How an address is written in France

The postal format table for France — the order the lines go in, the parts its operator requires, what it calls them, and the words it prints on a box — and, separately, what this server actually holds for France, so the page never implies a check it cannot run.

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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.

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The order the lines go in

The parts are named rather than filled in: Spaw does not know an address in France and will not invent one. This block is produced by the same function that rewrites a real address, so the line order, the capitals France 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
Postal code TOWN OR CITY

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	Town or city	required	yes
postalCode	Postal code	required	—

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

The postal code

A France postal code is two digits, then three more.

pattern \d{2} ?\d{3}

A national directory is installed for France, so a postal code here is not only checked for shape but looked up: 20,418 codes from geonames-postal-codes, version 2026-09-17, of which 20,418 are live and 0 have been retired. A retired code is usually a real address with an out-of-date code rather than a typo, so it is scored rather than refused.

What France calls an address that is not a front door

The words below are France's own, taken from its postal operator's addressing guide, and they are the words the checker reads. Because they are carried, an address here with none of them answers street.

address_type	written as
private_mailbox Private mailbox at a mail-receiving agency	PMB
po_box Post-office box	BOITE POSTALE; BP (only at the start of a line, with a number)
general_delivery Held at the counter for collection	POSTE RESTANTE
bulk_mail Business-volume arrangement	CEDEX, AUTORISATION; CS, TSA (only at the start of a line, with a number)

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.

What can be checked for a France address

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. An address can be perfectly formed and still not exist, and where no register is installed nothing here will pretend to know which.

check	for FR	what the answer means
Written form	yes	The address is split into France'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 France. A value that does not match answers invalid_postal_code.
postal code exists	yes	20,418 codes from geonames-postal-codes, live and terminated ones apart, so a retired code reads as retired rather than as a typo.
Kind of delivery point	yes	France's own box naming is carried, 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	25,519,974 addresses from fr-base-adresse-nationale. It covers part of the country, so a match answers exists: true and a miss still answers null.
Companies at the address	no	No open company register is installed for France, so companies_registered answers null and no mail-drop conclusion is drawn from a count.
Known mailbox branch	no	No operator branch list covers France, 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. How to read an address-existence answer sets out what a premise, street or postcode match proves, and what absence proves.

Other countries

address-formats 2026-09-05 · address-rules 2026-09-17 · fr-base-adresse-nationale 2026-09-12 · geonames-postal-codes 2026-09-17 · checked 2026-09-18

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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