Placefinder

Load the file you want to geocode

This page does the lookups from your own browser. Your file is never uploaded. Only the individual addresses are sent to the US Census geocoding service.

Choose a file

or drag it here — CSV, TSV or Excel

Or pick up where you left off

A saved progress file holds your rows, every coordinate found so far, and every decision you have made. Open it on any computer to carry on. Nothing is stored in the browser, so this file is the only copy — keep it somewhere you back up.

Open a saved progress file

a .json file saved from this tool

About Placefinder

Turn street addresses into coordinates using the US Census geocoder, then check the ones it could not place. Runs entirely in your browser — your file is never uploaded.

Cite this tool

Build the address

The geocoder works best with a street number, a street name, a city and a state. A ZIP helps but is not required.

Address parts

How is the address stored?

Street

City

State column

or use one state for all

ZIP

Helpers

Name column (for the review screen)

County column (optional)

If you provide this, every result is checked against the county the coordinates actually fall in. An address that geocodes successfully but lands in the wrong county is the error most likely to go unnoticed, because nothing about it looks broken.

Strip unusual charactersThe Census parser rejects some symbols outright Look up each distinct address only once Repeated addresses reuse the first result. Fewer requests, identical output.

Preview

This is exactly what gets sent for the first few rows. If it looks wrong here, it will fail there.

Look up the coordinates

Addresses are looked up with the US Census geocoder.

Census geocoder

Address vintage

Use Current unless you are matching to a specific survey year.

Requests at a time

Four is polite and fast. Raise it only if you are in a hurry and the service is keeping up.

Match checks

Check the street the Census matched Compares street name, direction and house number with your address. Rows that fail go to a "Street check" tab to review instead of being accepted silently. Untick it to accept every Census match as is.

Also try OpenStreetMap for anything Census cannot find

Read this before turning it on. OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service is run by a volunteer foundation and paid for by donations. Its usage policy permits a small one-off batch, but sets firm conditions: a maximum of one request per second, results must be cached rather than re-requested, and any service whose main purpose is geocoding is expected to run its own instance instead of using the public one.

This tool honours the pace limit and caches every result. Keep the batch modest, and if geocoding becomes a routine part of your work, host your own instance or use a paid provider. The Census geocoder has no such constraints for US addresses.

Try OpenStreetMap for failed addresses One per second, so 300 failures takes about five minutes

Stop after this many OpenStreetMap requests

Contact email (optional but appreciated)

Sent with each request so the operators can reach you instead of blocking you if something goes wrong.

Export

Each row records where its coordinates came from, so you can filter on source later or re-run only the rows that were never resolved.

What didn’t geocode, broken down

Pick a column and see where the rows without coordinates sit. Sorted with the worst first, so a failure concentrated in one place shows itself immediately rather than hiding inside a percentage.

Break rows down by Hide values where everything was found

Why they failed

The reason recorded against each row that came back without coordinates. A single reason covering nearly all of them is usually one fixable problem in how the addresses were built, not a thousand separate ones.

What to include

Source and quality columns geocode_source, geocode_status, matched_address, geocoded_county, county_check, street_check, street_check_notes, census_address_range, tiger_line_id Leave coordinates blank where the street check failed Only for rows still marked "Street check failed", meaning you have not accepted them. Off by default, so you can compare results with and without the check. Only rows that have coordinatesDrops everything still unresolved

CSV files are plain UTF-8 text with Unix line endings, which Mac, Linux, R and Python open directly. If you open a CSV in Excel and accented letters look wrong, use Download Excel instead.