A United States address looks simple and is not. The street line is defined by a national standard down to the abbreviation of every suffix, the delivery point is identified by a nine digit code rather than by the street address, and the second line of the address carries a suite or apartment that a naive mapping will lose.
This article describes the United States address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, how ZIP and ZIP+4 are handled, and which reference data CDQ maintains. It is the reference for anyone mapping United States business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated United States addresses from CDQ.
In this article, you will understand:
- How a United States address is structured, and what the postal standard requires of each element
- Which elements are needed to deliver mail, and which are carried for other purposes
- How each element maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
- What ZIP+4 identifies, why it is one value and not two, and how CDQ delivers it
- Which reference data CDQ maintains for the United States, and what the published values look like
- Where the current CDQ coverage for the United States is incomplete
Available in:
- CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for the United States: browse the published United States metadata
A United States address has an ordinary shape: a number, a street, a place and a post code. What is unusual is not the shape but how tightly it is specified, and what the post code is for.
| Specific to the United States | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| A published national standard prescribes the vocabulary and the line order | the abbreviation of every street suffix and every secondary unit designator is fixed, so a delivered value can be compared against a known set |
| The delivery point is identified by a nine digit code, not by the street address | the four digit add-on is derived by the postal service and narrows the address to one side of a block, one building or one floor |
| The state is written on every address and is mandatory | unlike Germany, France or Portugal, a United States address without a state is genuinely incomplete |
| The city is a post office name, not a municipality | it cannot be used as a key for the municipality, and several names are frequently valid for one post code |
| The county is not postal and is needed anyway | tax jurisdiction is assigned by county, so it has to be carried alongside the city rather than instead of it |
| A directional is part of the address | 123 N MAIN ST and 123 S MAIN ST are different buildings, usually on opposite sides of a baseline |
| Element | What it is | Used to address mail | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| state | top level subdivision, always written as its two letter code in postal use | yes, and it is mandatory | CA |
| county | subdivision of a state, present in business data and required for tax jurisdiction | no | Santa Clara |
| city | the post office name serving the address, which is not always the municipality the address sits in | yes | SAN JOSE |
| street line | number, directional, name, suffix, and a second directional where one applies | yes | 123 N MAIN ST |
| secondary unit | suite, apartment, floor, room, building or department | yes | STE 400 |
| ZIP | five digit code identifying the delivery area | yes | 95113 |
| ZIP+4 | four further digits identifying the delivery point inside that area | not required, and derived rather than supplied | 2007 |
A complete address in the form the postal standard asks for:
ACME MANUFACTURING INC
123 N MAIN ST STE 400
SAN JOSE CA 95113-2007The postal standard asks for uppercase, no punctuation, standard abbreviations, and the city, state and ZIP on one final line. That is a presentation convention for the envelope. The values behind it are what CDQ stores, and they are stored separately.
123 N MAIN ST is a number, a directional, a name and a suffix. Two of those four are standardised vocabulary:
| Part | Example | Standardised |
|---|---|---|
| number | 123 | no, but it may carry a fraction (123 1/2) or a hyphen (123-45 in Queens, New York) |
| directional | N, SW | yes, to one or two letters, and it can appear before or after the name |
| name | MAIN | no |
| suffix | ST, AVE, BLVD | yes, to the published suffix abbreviation |
A directional is part of the address, not decoration. 123 N MAIN ST and 123 S MAIN ST are different buildings, usually on opposite sides of a baseline that runs through the city. Dropping the directional does not shorten the address, it changes it.
The five digit ZIP identifies a delivery area. The four digit add-on narrows it to a delivery point: one side of one block, one building, one floor of a building, or one high volume recipient. Written together they are 95113-2007.
The add-on is assigned by the postal service from the rest of the address. It is not something a business partner knows about itself, and it is not stable if the street address changes. That is why it is looked up rather than requested, and why an address arriving with five digits is complete rather than deficient.
The United States postal city is the name of the post office that serves the address. A building can sit inside one incorporated city and carry the name of another on its mail, and several distinct place names are frequently acceptable for the same ZIP. So a United States city value cannot be used as a reliable key for the municipality, and a mismatch between the city you hold and the city the postal service returns is usually not an error in either.
The secondary unit belongs on the same line as the street. The postal standard puts STE 400 at the end of the street line, not on a line of its own above it. Systems that model a second street line often receive the suite there instead, and both forms occur in real data.
A county is not part of the postal address. It is nonetheless in most business records, because it drives tax jurisdiction. It has to be carried, and it has to be carried separately from the city.
