Australia Address Standard

An Australian address looks familiar to anyone used to English-language addresses: the number comes before the street, and the last line holds the place, the state abbreviation and the postcode. What breaks integrations is narrower. The place on the last line is the suburb or locality, not the city, so SURRY HILLS NSW 2010 is a complete Sydney address that never mentions Sydney. A unit is written in front of the street number with a slash (2/17 JONES ST), and a level in front of it with a word (LEVEL 7 17 JONES ST). The four-digit postcode identifies the state, but not the suburb.

This article describes the Australian address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, how the state and the postcode are handled, and which reference data CDQ maintains for Australia. It is the reference for anyone mapping Australian business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Australian addresses from CDQ.

In this article, you will understand:

• Why the suburb, not the city, is the place of an Australian address
• How a unit, a level and a lot number are written on the street line
• What the postcode encodes, and why it does not identify a suburb
• How each element maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
• How CDQ derives the state from the postcode
• Which country code applies to Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• Which reference data CDQ maintains for Australia, and where it is incomplete

Available in:

• CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for Australia: browse the published Australian metadata

Most of an Australian address needs no special handling. What is specific to Australia is narrower, and it is where integrations actually go wrong:

Australia has six states and two mainland territories. They are the only administrative level written on an address.

The local government area is an administrative unit, not a postal one. It is not written on an address, and its name can mislead: the City of Sydney is a council covering the centre and some inner suburbs, not the metropolitan area. A suburb is not a district of a city either. It is the delivery locality, and in Australian usage it carries the address the way a town does elsewhere.

ORBIT TRAVEL CO
TRAVEL WORLD HOUSE
LEVEL 7  17 JONES ST
NORTH SYDNEY  NSW  2060

SILKHOUSE TRAVEL CO
PO BOX 37
SPRINGVALE  VIC  3171

The recipient comes first, then any building name, then the street line or the postal delivery point, and finally the suburb, the state abbreviation and the postcode on one line. Australia Post asks for one or, preferably, two spaces between the suburb and the state and between the state and the postcode, for the last line in uppercase and without punctuation, and for the postcode as the last item. The country is omitted for domestic mail.

The street line is, in this order, the level, the unit, the street number, and the street name with its type.

Where the line would be too long, the level and the unit move to a line of their own above the street line, for example SUITE 3 above LEVEL 7 17 JONES ST.

The postcode is four digits, without a space. It identifies a delivery area, and its first digit identifies the state or territory:

The 1, 8 and 9 ranges, 02xx, 09xx, and the top of the South Australian, Western Australian and Tasmanian ranges (58xx, 68xx, 78xx and above) are for PO boxes and large-volume receivers. A business with its own postcode receives its mail there, not at its street address.

Three external territories are served by Australia Post with Australian postcodes, but have their own ISO 3166-1 country codes:

This standard uses the territory's own code. An address supplied as AU with one of these postcodes is accepted as input, and identifies the same place.

The suburb is the place, not the city. A record with the city Sydney and the postcode 2010 is inconsistent: 2010 belongs to Surry Hills and Darlinghurst, and Sydney itself has the postcode 2000. Keep the suburb as written on the address.

A postcode is not a suburb, and a suburb name is not unique. One postcode usually covers several suburbs, and the same suburb name exists in several states: there is a Richmond in New South Wales, in Victoria and in Tasmania. The suburb, the state and the postcode identify a place only together.

A postcode is text, not a number. Northern Territory postcodes start with 0. Stored as a number, 0800 becomes 800, which is not a valid postcode.

A few postcodes cross a state border. 2620 covers localities in New South Wales and in the Australian Capital Territory, and 0872 covers localities in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. For these, the postcode alone does not decide the state.

A postal delivery point is not a street address. GPO BOX 1777, LOCKED BAG 801 and RMB 26 identify where mail is collected, and a building cannot be found from any of them.

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 units and levels as typed premises.

Australia maps as follows:

The suburb is the city in this standard. The metropolitan city it belongs to is not written on the address and is not stored, and the local government area is not part of this standard: CDQ publishes no second administrative level for Australia. Australia does not use the SAP house number supplement, HOUSE_NUM2, which CDQ fills only for the Iberian and Latin American convention.

CDQ standardises the state against reference data and writes back the canonical name and the ISO 3166-2 code.

For Australia, CDQ also derives the state from the postcode. When the postcode is found in the reference data, the state it belongs to is the one delivered; only when the postcode is missing or not found does CDQ fall back to the state you supplied. Where an address provider is enabled and resolves the state first, the provider's result is used instead.

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.

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 Australia the key your configuration holds is conventionally the state abbreviation, which is also the suffix of the ISO code (AU-NSW and NSW), so the mapping is usually the identity. A mapping built from ISO before 2004 may still hold the old two-letter codes: AU-NS, AU-QL, AU-TS, AU-VI and AU-CT became AU-NSW, AU-QLD, AU-TAS, AU-VIC and AU-ACT that year. Confirm that your table has all eight.

Level 7, 17 Jones St, North Sydney NSW 2060, in the CDQ address model:

In the SAP fields, 17 is the house number, 7 the floor, Jones St the street, North Sydney the city, and New South Wales the region. North Sydney is a suburb in its own right, with its own postcode; it is not a part of Sydney to be written as Sydney.

8 entries, each carrying its ISO 3166-2 code and its name in English, French, German and Chinese.

18 entries, the street types Australia Post lists as commonly used, each with its Australian abbreviation.

The same list carries the post office box vocabulary: PO Box, P.O. Box and Box. The words Unit, Suite, Apartment, Level and Floor, written in full, are part of CDQ's general vocabulary, which is not specific to a country.

Four digits. For Norfolk Island, the format is the single postcode 2899.

These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.

An Australian address is a street line, followed by the suburb, the state abbreviation and the four-digit postcode on one line. The place is the suburb or locality, not the city. The level and the unit come before the street number, the unit often with a slash (2/17), and the street type follows the name. The state is mandatory, the postcode identifies the state but not the suburb, and Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands have their own country codes.

CDQ places the state in administrative area level 1 and the suburb in locality level 1. The street, the number, the unit and the level are separate fields, and the unit reaches street 5 or the room number by its type. The state is standardised from its name, and derived from the postcode where the postcode is found. The SAP region key is customer configuration and conventionally equals the state abbreviation.

The eight states and territories and the common street types are maintained as CDQ reference data. The slash unit form, the Australian abbreviations for units and levels, and the postal delivery types are where the current coverage is weakest.

• Business partner metadata for Australia
• United Kingdom Address Standard
• Canada Address Standard

We are constantly working on providing an outstanding user experience with our products. Please share your opinion about this tutorial!