PLACES & NETWORKS

OS Places API

Find UK addresses instantly and be confident you're getting the most up-to-date information with our address API.

Search the UK's most comprehensive online address database with our secure, scalable, and resilient address look-up web service. Perform accurate geocoding, reverse geocoding.

Search by postcode, UPRN, full or partial address and ensure you get the right address first time. Ensure your records are accurate in order to provide effective citizen services such as look-ups on local authority provisions against an address.

When an incident happens, control room staff need to know which properties are closest. The OS Places API GeoSearch  tools give instant answers. This helps create the common operating picture that’s vital for emergency services.

Plan Options

PSGA Members

Partners

Existing Licensees (including public sector Match & Cleanse)

New Licensees (Premium)

If you are a Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) member you can access and use the OS Places API (excluding Match & Cleanse) for free via the OS DataHub. Register for an account or login at www.osdatahub.os.uk

Register or Login
at OS DataHub

Our Partners can access and use the OS Places API (Including Match & Cleanse) via the OS Data Hub with the option of a free 60 day trial. Register for an account or login at www.osdatahub.os.uk

Contact us
to activate plans

Existing GB/Corporate Address Base Premium Licensees (including public sector using Match & Cleanse) should select these plans. Service plans are for 12 months.

Contact us
to activate plans

Get started with OS APIs straight away without needing to hold an existing OS data licence. Premium Service plans are for 12 months, paid in advance and cover internal business use only.

Contact us
to activate plans

It's free to evaluate OS APIs for your internal business use or to develop products and services prior to commercialisation. Get started with a Free Trial

Pricing

Free - two months	£3,520	£15,500	£30,100	£147,000	£161,000
Trial	New Licensees (Premium)
2,000 Transactions	100,000 Transactions	500,000 Transactions	1,000,000 Transactions	5,000,000 Transactions	10,000,000 Transactions

2,000 transactions / 60 days	100,000 transactions / year	500,000 transactions / year	1,000,000 transactions / year	5,000,000 transactions / year	10,000,000 transactions / year
You can license this data free to evaluate it for your internal business use or to develop products and services prior to commercialisation.	Prices effective from 01/04/2021. Internal Business Use Premium plans are designed for internal business use only.

Free - two months	£1,100	£3,400	£5,900	£22,000	£36,000
Trial	Existing GB Data Licensees
2,000 Transactions	100,000 Transactions	500,000 Transactions	1,000,000 Transactions	5,000,000 Transactions	10,000,000 Transactions

2,000 transactions / 60 days	100,000 transactions / year	500,000 transactions / year	1,000,000 transactions / year	5,000,000 transactions / year	10,000,000 transactions / year
You can license this data free to evaluate it for your internal business use or to develop products and services prior to commercialisation.	Internal business use When using OS data in your own business, you need our Framework Contract (Direct Customers) together with a data contract.

Trial	Partners
2,000 Transactions	Reseller
Free - 2 Months	Contact us
2,000 transactions / 2 months	Unlimited / year
You can license this data free to evaluate it for your internal business use or to develop products and services prior to commercialisation.	A 12-month plan, paid quarterly in arrears with royalties and service charges combined - based on usage type. Learn more. To use this data commercially in your own products and services, you will need to sign up to our Framework Contract (Partners) and a relevant defined use contract. This will vary depending on what you’re going to do with the data.

PSGA
www.osdatahub.os.uk If you are a Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) member you can access and use the OS Places API for free via the OS DataHub. Register for an account or login at www.osdatahub.os.uk

Capture and Verification

Improve efficiency – use OS Places API to verify the data you’re capturing against Ordnance Survey’s AddressBase® Premium dataset.

Edit out-of-date or partial details of residential and commercial properties in your own databases and add unique references to your properties, via the UPRN, for enhanced data management.

With OS Places API you can add intuitive address search (geocoding) capabilities to your applications. Let a user search a full or partial address, a postcode or a UPRN and find the complete address including its location.

Geosearch

Make sure OS Places API is driving your applications, and users will have access to some of the most sophisticated online GeoSearch services.

Let them draw their own bounding boxes or define a specific search area, and use the API to pull up all known address data within that location. Alternatively, let users click on a map and discover the nearest address.

Free to trial

You may be a large business, looking for APIs to integrate with your own GIS. Perhaps you’re an independent developer who wants to create a new web or mobile app. Either way, you’re welcome to trial all three features of the OS Places API free of charge. All we ask is that you don’t go over 2,000 transactions (combined, across all three features).

Specification

Availability	99.9% uptime (See Service Levels and Maintenance as defined in our Terms of Service)
Output formats	JSON and XML (Full technical documentation)
Data update frequency	Every six weeks
Geographical coverage	Address, geometry and UPRN for GB; address only for Northern Ireland

With this API, you’ll enable users to identify addresses accurately, quickly, and with reliable high levels of detail. OS Places API has the benefit of accessing historic data in the property’s lifecycle too, which should reduce ambiguity throughout. It opens up two essential, time and money-saving pieces of functionality:

Capture & Verification – checking address data, quickly and reliably, to enable deduping of entries in already populated databases and provide verified uniformity

Geosearch – enabling finds of addresses or reverse geocoding via radius search, or by drawing a boundary box

OS Places API derives data from our AddressBase Premium dataset – Great Britain’s most detailed view of addresses and their life cycles, including everything from planning to creation to change of use and demolition. The API therefore includes:

Data from the Local Land and Property Gazetteer and One Scotland Gazetteer, which includes information captured under statutory obligation through the Street Name and Numbering process.

The Royal Mail’s data, providing a Postcode Address File (PAF) containing the UDPRN and the delivery point address record.

Up to date cross references to our large-scale data, such as OS MasterMap Topography Layer and Highways Network via the TOID – but also references to objects that don’t have postal addresses, as well as coordinates that have been verified via our surveyors.

OS Places API won’t find general areas (such as ‘forest’), or perform bulk address matches in its off-the-shelf form. However, if bulk matching could be useful to you, please let us know.

The Geosearch resources – find the nearest, find within a specific radius, and find within a bounding box – all need X and Y coordinates entered in BNG (Eastings and Northings).

Postcode searches can be performed using only the area and district integers. For example:

SO16 0AS is the full postcode of our head office in Southampton. But searches for Ordnance Survey at SO16 will return details showing that our address is on Adanac Drive.

OS Places is a RESTful API, returning queries in either XML or JSON. There’s no need for any database management of AddressBase Premium itself.

The OS Places API accesses details of addresses in Northern Ireland, but these have a few unique characteristics due to not being derived from Address Base Premium. Addresses within Northern Ireland will not have a UPRN or status, and coordinates will be ‘0.0’ due to falling outside of the British National Grid.

Documentation and resources

At the OS APIs developer hub you'll find comprehensive guides, documentation and code snippets to help you start working with OS Places API as quickly as possible.

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OS API Framework Agreement

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