A Canadian address has the North American shape, with a civic number, a street, a municipality and a two-letter province code, but it can be written in English or in French, and the language decides the order of the street line. 123 MAIN ST and 123 RUE PRINCIPALE follow the same standard. Two further habits break integrations built for the United States: a unit number written in front of the civic number with a hyphen (10-123 MAIN ST), and a six-character alphanumeric postal code that identifies the province by its first letter.
This article describes the Canadian address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, how the province and the postal code are handled, and which reference data CDQ maintains for Canada. It is the reference for anyone mapping Canadian business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Canadian addresses from CDQ.
In this article, you will understand:
- How a Canadian street line is built in English and in French, and where the unit and the direction go
- Which administrative levels are written on an address
- What the postal code encodes, and why it is one value
- How each element maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
- How CDQ derives the province from the postal code
- Which reference data CDQ maintains for Canada, and where it is incomplete
Available in:
- CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for Canada: browse the published Canadian metadata
Most of a Canadian address needs no special handling. What is specific to Canada is narrower, and it is where integrations actually go wrong:
| Specific to Canada | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The address can be written in English or in French | the street type follows the name in English (MAIN ST) and precedes it in French (RUE PRINCIPALE); the street name itself is never translated |
| The unit can be written in front of the civic number, with a hyphen | 10-123 MAIN ST is unit 10 at number 123, not a number range and not house number 10-123 |
| The province or territory is written on every address | as a two-letter code on the same line as the municipality, and it is mandatory |
| The postal code is alphanumeric and identifies the province | K1A 0B1 is six characters with one space, and its first letter tells the province or territory |
| A direction is part of the street line | 123 MAIN ST W and 123 MAIN ST E are different buildings; the direction comes last, and O (ouest) is west in French |
| Rural and postal-installation addresses have their own vocabulary | RR 2, GD, PO BOX 1234 STN A and CP 1234 SUCC CENTRE-VILLE are delivery points, not street addresses |
CA is both Canada and California | a United States address with the state CA is easily read as a Canadian one, and the other way round |
Canada has ten provinces and three territories. They are the only administrative level written on an address.
| Level | What it is | Used to address mail | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| province or territory | 13 of them, each with a two-letter postal abbreviation | yes, and it is mandatory | Ontario (ON) |
| county, regional municipality, regional county municipality (MRC), census division | an intermediate level that exists in some provinces and not in others | no | Regional Municipality of Peel |
| municipality | the place on the last line, written with its official name | yes | Mississauga |
The intermediate level is not uniform. Ontario has counties, regional municipalities and single-tier cities; Quebec has regional county municipalities; some provinces have none at all. It is not written on an address and it is not needed to deliver mail.
ACME LTD
10-123 MAIN ST NW
CALGARY AB T2P 1J9EXEMPLE INC
200-1500 BOUL RENÉ-LÉVESQUE O
MONTRÉAL QC H3G 1T7The recipient comes first, then the street line, then the municipality, the province code and the postal code on one line. Canada Post asks for the province one space after the municipality and the postal code two spaces after the province, in uppercase, without punctuation. The country is omitted for domestic mail. Municipality and street names are written in their official form and never translated: TROIS-RIVIÈRES does not become THREE RIVERS.
The street line is the unit, the civic number, the street name and type, and the direction.
| Part | English | French | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| unit | 10- before the number, or SUITE 400, UNIT 10, APT 5 after the street | 200- before the number, or BUREAU 200, APP 5 after the street | with the hyphen form, no unit word is written; the unit can also go on a line of its own above the street line |
| civic number | 123, 123A, 123 1/2 | same | a letter suffix is attached, a fraction follows after one space |
| street type | after the name: MAIN ST | before the name: RUE PRINCIPALE, BOUL RENÉ-LÉVESQUE | in French the type follows the name when the name is an ordinal number: 1RE AV |
| direction | N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, SW | N, S, E, O, NE, NO, SE, SO | always the last element of the street line |
Only three street types are translated between the languages: ST and RUE, AVE and AV, BLVD and BOUL. Every other type stays in the language of the street name, which is why an English street in Quebec keeps its English type.