Not every county is called a county. Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs and census areas, and Virginia has independent cities that sit outside any county. In Virginia the same name can be both: Fairfax County and the city of Fairfax are different jurisdictions.
PO Box, rural route and highway contract addresses are not street addresses. PO BOX 1234, RR 2 BOX 152 and HC 1 BOX 15 are delivery points, and a building cannot be found from any of them.
Puerto Rico uses an extra line. A Puerto Rican address can carry an urbanizacion name above the street, which identifies the development the street sits in and is required to deliver.
ZIP codes in New England, New Jersey and Puerto Rico begin with a zero. Handled as a number at any point in the chain, 01730 becomes 1730, which is a valid looking four digit value and an invalid ZIP. Always carry a ZIP as text.
The CDQ address model has two parallel hierarchies. Administrative areas represent the political containers, typed REGION and COUNTY. Localities represent the places themselves, typed CITY, DISTRICT, QUARTER or BLOCK. Streets are held as thoroughfares with the number in its own field, and secondary units as typed premises.
The United States maps as follows:
| United States element | CDQ concept | Type | SAP field |
|---|---|---|---|
| state | administrative area, level 1 | REGION | region |
| county | administrative area, level 2 | COUNTY | county, with its FIPS code in the county FIPS field |
| city | locality, level 1 | CITY | city |
| neighbourhood | locality, level 2 | DISTRICT | district |
| street name with its directional and suffix | thoroughfare | STREET | street |
| house number | thoroughfare number | n/a | house number |
| suite, unit | premise | SUITE, UNIT | street 5 |
| building | premise | BUILDING | building |
| floor | premise | LEVEL | floor |
| apartment, room | premise | APARTMENT, ROOM | room number |
| PO Box | postal delivery point | POST_OFFICE_BOX | PO box |
| ZIP, with the add-on where it is known | post code | REGULAR | post code |
The United States is one of the countries for which the formatted address writes the number in front of the street value, giving 123 N MAIN ST. The two values remain separate in the model; only the presentation is reversed.
The nine digits are one postal code, written with a hyphen after the fifth. Splitting them across two fields would:
- weaken matching, because two addresses differing only in the add-on are usually the same building, and two sharing an add-on across different ZIPs are unrelated
- invite partial writes, where the add-on survives an update of the ZIP and produces a nine digit value that was never issued
- push postal logic downstream, into systems that have no reason to know what an add-on is
So the canonical form is 95113-2007 in the post code field, and an address for which no add-on is known carries the five digit value alone. Nothing is lost either way, and the delivered value is always a code the postal service would recognise.
CDQ delivers the state with its ISO 3166-2 code. An SAP system does not validate against ISO: it validates the region field against its own region key table, T005S, which is part of a customer's configuration. That key exists for tax and jurisdiction purposes, which is why it follows national tax or statistical numbering rather than ISO, and why the level it sits at differs from one country to the next.
The region key is customer-specific configuration, so this standard does not define one: a T005S is specific to a customer and to a client, and no single value would be correct everywhere. What this standard fixes is the ISO 3166-2 code. The mapping from it to the key your system expects is yours to maintain.
For the United States the key your configuration holds is conventionally the two letter state code, which is also the ISO subdivision code, so the mapping is usually the identity. That makes the United States the easy case rather than the normal one: most countries need a real mapping.
Treat the ISO code as the value CDQ guarantees and the SAP key as a mapping you own.
123 N Main St Ste 400, San Jose CA 95113, in the CDQ address model:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | US |
Administrative area 1 (REGION) | California |
| Administrative area 1 short name | CA |
| Administrative area 1 FIPS code | 06 |
Administrative area 2 (COUNTY) | Santa Clara |
| Administrative area 2 FIPS code | 06085 |
Locality 1 (CITY) | San Jose |
Thoroughfare (STREET) | North Main Street, delivered as N MAIN ST |
| Thoroughfare number | 123 |
Premise (SUITE) | STE 400 |
| Post code | 95113-2007 once the add-on is resolved, 95113 otherwise |
The examples below show the shape of each dataset, not its full contents. The complete published lists for the United States are on the CDQ Wiki page business partner metadata for the United States, which also covers legal forms, identifier types and the integrated data sources.
57 entries: the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories and outlying islands. Each carries its ISO 3166-2 code, its FIPS state code, and names in English, German, French and Chinese.
| Code | FIPS | English |
|---|---|---|
US-CA | 06 | California |
US-NY | 36 | New York |
US-DC | 11 | District of Columbia |
US-PR | 72 | Puerto Rico |
3,145 entries, one per county or county equivalent, each linked to its state and keyed by its five digit FIPS code. That key is the state FIPS followed by the county FIPS, so the parent is readable from the key itself.
| Code | State | Name | Also matched as |
|---|---|---|---|
01001 | US-AL | Autauga | Autauga County |
06085 | US-CA | Santa Clara | Santa Clara County |
22001 | US-LA | Acadia Parish | Acadia Parish |
51600 | US-VA | Fairfax city | Fairfax city |
A county supplied with the word County attached is matched: the word is removed before the lookup.
