We publish our data source and licence terms here so you can verify them before you build. If your compliance team needs more detail, contact support.
Data & Licensing
StableWhere SnapAddress data comes from — Royal Mail PAF, our Solutions Provider Licence, and what proper licensing means for your integration.
Where the data comes from
Every SnapAddress lookup is served from Royal Mail PAF (the Postcode Address File) — the definitive database of UK postal addresses, maintained by Royal Mail and used by postal workers to deliver mail. PAF contains over 30 million UK delivery points at sub-premise level, which is why a lookup returns "Flat 3, 14 Acacia Road" rather than just the building.
We refresh our copy of PAF monthly, in line with Royal Mail's release cycle. New postcodes appear shortly after Royal Mail activates them; terminated postcodes are removed. A syntactically valid postcode that returns a 404 usually falls into one of those two windows — see Rate Limits & Errors for details.
Our licence
SnapAddress operates under a Royal Mail Solutions Provider Licence — the licence that permits building and selling address lookup services on PAF data.
getAddress.io was forced offline in February 2026, following an October 2025 High Court ruling that it had operated on PAF data without a valid licence, leaving every integration built on it returning errors. The licensing status of your address provider is the difference between a dependency and a liability. If you were affected, the getAddress.io migration guide will get you running again in minutes.
Note
What the licence means for you
Two licence conditions are visible in how the product works:
Credits are valid for 12 months. Each credit pack is valid for 12 months from purchase, after which unused credits expire. This is a Royal Mail PAF licensing requirement that every licensed provider works under — a provider offering "never-expiring" PAF credits is either unlicensed or misdescribing its product. Credits are spent oldest-first (soonest-to-expire pack first), and topping up does not extend the validity of credits you already hold. Free trial credits are valid for 3 months. See Rate Limits & Errors for how spending works.
No bulk extraction. The licence permits lookups, not dataset redistribution. You can store the addresses your users select, but you may not scrape or systematically enumerate addresses to reconstruct or resell the PAF dataset. The terms of service cover this in full.
What's in the data — and what isn't
| Included | Not included |
|---|---|
| Every UK delivery point, down to flat and sub-premise level | Latitude / longitude — PAF has no geo component |
| England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland | International addresses — SnapAddress is UK-only |
| Organisation names at business addresses | Resident or occupant names |
| UDPRN — Royal Mail's stable identifier for each delivery point |
The UDPRN (Unique Delivery Point Reference Number) is worth knowing about: it is Royal Mail's permanent identifier for a delivery point, stable across PAF updates. Store it alongside addresses for deduplication, or fetch a single address later via GET /v1/addresses/{udprn}.
For the full field-by-field breakdown of what a lookup returns, see the Response Format.
See also
- Getting Started — make your first lookup in under five minutes
- Rate Limits & Errors — credit usage, expiry, and status codes
- Migrating from getAddress.io — drop-in compatible endpoints