What is G-NAF? Australia’s open address database, explained
11 July 2026 · updated 5 Sept 2026 · 5 min read
G-NAF, the Geocoded National Address File, is Australia’s national address database: an openly licensed index of nearly 16 million physical addresses, each with latitude and longitude, built by Geoscape Australia from state and territory land agencies and Australia Post data, and republished every quarter. It is the dataset nearly every Australian address API reads, WattleAddr included.
Is there a free Australian address database?
Yes, and this is it. G-NAF is published on data.gov.au under the Open G-NAF End User Licence Agreement, which is based on Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: free to download and to use commercially, with attribution and one restriction on compiling it into mailing lists. What is not free is the work of loading a multi-gigabyte quarterly release, indexing it for type-ahead and keeping it current, which is what an address API charges for. If you want the raw data, download it; if you want it answering a form as someone types, use an API.
What G-NAF is great at
- Confirming an address exists and is spelt/formatted correctly
- Returning clean, structured components (unit, street, locality, state, postcode)
- Providing a latitude and longitude for the address
- Powering fast, accurate type-ahead
What G-NAF is not
G-NAF tells you an address exists and where it is, not whether Australia Post will deliver mail there. Deliverability, DPID barcodes and AMAS certification for bulk-mail discounts come from Australia Post’s PAF, a separate product. We’re deliberately clear about this boundary.
Staying current
Geoscape releases a new G-NAF roughly every quarter. WattleAddr re-ingests each release and swaps it in with zero downtime, so your lookups reflect the latest national dataset, and every response tells you which release it came from.
Because G-NAF is open data, we can offer it at fair, honest prices, with attribution to Geoscape, as the licence requires.
For the full boundary between G-NAF and Australia Post’s PAF, with each dataset described in its owner’s words, see AMAS and PAF vs G-NAF.