Address verification fixes: postcodes no directory lists, ZIP+4, company counts without the dissolved, and a parser that finds the town

A postcode the directory never lists is not evaluated, not refused. Great Britain's directory leaves out Northern Ireland's BT postcodes, because reusing them needs a Land & Property Services licence, and the release carries no British Forces Post Office numbers, no BF1 codes and no non-geographic BX codes. The directory is complete, so until today every one of those answered valid: false with postcode_not_found. They now answer postcode_status: null: valid, with no town or county comparison, no centroid, confirmation.postal_code: "pattern", and no register match, because Ordnance Survey's Open Names covers Great Britain only as well. 1 High Street, Belfast, BT1 5GS is a valid street address with a risk score of 0, and an organisation above a BX code needs no street at all: HM Revenue and Customs, BX9 1AS is valid with the organisation separated. Boxes get the same treatment from the other side. A directory built from places — GeoNames, and every directory a register builds — does not list Postfach PLZs or APO ZIPs, so Postfach 10 01 01, 50441 Köln and PSC 1234 Box 5678, APO AE 09204 are no longer refused by one. The British directory, which does list box and large-user codes, and the French copy, which carries La Poste's business codes, still refuse a box code they lack.

A ZIP+4 is matched on its ZIP everywhere. The United States directory is complete, and it used to be asked for all nine digits, so 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351 answered postcode_not_found. The directory now looks a ZIP+4 up by its ZIP, and so do the building registers, the Census Bureau's number ranges, the company counts, the mail-drop lists and the registered-agent list, on both sides of every match: a filing or a branch published with a ZIP+4 is found by an address written with the plain ZIP, and the reverse. postal_code_formatted keeps all nine digits, and premise_key is the same for either spelling. It matters most in Connecticut, whose business file writes a ZIP+4 on 150,652 of its 439,769 filings, 34 percent; 43 Anvil Drive in Avon now reads the same company count written as 06001 or as 06001-3218. The street listings follow: GET /v1/address/streets and the open half of GET /v1/address/postcode answer a ZIP+4 with every street in its ZIP and label the streets with the ZIP rather than the nine digits, every spelling of one ZIP is one charge for the week, and a test address written 99999-0001 is still a test address.

companies_registered counts only companies that still exist. Every register was audited against its own file:

• Colorado's file lists every entity the state has ever registered. Of its 3,105,488 rows, 2,219,686 belong to entities that still exist — in good standing, behind on a periodic report (which the Secretary of State says does not mean a business has stopped operating), of a type that files no report, or whose agent has resigned — and the other 885,802, among them the dissolved, withdrawn, revoked, merged and converted, are no longer counted. 1500 North Grant Street in Denver read 136,102 companies in the 22 September compile and reads 122,145.
• New York's file held one row per address per document filed, so a company was counted once per filing, under agents it had since replaced, and after it dissolved: its 869,311 registered-agent rows with a street belonged to 542,338 entities. The register now reads the Department of State's active-corporations file, 4,284,739 active entities on 23 September, each counted once, 873,062 of them with a registered agent's street. 28 Liberty Street reads 53,904 rather than 89,029, and 111 Eighth Avenue, where agents that have since moved once filed, 128 rather than 81,625.
• Oregon's file lists active registrations only, but 1,819 of them named their agent more than once, spelled two ways at one address; each now counts once.
• France already counted active establishments only. The 2,429,502 active ones whose owner has opposed publication read "[ND]" in every address cell, and they were filed under placeholder keys no real address matches; they are now left out altogether, so no count at a real French address moves — 60 rue François Ier in Paris still reads 31,270.
• Connecticut and Hawaii (active entities only), Norway (a deleted entity leaves the file) and Companies House (a copy of the live register, with no dissolved company in it; a company in liquidation or under a strike-off notice still holds its registered office and still counts) were checked and are unchanged.
• An agent who writes a building name, a suite or "C/O" on the first line and the street on the second is now read at the street, when only the second line carries a house number: 15,065 New York rows, 6,261 Colorado and 4,995 Oregon. 99 Washington Avenue in Albany, which many filings write as "One Commerce Plaza", now reads 4,794.

Across the eight registers the local compile went from 23,946,643 company records over 9,652,828 addresses on 22 September to 20,812,823 over 9,478,132 today.

The parser finds the town, the organisation and the county.

