Published on 8 January 2024

Official directory of building addresses

The official directory of building addresses lists all official building addresses in Switzerland. The directory includes all buildings used for residential purposes, workplaces and buildings of general public interest.

Database of all building addresses in Switzerland

Addresses are the most frequently used geographic location parameters in everyday life as well as by companies. In the official directory of building addresses, every building entrance is clearly identified and designated an equally unambiguous building address. It also contains:

• House numbers
• The applicable street name from the official street directory names
• The applicable name of the locality and the post code from the official directory of municipalities
• The applicable name and number of the municipality from the official directory of municipalities
• The geographic location
• The status of the «building address».

Updates as of March 2025

For information, the data model and the visualization of the official directory of building addresses were updated on March 12, 2025. You can find all the information concerning the modifications on swisstopo's geodata news.

Production

Each municipality (and sometimes the canton itself) enters most of the content of this directory in the buildings and dwellings directory (GWR) that is compiled by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). The FSO periodically delivers the data to swisstopo, which supplements them with data from the cadastral survey (AV) where necessary and subsequently publishes them for use free of charge by everyone.

In order to improve data quality, the AV and GWR data are being harmonised. This work has largely been completed. Only a few municipalities are still working on harmonisation. In these few municipalities (less than 10), the directory of building addresses is not yet available or not fully available. It is planned that the harmonisation work will be completed by the end of 2024.

Utilisation of the directory

The official directory of building addresses can be used by the public administration, as well as by companies for commercial purposes. For example, it can be used as a database for cartographic and GPS-based products, and is also suitable for integration into web services. It can also be used for verifying the validity of an address or, for example, for searching for the national coordinates for a given address.

Terms of use

Additional information

• Technical details

  File formats

  The official directory of building addresses is available in the following file formats:

  • ESRI File Geodatabase
  • Interlis 2
  • CSV

  Coordinate systems

  The official street directory is available in the following coordinate system:

  • LV95

  Data model

  Datenmodell INTERLIS LV95

  Updates

  The official directory of building addresses is updated daily. swisstopo updates the data in accordance with the notifications from the GWR (Buildings and Dwellings Register). The municipalities, and more rarely the canton itself, record a large part of the contents of this register in the Buildings and Dwellings Register (GWR), which is maintained by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). The FSO transmits the data daily to swisstopo, which supplements this information with cadastral survey data where necessary and then publishes it for free use.

• Product information

  • Amtliches Verzeichnis der Gebäudeadressen

    PDF786.23 kB20 June 2025

Download

Access to the data

• STAC API
• SPARQL-request
• map.geo.admin.ch
• Metadata

FAQ

• What information does the official directory of building addresses contain?

  The official directory of building addresses contains the following information:

  • House numbers
  • The applicable street names from the official street directory
  • The applicable locality names and the postcodes from the official directory of towns and cities
  • The applicable names and numbers of the municipalities from the official directory of municipalities
  • The geographic location of building entrances
  • The status of each building address

  For a full description of the attributes, please refer to the product information.

• The address in the official directory of building addresses is different from the address in the cadastral survey. Can I report this?

  You can report errors to us via the «Report a problem» button on the www.map.geo.admin.ch website. We will then notify the authority concerned. You can also contact the municipality concerned and ask for the error to be corrected.

• How can I find out which municipality an address belongs to?

  Option 1: You can find the municipality for each address by clicking on https://map.geo.admin.ch the Official Building Address Directory and clicking on an address. The municipality will appear in the pop-up.

  Option 2: You can request information about an address via the API. You can find more information and a programming example in the product description above.