137 entries covering the published postal suffix vocabulary, each with its official abbreviation. The abbreviation is what the delivered street line carries.
| Term | Abbreviation |
|---|---|
| STREET | ST |
| AVENUE | AVE |
| BOULEVARD | BLVD |
| DRIVE | DR |
| HIGHWAY | HWY |
| PARKWAY | PKY |
| CROSSING | XING |
| EXPRESSWAY | EXPY |
The same list carries the post office box vocabulary: PO Box, P.O. Box, P.O. and Box all identify a post office box, and MS a mail station.
Five digits, optionally followed by a four digit add-on. The canonical written form is 12345-6789. Both 12345 and 123456789 are accepted as input and understood.
The format is validated and the value is not rewritten, so a ZIP that lost its leading zero upstream is carried as supplied rather than padded, and a nine digit value gains its hyphen only when the postal lookup runs. Post code normalisation is currently available for Canada and Mexico.
The state is standardised against reference data: whether it arrives as a name or as a two letter code, the canonical name, the ISO code, the postal code and the FIPS code are written back.
The county is standardised against reference data, with or without the word County, and its five digit FIPS code is written back. That code is what a tax jurisdiction lookup needs.
Street suffixes are recognised in the street text and rewritten to the official postal abbreviation, so Street, St and ST produce the same delivered value.
The ZIP+4 add-on is resolved through the postal service address lookup where that data source is enabled and credentials are configured. The lookup needs the state, the street, and either the city or the ZIP.
The city is preserved as submitted.
These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.
| Limitation | What it means for an integration |
|---|---|
| The postal lookup resolves the add-on, not the street line | The lookup is used to obtain the ZIP+4. It does not rewrite your street line into the postal standard form, so an address gains its add-on and keeps the street wording it arrived with. Where you need the postal standard street line as well, that is a separate step. |
| The street line vocabulary is not yet fully published | Directionals and the secondary unit designators are not yet maintained as reference data, so North Main St, N Main St and N. Main St remain three different values to a comparison, and a suite written as STE 400 may not be parsed into a premise. Normalise directionals on your side before matching, never drop one since it changes which building the address names, and supply the secondary unit in its own field where you need it there. |
| Supply the county suffix where the county carries one | Louisiana parishes, Alaska boroughs and census areas, and the Virginia independent cities are published with their suffix in the name, because the suffix is part of what they are called. A bare name may therefore not resolve for those. In Virginia the suffix is also the only thing distinguishing a county from a same-named independent city, so Fairfax, Franklin and Richmond need it. |
| A third administrative level is not delivered | The address model carries two administrative levels, the state and the county. A civil township, which sits below the county and matters in the Midwest and in New England, has no level of its own and is not carried. |
Resolving the ZIP+4 requires the postal service data source to be enabled for your workspace and credentials to be configured. Without it, United States addresses are curated from reference data alone and keep the five digit ZIP they arrived with.
A United States address is a street line built from a number, a directional, a name and a suffix, followed by a secondary unit, and closed by a line carrying the city, the two letter state code and the ZIP. The postal standard prescribes the vocabulary for the suffix and the secondary unit, and it prescribes uppercase without punctuation for presentation only.
The state is mandatory on a United States address, which sets the country apart from Germany, France and Portugal, where the top level subdivision is not written at all. The county is the element that goes the other way: it is not postal, and it is carried because tax jurisdiction is assigned by it.
CDQ places the state in administrative area level 1 and the county in level 2, so the county and its FIPS code travel with the address and can drive a tax jurisdiction lookup. The city goes in locality level 1, the street and its number stay in separate fields, and the suite, floor and room are typed premises.
ZIP and ZIP+4 are one value in one field, written 12345-6789, because the nine digits are one postal code and splitting them weakens matching. The add-on is resolved through the postal service lookup rather than requested from the business partner.
All 57 states and territories are maintained as CDQ reference data with their postal codes and FIPS codes, together with 3,145 counties keyed by FIPS and the postal street suffix vocabulary. Directionals, the secondary unit designators and the military state codes are not yet published as reference data.
- Business partner metadata for the United States
- France Address Standard
- Germany Address Standard
- India Address Standard
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