How an address is written in Australia

An address in Australia is written in this order: house number and street name, then suburb, state and postal code (four digits) on one line, with the suburb and the state in capitals. The strongest check here is a building-level one: Geoscape Australia's G-NAF lists 11,692,513 addresses in Australia (version August 2026), which its publisher declares complete.

The order the lines go in

The parts are named rather than filled in: Spaw does not know an address in Australia and will not invent one. This block is produced by the same function that rewrites a real address, so the line order, the capitals Australia asks for and any text its operator prints on every envelope are the checker's own behaviour rather than a second description of it.

Organisation
12 Street name
Flat or unit
SUBURB STATE Postal code

No recipient line: nothing in the response is about a person, so the name the envelope carries is not part of what is checked.

field	called here	required	capitals
organization	Organisation	optional	—
addressLine1	Street name	required	—
addressLine2	Flat or unit	optional	—
locality	Suburb	required	yes
administrativeArea	State	required	yes
postalCode	Postal code	required	—

No house-number rule is carried for Australia, so the international default is used: the house number comes before the street name. The postal code is written after the town.

Can Spaw tell whether an address in Australia exists?

Yes. Geoscape Australia's G-NAF lists 11,692,513 addresses in Australia (version August 2026). It is declared a complete address register, so an address it holds answers exists: true and one it does not answers exists: false. A false has two honest failure cases: a building added after the version in use, and an address spelled so differently from the register that no variant of its street matches. That is why a miss is scored rather than refused.

A postcode directory answers a different question. The postal code is confirmed separately by GeoNames' postal code list, which does not list every code, so one it does not hold is not flagged.

register	covers	lists	coverage	version
Geoscape Australia's G-NAF au-gnaf	Australia	11,692,513 addresses	complete	2026-08

Further reading: How to read an address-existence answer and How an open register locates a building.

Check an address in Australia

The same lookup the API runs, with Australia already selected.

Live demo

POST /demo/address · no key needed

try:

Response

Look up any address to see the full API response, straight from the live service. The country decides which format it is read against.

Every field in the response Get your API key

The postal code

Postal codes in Australia are four digits.

pattern \d{4}

A postcode list from a multi-country source is installed for Australia, so a postal code here is not only checked for shape but looked up: 3,170 postal codes from GeoNames' postal code list, version 2026-10-31. It lists current codes only, so a retired code is not told apart from one it does not hold.

What Australia calls an address that is not a front door

A PO box, a private mailbox and the other kinds of delivery point below are told apart by the words written on the address, never by a list of whose box is whose. The rows marked as the operator's own words are taken from the addressing guide of the postal operator in Australia; the others are international spellings, not the operator's own. All of them are what the checker reads, and because an entry is carried for Australia, an address here with none of them answers street.

address_type	written as
private_mailbox Private mailbox at a mail-receiving agency	PMBinternational spellings the checker also reads
po_box Post-office box	PO BOX, P O BOX, GPO BOX, LOCKED BAG, PRIVATE BAGthe operator's own words
general_delivery Held at the counter for collection	CARE PO, POSTE RESTANTEthe operator's own words
parcel_locker Parcel locker	PARCEL LOCKER, PCL LKR, PARCEL COLLECT, PCL COLthe operator's own words
rural_route Rural route	MS, RMB, RSD, RMS, CMB, CMA, CPA (only at the start of a line, with a number)the operator's own words

The anchored spellings are the conservative half of this: those words are ordinary language elsewhere in an address, so they only count when they open the line and carry a number after them.

The state codes

9 codes, which is what lets a written address be split at all — and the state written out in full is folded onto its code, so the two spellings are read as the same place.

ACT Australian Capital Territory
JBT Jervis Bay Territory
NSW New South Wales
NT Northern Territory
QLD Queensland
SA South Australia
TAS Tasmania
VIC Victoria
WA Western Australia

What can be checked for an address in Australia

Read from the datasets this server holds right now, not written into the page. For most countries the answer is the written form and the postcode shape and nothing beyond them — in particular not the row people assume is always there.

check	for AU	what the answer means
Written form	yes	The address is split into the country's own parts and rewritten in the order above. A missing required part is named in one typed reason rather than a general failure.
postal code pattern	yes	Checked against the pattern the table carries for Australia. A value that does not match answers invalid_postal_code.
postal code exists	yes	3,170 postal codes from GeoNames' postal code list. It lists current codes only, so a retired code is not told apart from one it does not hold.
Kind of delivery point	yes	The operator's own box words are carried for Australia, so an address with no marker answers street rather than unknown.
Street exists	yes	The address register carries every street its buildings stand on, so match_level answers street when the street is known and the building is not.
Building exists	yes	11,692,513 addresses in Australia from Geoscape Australia's G-NAF, declared complete by its publisher, so a miss can answer exists: false.
Companies at the address	no	No open company register is installed for Australia, so companies_registered answers null and no mail-drop conclusion is drawn from a count.
Known mailbox branch	no	No operator branch list covers Australia, so is_mail_drop is never set from one here.
Post actually arrives	no	Not from this page, and not from open data in any country: whether post is delivered, and the vacant, residential and agency flags that go with it, are the postal service's own licensed product. Those fields answer deliverability_checked: false rather than a guess.

Null means not evaluated, never no.

Other countries

Sources

Google's Address Data Service · address-formats 2026-09-05© Google LLC, CC BY 4.0 (Google Address Data Service); initial import via commerceguys/addressing (MIT)
The postal operators' addressing guides · address-rules 2026-09-17
Geoscape Australia's G-NAF · au-gnaf 2026-08Incorporates or developed using G-NAF © Geoscape Australia, licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under the Open Geo-coded National Address File (G-NAF) End User Licence Agreement (CC BY 4.0; not for mailing lists)
GeoNames' postal code list · geonames-postal-codes 2026-10-31Postal codes, places and centroids from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.

Data synced on 2026-10-31: the newest version among the datasets listed above.

Wrong result, or is it about you? If this tool said something you think is wrong, tell us and a person reads it. If Spaw is holding data about you and you never signed up here — a customer may have had your address verified, or reported that a message to it bounced — erase it yourself, confirmed by mail to that address and with no account needed.

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