Eircode is Ireland’s national postal code system. Introduced in 2015, it was the first public system of unique identifiers for all Irish addresses, assigning a unique 7-character code to each of the 2.4 million residential and business addresses in the country.
Each Eircode follows the format A99 AAAA and consists of two parts. The first three characters form the routing key, which identifies a broad geographic area. There are 139 routing keys across Ireland. The final four characters form the unique identifier, a randomized combination of letters and numbers assigned to a specific property. For example, D01 NY06 identifies a single property in Dublin, while T12 T997 identifies one in Cork.
Eircode provides building-level precision and, in some cases, apartment-level precision. This is particularly valuable for Ireland’s 800,000 non-unique addresses, where multiple properties share the same address and cannot be distinguished by a house name or number alone.
It brings greater precision to Irish addressing, supporting use cases such as address validation, delivery optimization, fraud detection, customer data quality, checkout, and customer targeting.
Eircode offers two datasets:
- Eircode Address File (ECAF): The core reference dataset, containing 2.4 million address points with their Eircodes and postal address information.
- Eircode Address Database (ECAD): Includes ECAF data and adds latitude and longitude coordinates, alias addresses, building information, and boundary data.
Eircode is not open data. Capita Business Support Services Ireland, trading as Eircode, licenses both datasets through authorized resellers, including GeoPostcodes.