Ensure your mail is correctly addressed with our UK clear addressing guidelines
Updated 24 Feb 2021
The more correctly formatted your address is, the faster and more reliably your mail or package will be delivered to that premise.
In the UK, there are a number of specific addressing elements that constitute a well formed address.
A full address should include a premise identifier, street details, post town and the postcode. The most essential part of the address is the postcode as it carries the most information.
Royal Mail recommend the premise, street and locality information occupy up to three lines while the post town and postcode make up the last two.
Information | Example | Notes |
---|---|---|
Addressee's name | Mr. Phillips Gaillard |
Only required if applicable |
Number, name and street name | Gunnersbury House , 1 Chapel Hill |
This identifies the specific premise. This element along with the company name can be split across 3 lines. A company name can also form part of the premise identifier. |
Locality | London |
Locality elements other than the post town are less critical. But occasionally an address can have additional locality elements attached to it. |
Post town | London |
A required part of all postal addresses in the UK. Should be uppercased and new line |
Postcode | A11 B12 |
Should be correctly formatted and occupy the last line on its own |
To be a valid premise at least one of the 4 premise elements must be present
So Barclays Bank Plc
, Flat 1
, 10
, Suite 5, 11
are all valid premise identifiers.
Adding unnecessary address details can do more harm than good. Unnecessary address fields create more information to sift through, creating a larger surface area for mistakes to appear and occasionally can be misleading.
Here are a list of suggestions on how your address should be presented to help speed things up and ensure accurate delivery
Royal Mail have specific recommendations on how an address should be printed. The general principle behind this, is to make it more readable for humans and machines. The guidelines for this are:
If you require assistance on completing a UK address, you can input part of the address details into our Address Finder demo. Select the relevant suggestion and the full address will appear.
To programmatically organise your address data into a standardised format recognised by Royal Mail, you can use our UK Clear Addressing Library. This project produces 3 address lines and premise attributes based on building_name
, sub_building_name
and building_number
.