• A lone line before the state and ZIP, or before the postcode, is the town: Springfield, IL 62701, Southampton, SO14 2AQ and Paris, 75001 answer missing_street, as 75001 Paris already did, where they used to take the town for the street and pass. A line that carries a number, a road or building word, a unit or a box stays the street (Rose Cottage, SO14 2AQ is still a street address), and nothing changes in a country whose format has no town line, such as Singapore.
• Where the line's shape leaves it open, the installed data decides: a place the postcode directory lists for the code or around it makes the line the town, and a street a register's listing files there makes it the street. Strand, WC2R 0RL is a valid street address confirmed by Open Names, and so are Piccadilly, Whitehall and Deansgate written the same way, while Mountain View, CA 94043, whose name ends in a street type, answers missing_street with Mountain View as the town, as Beverly Hills and Oak Park do. Where the data says both or neither, the shape still decides. Nothing new is reported in changes: the line was read, not moved.
• A floor is the unit, not the street: 5th Floor, 167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5PF reads 167-169 Great Portland Street with unit 5th Floor, and so does the floor written after the street or between the number and the street. Ground Floor Flat, 3rd Floor North, Level 3 and The Basement are units too, every unit an address carries is kept in the order written (5th Floor, Suite 500), and a building named with its number above a numbered street is the building: Tower 42, 25 Old Broad Street reads 25 Old Broad Street. In today's local compile the Companies House snapshot places 29,852 companies at 167-169 Great Portland Street and 27,998 at 86-90 Paul Street, and each of those spellings finds the same count. Across the whole snapshot no filing is keyed to a street that is only a floor any more, and 688 are keyed to a street with the word floor somewhere in it.
• An organisation line needs evidence — a word such as Ltd, PLC, Bank or HM, or an acronym above a town written in mixed case — so HMRC, BX9 1AS is valid with organization HMRC while asdf, BX1 1AA answers missing_street. DVLA, Swansea, SA99 1AR separates the organisation too, and still answers missing_street: only a BX code stands in for the street.
• A numbered box written after the street on the same line is the delivery point: 123 Main St P.O. Box 5, Springfield, IL 62701 answers po_box: "PO BOX 5", no street and box_line_moved, as PO Box 5 alone does.
• An Irish Co. Mayo or Co. Kerry line after the town is the county, and the town stays the town: Main Street, Castlebar, Co. Mayo reads Castlebar in Co. Mayo.
• Where a country writes the area after the town — Mexico, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Argentina, Chile and others — a line after the postcode's line is the area: Avenida Madero 1, Centro, 06000 Ciudad de México, CDMX reads Ciudad de México and CDMX, and İstiklal Caddesi 1, 34433 Beyoğlu, İstanbul reads Beyoğlu and İstanbul.
• A / splits a line only where the postcode leads the town and never after a bare number, so CS 70001 / 01001 Bourg-en-Bresse CEDEX is a box above its town while 3 / 1234 Pacific Highway, Pymble NSW 2073 keeps its unit and number.
• A care-of line that carries the street keeps it: C/O 39 Castle Street, Leicester LE1 5WN reads 39 Castle Street, where it used to read Leicester as the street.
• Unit words match whole words only, so Stevenage, Flagstaff, Levelland and Unity are towns again rather than an STE, FL, LEVEL or UNIT unit.

The parser corpus now holds 212 written addresses, 18 of them known limits with today's answer and a note.

Real streets are not placeholders. The shapes that mark a placeholder — no vowel, one letter repeated, a keyboard run — are now judged on the street without its type, never on the folded key that turned MG Road into MGRD and Bridge Street into BRST, which made the shape rules flag 1,013 of about 380,000 street names in Ordnance Survey's Open Names, and MLK Blvd besides. W counts as a vowel in Welsh (Bwlch, Cwmffrwd), R and L in Czech and Slovak (Tvrz). A part a dataset has confirmed is never judged at all: the comune of None under 10060, Jbphh for Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, CDMX for Mexico City. Measured over about 925,000 street names from the installed registers, 10 still flag.

Regions written the way people write them. Mexico's 32 states answer to their INEGI number, ISO code, abbreviation or name — CDMX, CMX, DF and Distrito Federal all mean Mexico City — and Ireland's provinces to their name, letter or Irish name, where any spelling but the directory's own used to score region_mismatch; Indian states answer to their ISO codes old and new, and a Spanish province with two official names to either. An Eircode routing key is filed under its province, so a county inside that province answers administrative_area_matches_postcode: null rather than a mismatch, a Dublin district key (D01–D24, D6W) confirms County Dublin (Dublin 2, Co. Dublin, D02 X285 matches), and a county in another province is still refused. Mexico City is a single city, so Ciudad de México written as the town of a Mexico City postcode is accepted, while any other state's name is still a wrong town.

