Mexico Address Standard

A Mexican address carries two things a generic address model has no obvious place for: the neighbourhood, the colonia, and a second number, the número interior, that identifies the unit behind the street number. Both are part of the postal address. The state is written as a postal abbreviation, such as NL or CDMX, and that abbreviation is neither the ISO code nor, in most cases, the key an SAP system uses.

This article describes the Mexican address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, how the state is resolved and the interior number delivered, and which reference data CDQ maintains for Mexico. It is the reference for anyone mapping Mexican business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Mexican addresses from CDQ.

In this article, you will understand:

• How a Mexican address is structured, and which of its parts the post office actually uses
• Why the colonia and the número interior belong in the address, and where each goes
• How each Mexican level maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
• Which state abbreviations CDQ resolves today, and which it does not yet
• Which reference data CDQ maintains for Mexico, and what the published values look like
• Where the current CDQ coverage for Mexico is incomplete

Available in:

• CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for Mexico: browse the published Mexican metadata

A Mexican address has a familiar shape: a street and a number, a post code, a city and a state. What is specific to Mexico is where integrations go wrong:

Mexico has two administrative levels below the country that appear on an address, and one sub-municipal level that the post office relies on.

The municipality and the city are two different things in Mexico. A municipality can hold several towns, and a city can spread over several municipalities: Monterrey's metropolitan area covers San Pedro Garza García, Guadalupe and others, each a municipality of its own. The city on the address is where the colonia lies, not the seat of the municipality.

Empresa Ejemplo S.A. de C.V.
Av. Paseo de la Reforma 222, Piso 12, Int. 1204
Col. Juárez
06600 CIUDAD DE MÉXICO, CDMX

The street type and name come first, then the número exterior, then the floor and the número interior. The colonia has its own line, usually written with Col. in front. The last line holds the post code, the locality and the state abbreviation. The alcaldía or municipality, here Cuauhtémoc, is often added on a line of its own or after the colonia.

Everything after the exterior number identifies the unit inside the building. It is free text with a common vocabulary:

So Av. Paseo de la Reforma 222, Piso 12, Int. 1204 reads: number 222 on Paseo de la Reforma, twelfth floor, unit 1204.

Some forms are easy to misread:

The código postal has five digits. The first two identify the state, or the capital: Mexico City's post codes run from 01000 to 16999. The third identifies a municipality or a zone, and the last two the colonia or group of colonias.

The post code matters beyond delivery: on an electronic invoice, a CFDI 4.0, the post code of the customer's tax address is mandatory and must match the one the tax authority holds.

The colonia has no obvious field. Systems built on a street, city and post code shape put the colonia in the second street line, in the city, or nowhere. A colonia in the city field makes the city unmatched against any list of municipalities.

The interior number shares a field with the exterior number. 222-1204, 222 Int. 1204 and 222 int 1204 all arrive in the house number field of source systems that have only one. Split out, the exterior number identifies the building and the interior number the unit.

The state arrives as an abbreviation, a name, or both. NL, N.L., Nuevo León and Nuevo Leon all mean the same state. Several abbreviations exist side by side: the post office writes Q. ROO, others QR or QROO.

Mexico City arrives under its old names. Distrito Federal, D.F., México, D.F. and delegación Cuauhtémoc are still common in master data entered before 2016.

Numbers in street names are common. Av. 5 de Mayo, Calle 16 de Septiembre, and the numbered streets of Mérida and other cities. A parser that takes the first number it sees as the house number will take the date or the street.

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 the position inside the building as typed premises.

Mexico maps as follows:

SAP reserves a second house number field, HOUSE_NUM2, for the Iberian and Latin American supplement to the house number. Mexico is one of the five countries for which CDQ fills it, and in Mexico it is where the número interior belongs. What goes there is the unit: the interior number, the office or shop, or the flat. The floor goes to the dedicated floor field, and the edificio or torre to the building field.

The delivery to SAP is a fixed selection from the typed premises of the address:

So 222, Piso 12, Int. 1204 is delivered as:

A unit is delivered twice: it reaches HOUSE_NUM2 and, because ROOM_NUMBER takes the first of room, door and apartment, ROOM_NUMBER as well. A customer reviewing an SAP load for duplicated content will see the unit in both fields for Mexico, and should read HOUSE_NUM2 as the authoritative one.

The municipality, when the address carries it, goes to the county field and not to the city. In Mexico City the alcaldía is the municipality-level unit, so Cuauhtémoc is the county and Ciudad de México the city.

CDQ delivers the state with its ISO 3166-2 code, for example MX-NLE. 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 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. What this standard fixes is the ISO 3166-2 code. For Mexico, three sets of short codes are in use, and they differ: the ISO code suffix (NLE), the post office abbreviation (NL), and the key in an SAP configuration, which is conventionally a two- or three-letter abbreviation close to the postal one. The mapping from the ISO code to your key is therefore a lookup, not a transformation. CDQ carries a default SAP key for 14 of the 32 states; for the others the default is empty.

Treat the ISO code as the value CDQ guarantees and the SAP key as a mapping you own.

Av. Paseo de la Reforma 222, Piso 12, Int. 1204, Col. Juárez, Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc, 06600 Ciudad de México, CDMX, in the CDQ address model:

32 entries: the 31 states and Mexico City. Each carries its ISO 3166-2 code and names in Spanish, with English, French, German and Chinese where these exist.

A state is resolved from its name, from its ISO code with or without the MX- prefix, or from its default SAP key. Most states whose name carries a diacritic are also matched without it, so Nuevo Leon resolves to Nuevo León.

The post office abbreviations resolve where they coincide with the ISO suffix or with the default SAP key. That covers 20 of the 32:

A special tax region, such as the northern border region with its reduced VAT rate, is a tax regime and not a territory: a company in it has an ordinary address in its state.

Five digits: 06600 is recognised as a regular post code, with spaces, dots or hyphens between the digits tolerated. A post code that is numeric but not five digits long is normalised: leading zeros are restored, so 6600 becomes 06600, and surplus leading zeros are removed, so 0006600 becomes 06600. A value with a C.P. prefix or another non-digit is carried as supplied.

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

A Mexican address writes the street and the exterior number first, then the floor and the número interior. The colonia has its own line, and the last line carries the five-digit post code, the locality and the postal abbreviation of the state.

The state and the municipality are the administrative levels. The state is always on the address, the municipality or alcaldía often. The colonia is not administrative, and the post office still relies on it; the post code identifies one colonia or a small group of them.

CDQ places the state in administrative area level 1, the municipality in level 2, the city in locality level 1 and the colonia in locality level 2. The exterior number goes to the house number, the floor to the floor field, the building to the building field, and the interior number, office or flat to the house number supplement, which is the field SAP reserves for this in Mexico. The post code stays one five-digit value, with its leading zero.

The 32 states are maintained as CDQ reference data, and the state can be derived from the post code. The Mexican vocabulary is where the current coverage is weakest: there are no Mexican street or premise terms yet, so the floor and the unit usually stay inside the street value, and twelve of the postal state abbreviations, CDMX and NL among them, are not yet resolved.

• Business partner metadata for Mexico
• Spain Address Standard
• Brazil Address Standard
• United States Address Standard

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