Finding your address from where you are standing
Your device knows its position as a pair of coordinates. Turning those numbers into a street address is called reverse geocoding: the page sends the coordinates to OpenStreetMap, which looks for the nearest mapped address and returns the house number, street, city, state, ZIP code and country.
The blue sign at the top of the tool shows the street line in large type, with the city, state and ZIP code underneath. The full address, written the way you would put it on an envelope, is in the first row below the signs with a copy button beside it.
People use this when they are somewhere unfamiliar and need to give an address: calling a tow truck, ordering a taxi to a hotel they cannot remember the name of, filling in a form at a new job site, or telling emergency services where they are.
In an emergency in the US, call 911 first. Dispatchers can often get your location from your phone automatically, and reading them the address from this page can help if they ask.
How close the address will be
In a town or city, where most buildings have mapped addresses, the result is usually the building you are in or the one next door. The limits come from two places: how exact your device's position is, and how completely the area has been mapped.
If your position is only good to 50 metres, the nearest address to that estimate may be across the street. If the street has been mapped but its house numbers have not, the page can name the road but not the number. In the countryside, a long driveway or an unnumbered road can leave the address as just a road name and a town.
When the house number matters, check it against the building. When it does not, the street and city are almost always right, and the coordinates underneath are exact enough to find the spot on any map.
Your mailing address may use a different city name
The city in your mailing address is chosen by the post office, not by city limits. Many homes outside any city boundary still have a city name in their address because that is where their post office is. The reverse is also true: a suburb can be inside one city while its mail goes through another.
OpenStreetMap usually reports the place you are actually in. So if this page says one town and your mail says another, both can be correct. Our guide on why your address says a different city explains how that happens and which one to use.
For forms that will be checked against postal records, such as a bank or a driving licence, use the address exactly as it appears on your mail.
Looking up the address of somewhere else
Tap anywhere on the map after a lookup and the page finds the nearest address to that point instead. That helps when you know where something is on a map but not what it is called, such as a car park entrance, a gate on a large site or a trailhead.
You can also paste a pair of coordinates, for example from a photo's location data or a GPS unit, into the search box. The page will turn them into an address the same way.
Privacy
This site does not save the addresses you look up. Nothing is tied to an account because there are no accounts. The request that turns your coordinates into an address goes from your browser to OpenStreetMap's public geocoding service, which runs under the OpenStreetMap Foundation's own privacy policy.