What Is the Postcode Address File (PAF®)?

The Postcode Address File or PAF is an address dataset maintained by Royal Mail. It contains all known delivery points (features a letter box and/or a business mailing inbox) and postcodes in the UK.

The Postcode Address File provides access to 1.4 million business names, 1.8 million UK postcodes and over 30 million residential and business addresses. The database is constantly maintained and verified by 90,000 postmen and women, with up to 5000 updates being made daily.

Why use PAF?

PAF can be integrated into a number of systems, including Point of Sale (PoS) terminals, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, internal and external applications. The benefits of using PAF include to:

• Improve the customer journey, making it easier and quicker to select the correct address or postcode
• Reduce costs from ensuring the correct delivery points
• Spend fewer resources on processing returns
• Galvanise your customer service, by delivering items and orders first-time

Our APIs return standard data returned by Royal Mail's Postcode Address File. View our documentation which provides a description of the addressing data available through the Ideal Postcodes API.

Get in touch to integrate Postcode Lookup, Address Autocomplete and more using the most up-to-date and accurate UK dataset.