
addr:floor	Number		The floor number that is part of the address of an apartment/flat/office. Also add level=*, which is applicable regardless of whether the floor number is part of the address.
addr:block	user defined		The city block, if part of the address. In Japan, very few streets have names, so most housenumbers are associated with the block, not the street. See JA:住所 § 街区 Block number address systemについて.

Multilingual addresses

In areas with two or more official languages, addresses can be localized by adding a language code after the usual address keys like:

• addr:street:en=*
• addr:city:en=*

How language codes are selected is described in multilingual names.

Addresses without housenumbers

• If there wasn’t a housenumber assigned to the address, you can use nohousenumber=yes

Old (former) housenumbers

Sometimes housenumbers change. In this event, it may still be useful to keep track of the former housenumber (e.g. because they are still visible, because it makes the housenumber unambigous with respect to the old/new question, etc.). The common tag for these is old_addr:housenumber=*. Similarly, for areas with housenumbers refering to a place rather than a street, old_addr:place=* is used.

See also

• contact=* - The contact tag is the prefix for several contact:* keys to describe contacts
• addr:streetnumber=* - Secondary house numbers known as "číslo orientační" in the Czech Republic.
• 2008 Proposal Proposed features/House numbers/Karlsruhe Schema
• 2011 Proposal Proposed features/addr keys (2011-04)
• 2011 Proposal Proposed features/addr:place
• 2019/10 Proposal Proposed features/Addr:milestone for distance based addresses
• 2022 under active discussion on Talk GB is Addresses_in_the_United_Kingdom - tags on this page are part of this discussion.