Thailand Address Standard

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Overview

A Thai address does not follow the street-and-city pattern that most European and North American address models assume. It is a four-level administrative nest, written smallest-first, in which the street is optional and the village number is not a street at all.

This article describes the Thai address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, and which reference data CDQ maintains so that a Thai address can be validated rather than merely stored. It is the reference for anyone mapping Thai business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Thai addresses from CDQ.

In this article, you will understand:

• How a Thai address is structured, and why the structure differs from the European pattern
• How each Thai administrative level maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
• Which reference data CDQ holds for Thailand, and what the published values look like
• Which properties of Thai addresses regularly cause integration errors
• Where the current CDQ coverage for Thailand still has gaps

Available in:

• CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for Thailand: browse the complete published Thai metadata, including every province, district, alternative name and address term

What makes a Thai address different

Thai addresses are not a street-and-city model with local spelling. They are a four-level administrative nest, written smallest-first, in which the street is optional and the village number is not a street at all. That is the specific reason a positional mapping (first line to street, remaining lines to address supplements) produces a mangled result.

The decisive structural difference is that Thailand has no separate settlement level. In a European address, a city such as Munich sits inside an administrative region and is a distinct concept from it. Thailand has no equivalent: from the province downwards, every level is simultaneously an administrative subdivision and the address itself. There is no "city" that is separate from the district it sits in.

The four levels

Written smallest-first, as they appear on a Thai envelope:

A complete address adds the house number, an optional street, and the post code:

186/1 Moo 1, Old Railway Road
Samrong Tai, Phra Pradaeng
Samut Prakan 10130

Reading that from the bottom up: province Samut Prakan, district Phra Pradaeng, subdistrict Samrong Tai, village number 1, house 186/1 on Old Railway Road.

Bangkok uses different words for the same levels

Bangkok (กรุงเทพมหานคร) is administratively distinct from the 76 provinces, and its two middle levels carry different names:

The levels are the same; only the words differ.

Bangkok is also written several ways in Thai. The official form is กรุงเทพมหานคร; the short forms กรุงเทพ and กรุงเทพฯ are both in common use, including in official filings. All three resolve to Bangkok in the CDQ reference data.

Properties that regularly cause integration errors

These are the characteristics that most often break a mapping built on European assumptions.

Many addresses have no street. Outside urban areas a complete, deliverable Thai address is house number, Moo, tambon, amphoe, changwat, post code. No street is involved. Logic that requires a street, or that promotes some other value into the street field to avoid leaving it empty, will corrupt these addresses.

House numbers are compound. 186/1 means plot 186, sub-plot 1. It is a single value, not a range and not two fields. Splitting it on the slash destroys the meaning.

ถนน (Thanon) is a road; ซอย (Soi) is a numbered lane off a road. In a name such as Soi Sukhumvit 21, the number 21 belongs to the lane name, not to the building. A house-number parser must therefore only accept a number at the start of a line.

The district seat usually carries the district's own name. Tambon Hat Yai sits inside Amphoe Hat Yai. A name on its own cannot tell you which level it belongs to; only the marker word (ตำบล versus อำเภอ) can. Logic that assigns a level by matching a name against a district list will systematically mis-file district seats.

Romanisation is not standardised. สำโรงใต้ appears as Samrong Tai, Samrongtai and Samrong-tai, and all three occur in real filings. Matching a Thai place name by exact string comparison misses most real-world spellings.

How CDQ models a Thai address

The CDQ address model has two parallel hierarchies. Administrative areas represent the political containers and support two levels, typed REGION and COUNTY. Localities represent the places themselves and support up to ten levels, typed CITY, DISTRICT, QUARTER or BLOCK. Streets are held as thoroughfares, with the house number in a separate field.

Thailand's four levels are placed as follows:

Why the levels are placed this way

Four properties drove the placement:

• The two administrative levels stay together, and the two place levels stay together. Splitting one national hierarchy across both CDQ hierarchies produces a structure that is hard to reason about and harder to query.
• Each of the four levels reaches its own distinct SAP field. Nothing collapses onto a shared output field, so no level is lost on export.
• No value is stored twice. The district appears once, as an administrative area.
• No new concept type is required. The model works with the types the CDQ address model already defines.

Two alternatives were considered and rejected:

Worked example

The address used above, expressed in the CDQ address model:

Reference data CDQ maintains for Thailand

Validating a Thai address requires knowing which provinces, districts and marker words exist. CDQ maintains that reference data centrally, so the same lists back address curation and the published metadata.

Provinces

78 entries: the 76 changwat, Bangkok, and the special administrative city of Pattaya. Each carries a code, names in Thai and Latin script, and the alternative spellings CDQ will also match.

Districts

928 entries, one per amphoe and per Bangkok khet, each linked to its province. Note that the alternative names carry the level marker, so a value arriving as อำเภอพระประแดง or Khet Phra Nakhon is matched as readily as the bare name.

Address terms

The marker words that identify a level from the address text rather than from its position. Each term is typed to the CDQ concept it identifies, and the Thai abbreviations are recognised alongside the full forms.

Spelling variants

Romanised Thai is not standardised, so CDQ publishes the common spelling variants as alternative names on the province and district records. A value matches whether it arrives spaced, joined or hyphenated, with or without its level marker.

District codes follow the official Thai administrative numbering maintained by the Department of Provincial Administration. The codes are hierarchical and fixed-width: two digits for a province, four for a district, six for a subdistrict, with each level prefixed by its parent. TH-1104 is therefore province 11, district 04, which makes the parent-child relationship readable from the code itself.

The CDQ Wiki page business partner metadata for Thailand is the place to browse everything published for Thailand: the provinces with their names and alternative names, the districts, legal forms, identifier types, data quality rules and the integrated data sources.

Current limitations

The Thai coverage described above is deliberately incomplete in places. These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.

Summary

A Thai address is a four-level administrative nest with an optional street, written smallest-first, and with no separate settlement level. CDQ models it by placing the province and district in the two administrative area levels and the subdistrict and village in the first two locality levels, so that each of the four levels reaches its own distinct output field.

Provinces, districts and the Thai address vocabulary are maintained as CDQ reference data, and the complete published lists can be browsed on the CDQ Wiki. Subdistrict and village validation, and post code consistency checking, are not yet covered.

Related Resources

• Business partner metadata for Thailand
• Thailand Department of Business Development Company Register (TH.CR)
• India Address Standard
• Japan Address Standard
• Korea Address Standard

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