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Logo. Feature : Addresses
One example for Feature : Addresses
Used to provide address information for the building or facility.



Address information can be added to OpenStreetMap using a variety of methods, such as adding a simple node containing an address, adding address information to a building, site or other area, or alternatively to an entrance node for the building or site.

OpenStreetMap tagging provides support for various address schemes used across the world.

How to map addresses


  • isolated nodes inside building=* polygons
  • building=* polygons
  • nodes that are parts of building polygons ( = entrance=*s) or on the access to a property (e.g. on barrier=gate or barrier=entrance), used in places where addresses are assigned to entrances and accesses rather than to buildings)
  • on polygons representing the perimeter of the site (if addresses are assigned to buildings this approach should be avoided)

Historically, this approach originates from the Karlsruhe Schema.

The Rapid Address Collection page outlines methods of collecting and mapping address data rapidly.

Usually address informations doesn't need to be duplicated, i.e. there should be only one addr:housenumber=* per street and house number (which would typically be placed on the building). Software can usually link addresses to other features by geographical proximity, and duplicated addresses are often flagged as errors by quality assurance tools. However, there is still some debate on that point (see for example Address information in POI *and* building? on Also, the community in some countries has established their own rules.

Tags such as addr:country=*, addr:city=* are often redundant as features inside administrative boundaries (when mapped) "inherit" their attributes as supported by software such as Nominatim or Photon.

Using relations




Buildings with multiple house numbers

Ambox warning pn.svg There is currently no global consensus on this. Here are some possibilities:

    • in some cases there is a local consensus that this approach is preferable, for example in Poland
    • (Don't then also give the building an address, else all the numbers will be duplicated.)
  • If house numbers are associated with individual entrances, tag those numbers to entrance=* nodes.
  • Separate the numbers by commas (e.g., 11,13,15) or semicolon (e.g., 11;13;15).
    • Currently, the comma version is more popular. While the default separator for multiple values in OSM is the semi-colon, the "Karlsruhe Schema" widely adopted for addresses mandates the use of a comma to separate house numbers.
    • In a discussion on the tagging mailing list it was proposed to use a semi-colon instead. See [1][2].
  • Specify the range (e.g. 10-95). Note that there is a risk of ambiguity between two meanings:
    • When such a range is officially used for the entire house, this is the preferred method. In this case 10-95 is simply a label like any other. In this and other cases, house numbers officially contain a dash and are not meant to be treated as special.
    • When such a range is meant to be interpreted as a list of addresses, use addr:interpolation=* (described below) to emphasise this. Some mappers will add a short "virtual" way which allows them to put addresses 10 and 95 on separate nodes as normal. Some mappers will specify the range 10-95 on a single object, where the addition of the addr:interpolation=* tag disambiguates it from the "simply a label" meaning, specifying that it is indeed to be treated as a range. Both approaches are used in practice and there is little consensus.
    • Note that in some cases building or building complex has single address such as 3-5 that only looks like a housenumber range. As usual, do not convert such data blindly, without a verification.
  • In case of separate buildings mapped as one it is recommended to create separate connected polygons for separate buildings, each with own address.
  • Remember that there are also buildings which are a single building with one entrance and nevertheless have a "hyphenated " address, e.g. 4-5 Bonhill Street way 157901333 and other buildings nearby. In this case, there aren't separate entrances to map. In some cases entire facility with multiple buildings has such address, such as hospital in Poland with address Wrocławska 1-3 Kraków[1].

Multiple buildings for one housenumber


To name the buildings, use addr:housename=*.

Using interpolation



For irregular missing house numbers (e.g., missing 13), two ways need to be drawn (e.g., 1-11 and 15-25). If there is a regular structure to the missing house numbers, for example, every other number is missing from a sequence (example for an odd way: 3401, 3405, 3409, etc.), use a numeric value with addr:interpolation=* to indicate the value to increment between house numbers. (Note: addr:interpolation=odd and addr:interpolation=even are just special cases of addr:interpolation=number, where number is 2 (i.e. addr:interpolation=2), and the beginning node is odd or even, respectively).


As seen in the example picture above, it's allowed to add nodes that do not have an integer value for their addr:housenumber=* tag somewhere in an odd/even/all interpolation (e.g., 12b). Those will be ignored for the interpolation. However, endpoints of the interpolation way always have to follow the given interpolation rule! i.e. For addr:interpolation=even the addr:housenumber=* tag on the end nodes must be an even number.



