Working With UK Postcodes

Thursday, March 13. 2008

This short post provides you with a table for converting postcodes into counties. I created the table from a variety of sources for a recent project where I needed to be able to map user's postcodes to counties.

I was recently working on a project which needed to match a user with a county based on their (UK) postcode. In the end searched over Wikipedia and made extensive use of Google to come up with a small table which matches the postcode prefix with the postal town, county, and region. You can find a tab-separated file with this data here:

http://porteightyeight.com:8080/svn/code/users/adam/public/blog/trunk/postcode-table/postcodes.tsv

I hope this saves someone some time in the future. It only gives you accuracy down to the county level as the towns listed are the postal towns, which I assume are the local Royal Mail delivery hubs, and hence the user will not necessarily live there. I have included Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. However, overseas territories are not included (but you can find a list here).

Further Detail

If your application needs to map post codes to actual addresses then you will need to purchase the PAF File from the Royal Mail. Prices from this start from around the £100 mark, but for a web application you will probably be paying in the region of a few £1000.

For those of you in the US you may find US Postal Service Address Information Systems website useful.

Posted by Adam Charnock at 15:33 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: php, real world, uk

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Unfortunately there are many post codes that use the nearest county town, but are not necessarily in the same county. For example, a lot of PH postcodes are acually in Inverness-shire and not Perthshire. Is there a cleverer list out there that perhaps matches the first alpha-numeric group to county?

#1 Duncan on 2008-04-20 14:52 (Reply)

Hi Duncan,

That is a good point, but I am not aware of such a list. However, I have been toying with the idea of using something like the Google Maps API to get an address for a postcode. I have yet to properly look into this, but I will write a post on it when I do.

Thanks for reading!

#1.1 Adam Charnock (Homepage) on 2008-04-23 23:21 (Reply)

I would be very intrested in getting your tsv file that you have mentioned as I am doing a project based on them for my company in the republic of Ireland. Please mail me the details of access. Look forward to hear from you soon.

#2 Rajagopal (Homepage) on 2008-06-18 13:52 (Reply)

I would be very intrested in getting your tsv file that you have mentioned as I am doing a project based on them for my company in the republic of Ireland. Wheni followed the link it was prompting for a username and password. Please mail me the details of access. Look forward to hear from you soon.

#3 Rajagopal (Homepage) on 2008-06-18 13:53 (Reply)

Cheers Adam - Postcode prefix to Region was exactly what was giving me a headache. Many thanks indeed

#4 Andy on 2008-08-15 15:36 (Reply)

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