The postal code is six characters, A9A 9A9, written with one space and no hyphen. The first three are the forward sortation area, which identifies a region or part of a city; the last three identify a local delivery unit, often one side of a block or one building.
The letters D, F, I, O, Q and U are never used, and W and Z never come first. A 0 as the second character marks a rural area. The first letter identifies the province or territory:
| First letter | Province or territory |
|---|---|
A | Newfoundland and Labrador |
B, C, E | Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick |
G, H, J | Quebec |
K, L, M, N, P | Ontario |
R, S, T, V | Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia |
X | Northwest Territories and Nunavut, shared |
Y | Yukon |
10-123 MAIN ST is unit 10 in the building at 123 Main Street. Loaded as one house number, it becomes 10-123, which no comparison will match against 123 MAIN ST SUITE 10 although it is the same unit. Split it before loading, or supply the unit in its own field.
A postal code is one value. Splitting it into its two halves, adding a hyphen, or storing it in lowercase all produce values that do not compare with the canonical K1A 0B1.
The postal code and the province must agree. Because the first letter identifies the province, a mismatch between the two is a sign that one of them is wrong. X is the exception that cannot be resolved from the letter alone, because it serves two territories.
A delivery installation is not a street address. PO BOX 1234 STN A, RR 2 (rural route) and GD (general delivery) identify where mail is collected, and a building cannot be found from any of them. The station (STN, RPO, or SUCC in French) belongs to the delivery point, not to the municipality.
CA is the country code of Canada and the postal code of California. A record whose state field holds CA and whose country field is empty or wrongly filled can be read as a Canadian address. Keep the country and the province or state in separate, clearly named fields, and check the postal code: a Canadian postal code starts with a letter, a ZIP code with a digit.
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 floors as typed premises.
Canada maps as follows:
| Canadian element | CDQ concept | Type | SAP field |
|---|---|---|---|
| province or territory | administrative area, level 1 | REGION | region |
| municipality | locality, level 1 | CITY | city |
| community or neighbourhood inside a municipality | locality, level 2 | DISTRICT | district |
| street name with its type and direction | thoroughfare | STREET | street |
| civic number, with its suffix | thoroughfare number | n/a | house number |
| suite, unit, bureau | premise | SUITE, UNIT | street 5 |
| apartment | premise | APARTMENT | room number |
| floor | premise | LEVEL | floor |
| PO box, case postale | postal delivery point | POST_OFFICE_BOX | PO box |
| postal code | post code | REGULAR | post code |
The intermediate level (county, regional municipality, MRC) is not part of this standard, and CDQ publishes no second administrative level for Canada. Canada does not use the SAP house number supplement, HOUSE_NUM2, which CDQ fills only for the Iberian and Latin American convention.
The province can arrive as a name, in English or French, or as the two-letter code. CDQ standardises it against reference data and writes back the canonical name and the ISO 3166-2 code.
For Canada, CDQ also derives the province from the postal code. When the postal code is found in the reference data, the province it belongs to is the one delivered; only when the postal code is missing or not found does CDQ fall back to the province name or code you supplied. Where an address provider is enabled and resolves the province first, the provider's result is used instead.
A record with a postal code found in Ontario and the province QC is delivered with Ontario. That is usually the correction you want, but it also means a wrong postal code moves the province with it. Check records where the delivered province differs from the one you sent.
CDQ delivers the province 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 Canada the key your configuration holds is conventionally the two-letter postal abbreviation, which is also the suffix of the ISO code (CA-ON and ON), so the mapping is usually the identity. Older configurations may still hold NF for Newfoundland and Labrador, whose code changed to NL in 2002, or lack an entry for Nunavut, created in 1999. Confirm that your table has all thirteen.