The town check knows the municipality. GeoNames lists a colonia, a post office or a street under many postcodes instead of the town. For eighteen countries whose file carries it, the directory now also lists the municipality or city from the dump's own administrative columns: Guadalajara 44100, Mumbai 400001, Makati 1200, Sapporo 060-0001, Chiyoda-ku 100-0005 and București 030031 match their postcodes. Bulgarian cells holding a Cyrillic and a Latin name are split (Plovdiv 4000, Sofia 1000), as are Spanish ones holding two official names; every Singapore code lists Singapore; and Metro Manila's capital district lists Manila. Measured on the 9,903 towns of 15,000 people or more in those countries, the postcode nearest each town now names it 55.6 percent of the time, up from 32.8. The cost is leniency: a code 15 to 40 km away now names the town 10.7 percent of the time, up from 1.2, so a wrong town nearby is accepted more often than before.

CEDEX, box lines and Canada Post's stations. A CEDEX after the town is business-mail routing: 10 rue de Rivoli, 75384 Paris CEDEX 08 keeps its street and answers address_type: bulk_mail with po_box null, where it used to be read as a box and lose the street; a CS or TSA line is still the box. A street line that opens with a box written the short way — GD, P O Box, Apdo — becomes the box under the operator's name (GENERAL DELIVERY, PO BOX, APARTADO) and no longer stays the street as well, and a box on its own line beside a street keeps both and is written once in formatted, under the street, never again as a district. Canada Post's station stays on the box: GD STN A Calgary AB T2P 2M2 reads GENERAL DELIVERY STN A in Calgary, and PO Box 45 Stn LCD 1, Toronto ON M5W 1A1 keeps STN LCD 1 whole.

The sandbox takes an empty optional field. The published sandbox key answered 403 SANDBOX_VALUE_NOT_ALLOWED to the test order the Shopify page prints, because the empty address_line2 a checkout sends reaches the API as null. An empty or null optional field now counts as absent; a value of any other type is still refused, and an empty field never makes an address that is not a test address answerable.

Two data pages, and fuller district pages. Address data sources lists every address register and postcode directory installed — publisher, licence, declared coverage and what partial means there, the levels it answers at, its size and version, how often it is refreshed — with the company registers and mailbox operators counted but not named, and a Markdown twin. Great Britain postcodes in numbers counts the live and terminated postcodes in the ONS directory, with the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man counted apart, the codes introduced and terminated in each of the last 24 complete months, and a row per postcode area. Each British district page now also lists its postcode sectors, the twelve nearest districts, every road Open Names files under it (named roads first, then numbered ones) and how many companies Companies House lists with a registered office there, with, from a hundred up, how many sit at addresses 25 or more companies share: WC2H has 91,283, of which 89,741. A page headlines the place Open Names most often lists first rather than the region, and the 26 Channel Islands and Isle of Man districts have pages of their own, apart from every Great Britain figure.

Measured on real business addresses. The address product page now publishes a recall table: every Sunday a seeded sample of up to 2,000 addresses from each installed company register goes through the ordinary lookup, uncharged and unlogged, and the page prints how far each got — the building, the street, the postcode only, nowhere, no register to ask, or refused as written. In the local run of 23 September 2026, 1,441 of 2,000 Companies House filings matched a street. It measures the matcher on addresses other people wrote, skewed urban and towards formation agents, and it is not coverage.

Street listings read the register that files the postcode. Belgium's three regional registers share its postcodes, and the streets and postcode endpoints used to ask only the first, Flanders, so every Brussels and Walloon postcode listed nothing: the streets endpoint answered 404 and the postcode endpoint an empty list. They now try each register in turn and name the one that answered: 1000 Brussels lists 1,394 streets and 4000 Liège 857, and 1,143 Belgian postcodes can be listed, up from 517.

Known limits. Where neither the directory nor a street listing settles a lone line, its shape still decides: London Wall, EC2M 5QD is read as the town and answers missing_street, because Open Names files London Wall under EC2Y, and Canary Wharf, E14 5AB still passes as a street called Canary Wharf. And only a BX code stands in for a street; other large-user codes do not.