The complete Ordnance Survey property record linked by the UPRN
AddressBase Premium is now available on Ideal Postcodes accounts. It is currently Ordnance Survey's most detailed property-level dataset for Great Britain.
Coverage spans Great Britain, meaning England, Scotland, and Wales. It does not extend to Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, or the Channel Islands, which includes Jersey and Guernsey.
Ordnance Survey AddressBase
AddressBase is Ordnance Survey's authoritative address dataset for Great Britain. It is compiled from three sources working together: Local Authorities, which maintain the Local Land and Property Gazetteers, Ordnance Survey itself, and Royal Mail's Postcode Address File.
Every record is tied to a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN). The UPRN is a persistent numeric identifier assigned to a property that stays the same throughout its lifecycle, whether the property is built, unbuilt, occupied, vacant, converted into flats, or eventually demolished. Because the UPRN is not tied to postal deliverability, AddressBase covers a wider set of locations than PAF alone. That includes non-postal objects such as car parks, substations, ponds, and warehouses without a delivery point, as well as pre-build and historic addresses.
AddressBase Core and AddressBase Premium
AddressBase Core is the entry-level product that provides a single, simplified point for each property with basic classification. It covers the essentials: standard address lines, the UPRN and UDPRN, USRN and TOID, classification code, coordinates, county, ward, district, and country. For many address validation use cases, Core is more than enough.
AddressBase Premium is the full property-level record with more depth. It consolidates multiple data points and street records. Where Core gives you a well-formed address with a UPRN attached, Premium gives you the complete Ordnance Survey view of that property.
To make the difference easier to see, here is what Premium adds on top of Core:
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Lifecycle and state information, including logical lifecycle status (approved, provisional, historical), BLPU physical state (under construction, in use, vacant, demolished, planning granted), and the full set of start, end, and last-update dates for every component of the record.
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Parent-child relationships, showing how many child UPRNs sit beneath a parent record where a property contains flats or sub-units.
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AddressBase postal status indicator, showing whether the address is directly linked to Royal Mail's PAF, spatially derived from a parent, non-postal, or based on Local Authority information.
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Full LPI details, with the PAO and SAO (Primary and Secondary Addressable Object) breakdowns, official flags, and language codes covering English, Welsh, Gaelic, and bilingual entries.
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Complete street records, including surface type, classification, state, tolerance, and start and end coordinates on both the British National Grid and the ETRS89 coordinate reference system.
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Welsh language translations for thoroughfare, locality, and post town where they are held.
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Cross-references to the OS MasterMap, Address Layer and Highways TOIDs, on top of the Topography TOID already available in Core.
Our implementation surfaces every data point
Many providers surface a narrower subset of the dataset, typically the standard address elements plus the UPRN and classification.
We provide every data point that Ordnance Survey publishes in AddressBase Premium available in our response, linked by the UPRN.
What's next: OS NGD support
Ordnance Survey has been steadily moving its authoritative data into the OS National Geographic Database (NGD), delivered through the OS Data Hub. The NGD Address Theme contains all the address data found in AddressBase Premium, with a simpler structure and daily updates in place of the six-weekly refresh cycle.
We are already working on OS NGD support and will be rolling it out on Ideal Postcodes soon.
Getting started
Please contact us to have AddressBase Premium enabled on your account. The full field reference is available in our AddressBase Premium documentation.