Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF)

What G-NAF is

G-NAF lists Australia's physical addresses, recording for each one its state, locality, street, number and a coordinate. Geoscape Australia builds and maintains it. Geoscape is the trading name, adopted in 2020, of PSMA Australia Limited, a self-funded public company owned by Australia's nine governments, and G-NAF was first released in 2004.

The file draws on contributors, which include state and territory land records and Commonwealth government agencies, and the ABS supplies its mesh block data. Each address has a confidence level recording how many of the three contributor datasets hold it, from 2, where all three supplied an identical address, down to 0, where only one holds it. To be included, an address needs a matched locality, a street name, and a street number or lot number.

G-NAF is updated quarterly. The August 2026 release held 15,949,543 addresses, 48,294 more than the previous release, of which 15,108,510 (94.73%) were principal addresses. The rest are aliases, which are other labels for a principal address that may differ in number, level, street name or locality.

How precise the geocodes are

Each address has a locality geocode at the centre of its locality, and a street-locality geocode at the centre of its street where the street is matched. Where Geoscape can place the address on its property, it also has an address-site geocode. Geocode reliability records the precision on a six-point scale:

• 1: recorded to an appropriate surveying standard.
• 2: within the address site boundary, or close to its access point.
• 3: near, or possibly within, the address site boundary.
• 4: associated with a unique road feature.
• 5: associated with a unique locality or neighbourhood.
• 6: associated with a unique region.

In the August 2026 release, 98.11% of principal addresses were geocoded at address level, 1.83% at street level and 0.06% at locality level. G-NAF also allocates a mesh block code to each address where one can be identified, with a code table recording how the match was made, and this is what links an address to ABS boundaries. The ABS recommends that addresses geocoded only to street or locality level be used for SA2s and larger areas, because some SA2 boundaries split localities.

Licence and limits

The open G-NAF on data.gov.au is free to use under the Open G-NAF End User Licence Agreement, whose terms are based on the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). The licence restricts use for mail, stating that open G-NAF data must not be used for the generation or compilation of an address for the sending of mail unless the user has verified, by reference to a secondary source of information, that each address is capable of receiving mail.

G-NAF records addresses and their locations, and data.gov.au states that it contains no personal information or details relating to individuals. Building names, where present, are free text and aren't unique to an address. Because G-NAF is built to hold physical addresses, geocoding against it places records at their physical address, the basis the ABS recommends for locating people.

G-NAF and Censible

Censible places Sites addresses with G-NAF's current principal addresses, matching the street within the suburb or postcode the address gives, and marks any site it could only place at a suburb or postcode centre for checking. G-NAF is © Geoscape Australia and used under its open licence, credited on Censible's notes and sources page.

Sources: data.gov.au, Geoscape Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF); Geoscape Australia, G-NAF Data Release Report, August 2026; Geoscape Australia, G-NAF Product Description.