Philippines/Addressing

This page documents discussions on addressing scheme for the Philippines. The purpose is for areas with completed roads, we start including address data as well. At the moment we can start with physical address and not the P.O. box.

Addressing variations

from the PhilPost

See w:Postal addresses in the Philippines

Metro Manila address formats P.O. boxes

   Mr. Juan dela Cruz
   P.O. Box 1201, Manila Central Post Office
   1050 Manila

   Mr. Juan C. Masipag
   P.O. Box 1121, Araneta Center Post Office
   1135 Quezon City, Metro Manila

Direct delivery

   Miss Teresita C. Metrillo
   7114 Kundiman Street, Sampaloc
   1008 Manila

   Miss Auria M. Francisco
   75 P. Domingo Street, Carmona, Makati City
   1207 Metro Manila

Provincial address formats

P.O. boxes

   Ms. Perlita A. Sanchez
   P.O. Box 1000, Gasan Post Office
   4905 Gasan, Marinduque

Direct delivery

   Mr. Samuel H. Magtanggol
   95 Hermogenes Street, Sofia Subdivision
   Del Pilar, San Fernando City
   2000 Pampanga

Address in subdivisions

   Block # Lot # X Subdivision 
   Y Barangay, Z City
   Zipcode, Metro Manila

Others

   (1) house number or Lot/Blk/Phase, (2) Floor Number, (3) building name or Apartment name, (4) streetname, 
   (5) sitio or purok, (6) > subdivision name (or project name), 
   (7) barangay name, (8) town or city name, 
   (9) province, (10) regions name, (11) country name, (12) zip code

Schema

Tags

The following tags are in use as of 2024 to handle Philippine address details. Instead of creating Philippines-specific tags for distinctive divisions listed in typical Philippine addresses such as barangays, sitios/puroks or even housing subdivision, such details are accommodated using existing globally used tags, namely addr:district=*, addr:subdistrict=* and addr:neighbourhood=*.

A similar tagging scheme was already used for handling address details for public schools from the Philippine Department of Education database added to OSM under the OSMaPaaralan initiative, but using slightly different keys. Some of such tags have been migrated to the tags under the scheme listed below.

Tag	Required?	Element type	Values	Description
addr:has_apartments	optional		boolean	"true" if this address is an apartment complex, "false" if not.
addr:apartment_number_format	optional		string	number format of apartment building. Several number formats may be supplied, separated by commas. A = alphabetic (optional), Z = alphabetic (required), 0 = numeric (optional), 9 = numeric (required). Examples: "9" = one numeric digit, "Z" = one alphabetic character, "999a" = three numeric digits with optional lower case alphabetic character (such as "123" or "123b"), "Z,09" = "either one alphabetic character or one or two numeric digits (such as "K", "1" or "15")
addr:building	optional		string	Number of building or apartment complex.
addr:housename	optional		string	Building name as seen on the address of the feature. May be used with house number (addr:housenumber).
addr:housenumber	optional		string	The "house number". May contain non-digits. If a single entry has multiple house numbers, separate them by ",". e.g. "12B, 12C". Addresses on subdivisions using a block-lot system are to be mapped as addr:housenumber, but with "Block [number], Lot [number] (e.g. Block 1, Lot 1) be simplified to "B[number]-L[number]" (e.g. B1-L1) or even "[block number]-[lot number]" (e.g. 1-1), which is similar to the house numbers used in Japanese addressing, where the first number is the block number and the second is the building number. May be used with building name (addr:housename)
addr:street	optional		string	The (main) name of the related street. If not given a program parsers may assume the name of the nearest street it can find, but this is not easy or fast to do in all cases, so putting the name in here is encouraged.
addr:neighbourhood	optional		string	Name of sitio/purok, subdivision or industrial park.
addr:district	optional		string	Barangay (in most cases) or district (both defined and undefined in laws, used in Manila, Quezon City, Pasay, Iloilo City, Davao City, Samal) as seen in the address. Numbered/Poblacion barangays may be entered, but in most cases, they are omitted and replaced with the district or "Poblacion" (if barangay is part of it.) or with no barangay and/or district at all, like most addresses in Pasay.
addr:postcode	optional		string	Postal code of the building/addressed area. Different countries have different length and different characters allowed for postal codes. Postal codes in the Philippines are called ZIP codes (the same with the US postal codes, but are 5-digit and sometimes including additional 4-digits, called ZIP+4) and are 4-digit.
addr:city	optional		string	City as used in postal addresses of the building/addressed area.
addr:province	optional		string	Province as used in postal addresses of the building/addressed area.
addr:region	optional		string	Region where the feature lies. This is filled for Metro Manila addresses only but can otherwise left blank.
addr:full	optional		string	Full postal address. This can be used in addition to other tags if the other tags are not enough to fully describe an address.
addr:interpolation	required		even/odd/all/alphabetic	To interpolate the house numbers belonging to the way along the related street.

Others

In case of houses with "old" and "new" number, "new" number should end in addr:housenumber=* (old one also may be tagged, for example in old_addr:housenumber=* or addr:housenumber:old=* or similar).