PLACES & NETWORKS
OS Places APIOur secure, scalable, and resilient address look-up web service, OS Places API lets you search the UK's most comprehensive online address database. |
With OS Places API, managing customer data is a breeze. Lightning-quick postcode and address search means your records are accurate and customer deliveries should always get to the right front door. |
For customer data managers, the address matching and cleansing tools in OS Places API let you build trust in your information. They make it simple to correct errors from misheard phone calls, for example, so you get fewer duplicate records. |
When an incident happens, control room staff need to know which properties are closest. OS Places’ geosearch tool gives instant answers. This helps create the common operating picture that’s vital for the emergency services. |
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Capture and Verification
Improve efficiency – use OS Places to verify the data you’re capturing against Ordnance Survey’s core AddressBase® Premium dataset.
Edit out-of-date (or partial) details of residential and commercial properties in your own databases and make it personal: add shareable URPNs to existing features, such as post-boxes or warehouses.
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Matching & CleansingWith OS Places, you’ll have instant, reliable search results to make deduping and cleansing address data easier for your business.
Improve efficiency, guarantee accuracy and reduce costs throughout. Use postcodes and UPRNs or text strings to identify and match your targets – get information about residential and commercial properties quickly and easily.
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Geosearch
Make sure OS Places 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 radius search area, and use the API to pull up all known address data within that location |
Plan Options
Free trial |
Premium |
Existing Data Licensees & Partner |
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It's free to evaluate OS APIs for your internal business use or to develop products and services prior to commercialisation.
Register to start a free trial |
Get started using OS APIs straight away without needing to hold an existing OS data licence. Premium Service plans are for 12 months, paid in advance.
Contact us to activate Premium plans |
Our Partners and Public Sector Mapping Agreement members with a GB licence for OS Data should select these OS API plans. Service plans are for 12 months, paid in advance.
Contact us to activate these plans |
Service Plans
Trial |
Premium |
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2,000 Transactions |
100,000 Transactions |
500,000 Transactions |
1,000,000 Transactions |
5,000,000 Transactions |
10,000,000 Transactions |
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Free - two months |
£7,250 |
£34,150 |
£67,300 |
£211,000 |
£225,000 |
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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 UsePremium plans are designed for internal business use only.Creating products or servicesChoose our plans for existing data licensees to use our APIs in your own products and services, or to distribute it.Public Sector Mapping AgreementsMembers of Public Sector Mapping Agreements should use our plans for existing data licensees. |
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Trial |
Existing GB Data Licensees |
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2,000 Transactions |
100,000 Transactions |
500,000 Transactions |
1,000,000 Transactions |
5,000,000 Transactions |
10,000,000 Transactions |
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Free - two months |
£1,100 |
£3,400 |
£5,900 |
£22,000 |
£36,000 |
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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.
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Internal business use
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Trial |
Partner |
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2,000 Transactions |
Data Exploration |
Reseller |
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Free - 2 Months |
Contact us |
Contact us |
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2,000 transactions / 2 months |
100,000 transactions / month |
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. |
Our Partners can use this service plan for 3 months to demonstrate, test and develop products being created for use by a third party.Partners will migrate to the Reseller plan when ready for commercialistion, or require development and testing beyond 3 months. |
A 12-month plan, paid quartely 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. |
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 |
Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands |
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 10,000 transactions (combined, across all three features).
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 three essential, time and money-saving pieces of functionality:
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Geosearch – enabling finds of addresses or reverse geocoding via radius search, or by drawing a boundary box.
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Matching & Cleansing – integrating with existing systems to enable faster, more accurate postcode look-ups and autocompletion on websites and Enterprise customer service systems.
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Capture & Verification – checking address data, quickly and reliably, to enable deduping of entries in already populated databases and provide verified uniformity.
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.
AddressBase itself contains local authority, Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail addresses, current and alternative addresses, provisional addresses (still in the planning stage) and historic information too, where it’s available. It also includes Objects Without Postal Addresses (OWPAs) and cross references to the OS MasterMap TOIDs, as well as:
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Up to date cross references to our large-scale data, such as OS MasterMap Topography Layer and Integrated Transport Network Layer 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.
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Data from the Local Land and Property Gazetteer and One Scotland Gazetteer, which includes information captured under statutory obligation through the SNN process.
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The Royal Mail’s data, providing a Postcode Address File (PAF) containing the UDPRN and the delivery point address record.
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The Valuation Office Agency, which provides cross references to council tax and non-domestic rates data.
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). However, postcode searches can be performed using only the area and district integers. For example:
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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. The ‘find’ tool enables rapid searches of AddressBase Premium to discern ambiguous addresses, whereas the ‘match’ tool is for more granular matching and cleansing of existing address databases. 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.
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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Documentation |
Support |
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Manage your API keys and monitor yourusage in My apps
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Comprehensive guides and code snippets tostart building with OS Places API |
Ask us questions and find answers inDeveloper Portal support
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