How an address is written in South Africa
An address in South Africa is written in this order: house number and street name, then neighbourhood, then town or city, then postal code (four digits). The strongest check here is the postal code itself: GeoNames' postal code list (31 October 2026), with 3,266 postal codes for South Africa, current codes only.
The order the lines go in
The parts are named rather than filled in: Spaw does not know an address in South Africa and will not invent one. This block is produced by the same function that rewrites a real address, so the line order, the capitals South Africa 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 Neighbourhood Town or city 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 | — |
| dependentLocality | Neighbourhood | optional | — |
| locality | Town or city | required | — |
| postalCode | Postal code | required | — |
No house-number rule is carried for South Africa, 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 South Africa exists?
No. No address register is installed for South Africa, so exists answers null: not evaluated, never no. An address can be perfectly formed and still not exist, and nothing here will pretend to know which.
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.
Further reading: How to read an address-existence answer.
Check an address in South Africa
The same lookup the API runs, with South Africa already selected.
Live demo
POST /demo/address · no key needed
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.
The postal code
Postal codes in South Africa are four digits.
pattern \d{4}
A postcode list from a multi-country source is installed for South Africa, so a postal code here is not only checked for shape but looked up: 3,266 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 South Africa 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 South Africa; 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 South Africa, an address here with none of them answers street.
| address_type | written as |
|---|---|
| private_mailbox Private mailbox at a mail-receiving agency | POSTNET SUITEthe operator's own words |
| po_box Post-office box | PO BOX, P O BOX, PRIVATE BAGthe operator's own words |
| general_delivery Held at the counter for collection | POSTE RESTANTE, GENERAL DELIVERYinternational spellings the checker also reads |
What can be checked for an address in South Africa
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 ZA | 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 South Africa. A value that does not match answers invalid_postal_code. |
| postal code exists | yes | 3,266 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 South Africa, so an address with no marker answers street rather than unknown. |
| Street exists | no | No register is installed for South Africa, so a street is neither confirmed nor denied: match_level answers null. |
| Building exists | no | No address register is installed for South Africa, so exists answers null: not evaluated, never no. Absence is not evidence here. |
| Companies at the address | no | No open company register is installed for South Africa, so companies_registered answers null and no mail-drop conclusion is drawn from a count. |
| Known mailbox branch | no | No operator branch list covers South Africa, 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
- 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.
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