What are mapcodes?

Mapcodes are a free, open way to make every house or location on Earth addressable by a short code.

With nothing else except your mapcode, for instance, a navigation system will bring someone to within a few feet or meters of your front door.

Mapcodes are short, easy to use and easy to recognise. And they are free. Always.

Download on the App Store Get it on Google Play
Read more

I want a mapcode...

You can get your mapcodes easily on the map below. Or, if you want to run a business with mapcodes, you can use our open-source software libraries to do so. Free forever.

Try it out! Fill in your address, your zipcode or your latitude/longitude coordinates in the entry box in the map view below. The mapcode is shown below the map.

Or use MyMapcodes.com to find mapcodes easily, also on your phone. (MyMapcodes is a free, unaffiliated website.)

Mapcode Finder for iOS and Android!

You can download the free Mapcode Finder app for your mobile phone or tablet on the Apple AppStore or Google PlayStore.

Mapcode stories

Emergency services

Emergency services

Emergency services need to quickly reach the strangest places. Not only will a mapcode get an ambulance to within meters of its target, no matter where, but the short mapcodes can also be communicated clearly even over bad connections (Eastern Cape, South Africa).
National post code system

National post code system

Many countries are currently considering mapcodes as a candidate for their national post code. Most countries today only have "zone" codes, where thousands of dwellings share the same code. South Africa was the first to introduce mapcodes to officially support informal dwellings (such as slum dwellings).
Inventory localization

Inventory localization

In countries without an effective addressing system, utility services can not readily come to aid of households or businesses when they are faced with power cuts or water leakages. In Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, electricity and water meters bear mapcodes which aren't just their unique asset identifier, but acts as the address of that particular house or business.
Archeological finds

Archeological finds

Archeological and botanical finds are (of course) registered very precisely. Many errors are made, however, both in writing down and in copying the unwieldy latitudes and longitudes. Mapcodes are now used to put a human face on coordinates by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center.
Land ownership

Land ownership

Land or building ownership is a relevant and complicated, but vastly under-organized issue in many countries. Several land registry offices are looking into identifying parcels of land by their central mapcode whilst others (South Africa, India, USA) have implemented mapcode down to a 1m2 accuracy for urban planning and asset management.

Free forever

Mapcodes are free forever. You can use them in any application you want and you'll never need to worry about paying a licence or commercial license terms. And you'll get full access, always, to our algorithms, source code and documentation. We simply want everyone to be able to use mapcodes.

Non-profit

The Mapcode Foundation is a non-profit foundation, established in The Netherlands. The objective of the Mapcode Foundation is to foster mapcodes as a standard of public location encoding, and to provide, support, distribute and stimulate the use of mapcodes, free of charge, as widely as possible.