Using Address Interpolation for partial surveys



The optional tag addr:inclusion=* identifies the accuracy of the data.


Letters in house numbers (for example in Russia)

Russian addresses may have complex addr:housenumber=* values with letters, ex. 48А к2 с1 [3] (means house number 48А, building 2, construction 1). In some cases, official addresses have only "корпус" (building) numbers, so addr:housenumber=* will start with letter "к".

Addresses without street names



In these cases no tag addr:street=* should be present. The key addr:place can be used instead of addr:street to indicate the part of the address that takes the place of the street name, such as the name of the village, subdivision, or island. In the case of buildings in a district and/or subdistrict, the tags addr:district=* and if applicable addr:subdistrict=* should be used to make the addresses searchable and routable.

Country specific rules and sources


See Rural Addresses.





Czechia uses its own system for mapping addresses as the use of addr:housenumber=* is not sufficient. Additionally we use these tags:

The system is described on page Cs:WikiProjekt Česko/Systém adres(cs).

Czech government provides open data for house numbers. House numbers are updated approximately every month. For more information see Address_import_from_RUIAN.



All Danish address nodes are (since february 2009) imported from a central service operated by the Danish government and continuously checked and corrected against the same service. Foreign cartographers mapping in Denmark should be wary that the Danish community does not approve of merging the imported address nodes with buildings. When using the JOSM-plugin buildings_tools in Denmark, please ensure that it is not configured to automatically merge address nodes with buildings.







Housenumbers are usually assigned to the access points of a property (e.g. a gate on the perimeter) or entrance to a building (if it is directly on the street), and also to certain types of potential entrances or former entrances, e.g. to shop windows. You can add additional tags like entrance=yes/no or barrier=gate to be more specific. In historic context it is also not unusual to have building entrances with housenumbers on the first (and other upper or lower) building level(s). In these cases you can add level=1(etc.) to make the situation explicit. For places without assigned housenumbers (it: snc) you can use nohousenumber=yes and keep addr:housenumber=* empty.

New Zealand

Street Addresses in New Zealand have been imported into OSM from government data, and the data is regularly conflated. See Import/New Zealand Street Addresses (2021) for more information.

Rural Addresses

From Rural Address Property Identification:

The Rural Addressing scheme was adopted in Australian/New Zealand Standard 4819:2003 Geographic Information – Rural and urban addressing in 2003. It is based on RAPID, an acronym for Rural Address Property IDentification, a scheme first instituted in New Zealand in 1999[2] to assist emergency services in identifying and locating rural properties.

An example address of 1536 Longley Road can easily be found by dividing by 100. This tells anyone looking for the property, that it is 15.36 km from the start of Longley Road. An emergency crew can set the vehicle trip meter at the beginning of the road and know they do not need to waste time checking for letterbox numbers until the trip meter gets close to the rapid number they are looking for.

Any rural property can have a number, and some have multiple numbers for different entrance ways off the road. This helps when a visitor needs to access stockyards or other parts of a rural property.

Example: house numbers along Mountain Road are determined based on the distance from the start of the road (node 310500686)


As of mid 2014, all Norwegian official addresses has been released to the public for free. The data is of very high quality. There are updates released regularly. We use a tool (no) to keep track of progress and merging changes. All of them have been imported as nodes with addr:housenumber=*, addr:street=*, addr:postcode=* and addr:city=*. We follow the Danish pattern and do not merge the tags to building outlines. There is no need for interpolations, so we remove them as we go along. We also prefer to keep the data in the nodes alone, so associatedStreet relations are also unwanted and deleted as we go along. This is to ease later updates and have a very consistent dataset.


Modified Karlsruhe Schema with AddrN additions is widely used and supported by most software. [4]

Instead of full address set for each object the addressing scheme is divided into two (actually three) levels as "objects" and "places".

1. Places are polygons with name and addr:country; optionally addr:region, addr:district and addr:subdistrict
2. Objects are any addressed entities like buildings, POIs etc.
Only addr:street and addr:housenumber are required, the rest (country, region) is inherited from surrounding place polygon.
3. If POI is placed inside building polygon then it inherits address from the building.

Maps and quality assurance tools

There are visualisations of address and building information available as a view within Geofabrik's OSM Inspector. These visualisations track building tags, and shows if any address/name data is present. OSM Inspector also provides checks on address interpolation ways. Coloured Streets is a JOSM mappaint style which is specialized on address data.

See also

External links