Published on 8 January 2024

Official street directory

This directory lists all streets, paths, alleys, squares and named districts that are used as street names for addresses.

Comprehensive information about Switzerland’s streets

A street name forms an essential and integral part of a building address – a geographic localisation process that we use in our daily lives. In order for a street name to be used for computer-aided administrative tasks or in information systems, a suitable database is required: the official street directory. For every listed street, this directory contains:

An unambiguous identifier
A clearly designated street name in each locality – street names in multilingual regions may be listed in more than one language
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 of the street
The status of the street (completed, under construction, etc.).

Changes as of March 2025

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

Production

The data stored in the official street directory are based on the data collected for the cadastral survey AV). Each municipality (and sometimes the canton itself) manages the data in the federal 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 geometric data 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 is not yet available or not fully available. It is planned that the harmonisation work will be completed by the end of 2024.

Use of the directory

The official street directory can be used by the public authorities, as well as by companies for commercial purposes. For example, it can be used as a database for cartographic products and is also suitable for integration into web services.

Restrictions

The official list of roads in Switzerland only contains those roads where there are building addresses. For this reason, the highways, for example, are not covered comprehensively. The use of the directory is therefore not recommended for routing tasks.

Additional information

File formats
The official street directory is available in the following file formats:
- ESRI File Geodatabase
- Interlis 2
- CSV (Excel)
Coordinate systems
The official street directory is available in the following coordinate system:
- LV95
Data model
Datenmodell INTERLIS LV95
Updates
The official street directory is updated daily. swisstopo updates the data according to the reports from the GWR (Buildings and Dwellings Register) and the official cadastral survey. 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 data from the cadastral survey and the topographic landscape model (TLM) where necessary and then publishes it for free use.
Product information of the official directory of streets and building addresses
PDF277.36 kB7 October 2024

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Access to the data

FAQ

Contents of the official street directory:
- An unambiguous identifier
- A clearly designated street name in each locality – street names in multilingual regions may be listed in more than one language
- The applicable name of the locality and the post code from the official directory of towns and cities
- The applicable name and number of the municipality from the official directory of municipalities
- The geographic location of the street
- The status of the street (completed, under construction, etc.).
Detailed information on the attributes can be found in the product information.
You can report errors to us via the «Report problem» button on the www.map.geo.admin.ch website. We will then notify the authority concerned.
Ghost streets
Streets that run along a municipal boundary, and therefore have buildings addressed in the municipalities concerned, have several ESIDs. This is due to the fact that each municipality is responsible for assigning the street names used to address the buildings in their municipality. For these particular streets, each will have a «main» ESID (which is the primary street), as well as «secondary» ESIDs. Two new attributes, STR_PARENT and STR_CHILDREN, have been created to deal with this particularity. The figure below illustrates the situation.
Gehrenmoosstrasse is located in the municipality of Marbach (SG). However, building 40.1 in Altstätten is also addressed to Gehrenmoosstrasse. Each of the two municipalities must assign an ESID to the street. The ESID 10096540 assigned by the municipality of Marbach (SG) is what we will call the «parent» ESID. It is the geometry linked to this ESID that will be displayed on map.geo.admin.ch. The 10122651 ESID is a «child» ESID. The geometry of this ESID will be a point.
In CSV format, the situation will be as follows:
It is now possible to find street affiliations with several ESIDs. The «parent» and «child» information will also be shown in the Infobox when such a street is clicked.