400-100 King St W, Toronto ON M5H 2N2, in the CDQ address model:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | CA |
Administrative area 1 (REGION) | Ontario |
| Administrative area 1 code | CA-ON |
Locality 1 (CITY) | Toronto |
Thoroughfare (STREET) | King St W |
| Thoroughfare number | 100 |
Premise (SUITE) | 400 |
| Post code | M5H 2N2 |
In the SAP fields, 100 is the house number, 400 goes to street 5, King St W is the street, Toronto the city, and Ontario the region.
The examples below show the shape of each dataset, not its full contents. The complete published lists for Canada are on the CDQ Wiki page business partner metadata for Canada, which also covers legal forms, identifier types and the integrated data sources.
13 entries, each carrying its ISO 3166-2 code, its English name, its French name where it differs, and a Chinese name.
| Code | English | Also matched as |
|---|---|---|
CA-QC | Quebec | Québec |
CA-BC | British Columbia | Colombie-Britannique |
CA-NL | Newfoundland and Labrador | Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador, Newfoundland |
CA-NT | Northwest Territories | Territoires du Nord-Ouest |
CA-NU | Nunavut | Nunavut |
63 entries in English and French, each with its Canada Post abbreviation. Where the two languages abbreviate a type differently, both are held.
| Term | Language | Abbreviation |
|---|---|---|
| Street | English | ST |
| Avenue | English | AVE |
| Avenue | French | AV |
| Boulevard | French | BOUL |
| Chemin | French | CH |
| Crescent | English | CRES |
| Croissant | French | CROIS |
| Concession | English | CONC |
The same list carries the post office box vocabulary: PO Box, P.O. Box and Box in English, and Case postale (CP) in French.
A9A 9A9, with the letters Canada Post does not use excluded and an optional space in the middle.
The province is standardised against reference data: whether it arrives in English, in French, or as the two-letter code, the canonical name and the ISO code are written back. Where the postal code is found in the reference data, the province is derived from it.
The postal code is completed with its space where it arrives without one, so K1A0B1 becomes K1A 0B1.
The municipality and the levels below it are preserved as submitted. Where an address provider is enabled, it can enrich and complete them.
These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.
| Limitation | What it means for an integration |
|---|---|
| The formatted address writes the number after the street | The formatted street line for Canada reads King St W 100, not 100 King St W. The street and the number are separate fields in the model and in SAP, so only the single-line presentation is affected. Build the Canadian street line from the separate fields where you need it. |
| A unit in front of the civic number is not recognised as a unit | There is no Canada-specific handling of the 10-123 form, so it can arrive as one house number. Supply the unit in its own field, or as SUITE 10 after the street. |
| Unit, direction and delivery-installation vocabulary is not published | SUITE, UNIT, APT, BUREAU, APP, the directions, and RR, GD, STN, RPO and SUCC are not yet published as reference data. A unit that arrives inside the street value may stay there, and W and O are not recognised as the same direction. |
| Street types written in full are not all published | The published list holds the types that Canada Post abbreviates. Types written in full, such as RUE, LANE, WAY, TRAIL, MONTÉE and CÔTE, are not all in it yet. |
| Only the missing space is corrected in a postal code | A postal code in lowercase or with a hyphen (k1a 0b1, K1A-0B1) is kept as supplied. Supply it in uppercase with one space. |
| No intermediate administrative level | Counties, regional municipalities and MRCs are not published, so they are not standardised and are carried only as supplied. |
A Canadian address is a street line, followed by the municipality, the two-letter province code and the postal code on one line. It can be written in English or French: the street type follows the name in English and precedes it in French, the direction comes last, and the unit can be written in front of the civic number with a hyphen. The province is mandatory, and the six-character postal code identifies it by its first letter.
CDQ places the province in administrative area level 1 and the municipality in locality level 1. The street, the number and the unit are separate fields, and the unit reaches street 5 or the room number by its type. The province is standardised from its English or French name or its code, and derived from the postal code where the postal code is found. The SAP region key is customer configuration and conventionally equals the postal abbreviation.
The 13 provinces and territories and the bilingual street-type vocabulary are maintained as CDQ reference data. Units, directions and rural delivery points are where the current coverage is weakest.
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