Coordinates to Address
Free reverse geocoder. Paste any latitude / longitude — Decimal Degrees, DMS, or DDM — click the map, or use GPS, and get the full street address with a structured breakdown plus elevation, time zone, and current local time. Batch CSV mode for 25 points at once.
Smart paste: drop a full pair like 40.7128, -74.0060 or 40°42′46″N 74°0′21″W into either box and the tool will split it.
Coordinates → address, with everything else you wanted
The basic reverse-geocoding question is straightforward: given a latitude and longitude, what is the address? Most online tools answer that question with a single line of text and nothing else. Coordinates to Address adds three layers on top.
First, the structured breakdown. Every Nominatim result is parsed into its component fields — house number, street, neighbourhood, city, county, state, postcode, country — each in its own labelled card with a copy button. So when you need the postcode for a billing form or the county for a jurisdictional lookup, you don\u2019t have to parse a comma-separated string.
Second, three coordinate formats out: Decimal Degrees, Degrees-Minutes-Seconds, and Degrees-Decimal-Minutes. GPS receivers and most APIs use DD; surveying and aviation use DMS; marine navigation and handheld GPS use DDM. The same point shows in all three formats side by side — copy whichever your downstream system expects.
Third, enrichment. The result includes elevation (Copernicus 30 m DEM), the IANA time zone, the current local time at that point, and a one-click hand-off to Google Maps, Apple Maps, or OpenStreetMap. The other tools that exist mostly stop at the address string. We figure if you came here for the lat / lng → address conversion, you probably also want to know whether the point is at sea level or 2,000 m up, and what time it is there.
How to convert coordinates to an address
Six steps from coordinates to a full address with rich enrichment.
- Enter or paste your coordinates. Type latitude into the first box and longitude into the second, or paste a full pair like "40.7128, -74.0060" into either field — the smart parser will split it automatically. Decimal Degrees, Degrees-Minutes-Seconds (40°42′46″N 74°0′21″W), and Degrees-Decimal-Minutes (40°42.768′N 74°0.36′W) are all accepted.
- Or click anywhere on the map. Click any point on the world map and the latitude / longitude fields fill in instantly. The reverse geocoder runs at the same time. Pinch and drag to zoom into the exact spot before clicking.
- Or use GPS. Tap "My Location" to grab your current latitude and longitude from your device’s GPS sensor (or Wi-Fi positioning on a desktop). Your browser will ask for permission first; nothing is shared with us.
- Read the structured address. The result panel shows the canonical Nominatim display name plus a structured breakdown — house number, street, neighbourhood, city, county, state, postcode, and country — each in its own labelled card with a Copy button.
- Read the enrichment. Three extra cards add value beyond the address: elevation in metres and feet (Copernicus 30 m DEM), the IANA time zone of the point, and the current local time at that location.
- Open in Google Maps, Apple Maps, or OpenStreetMap. One-click handoff to any of the three major map providers. The hero panel also exposes Copy buttons for the full address and the decimal coordinates so you can paste directly into a CRM, spreadsheet, ticket, or document.
Coordinate formats this tool understands
Three formats are accepted as input — paste any of them into either the latitude or the longitude box (the smart paster will split a full pair). All three are also produced as output side-by-side, so you can convert between formats while reverse-geocoding the point.
The default for GPS receivers, most APIs, and CSV files. Negative values for South / West. Six decimal places ≈ 11 cm of precision.
Traditional cartographic notation. Often appears in surveying, aviation charts, and on engraved monuments. Use N / S / E / W instead of negative signs.
Used in marine navigation and on most handheld GPS receivers. Hybrid of DD and DMS — degrees as integers, minutes with decimals.
For a stand-alone format converter that handles UTM, MGRS, Plus Codes, and OS Grid in addition to the three common formats above, see our GPS Coordinate Converter.
What people use Coordinates to Address for
Seven recurring patterns we see in the analytics — each one is a different industry asking the same lat/lng-to-address question for slightly different reasons.
Ticket investigation — turn a photo’s GPS tag into a street address
Insurance, claims, fraud, and incident-response teams routinely receive photos with embedded EXIF GPS tags but no street address. Drop the lat / lng into Coordinates to Address and you get the full street address, neighbourhood, county, and postcode — plus elevation and time zone, which corroborate the timestamp story. Faster than booting QGIS, faster than calling a map API for one lookup.
Field crew geotagging — call out a precise address from raw GPS
Surveyors, utility crews, environmental field workers, and delivery drivers often record raw GPS coordinates while in the field. Back at the desk, paste the coordinates into the batch tool and get a CSV of street addresses for every observation. The batch mode handles 25 rows per submission and respects Nominatim’s rate limit so the workflow is safe to repeat all day.
Validate addresses you geocoded earlier
Round-trip QA: take a list of address strings you geocoded with our forward tool, and pass the resulting lat / lng back through this reverse tool. If the round-trip address matches the original, you have high confidence in the geocode. If it doesn’t, the address was likely fuzzy or duplicated — the tool exposes the divergence cleanly.
Wildlife, ecology, and citizen-science data cleanup
Researchers commonly receive observations with lat / lng but no human-readable place name. Reverse-geocoding turns "32.7157, -117.1611" into "San Diego, California" so the dataset is filterable by region. The batch CSV export plugs straight into R, Python, or QGIS without further processing.
EXIF photo metadata → location strings
Photo libraries, asset-management systems, and stock-photo workflows often need a human-readable location string for every image. Pull the GPS lat / lng from EXIF, run a batch reverse geocode, and you have "Eiffel Tower, Paris, France" instead of "48.8584, 2.2945" for every photo.
Asset management — map fleet, sensors, or IoT devices to addresses
IoT sensor networks, vehicle fleets, and asset-tracking systems generate streams of lat / lng. Once a day, run a batch reverse geocode against the unique points to enrich your asset table with city, county, state, and postcode. Far cheaper than calling a paid geocoding API thousands of times.
Legal & compliance — establish jurisdiction from coordinates
Court filings, regulatory submissions, and compliance audits sometimes need to translate a coordinate (e.g. from a 911 dispatch log, a maritime AIS record, or an environmental incident) into a state, county, and postcode for jurisdictional context. The structured breakdown gives you each level cleanly and the export is suitable for evidence packets.
How reverse geocoding actually works
A reverse geocoder is a database lookup with three stages, optimised for low latency.
Stage 1 — Find the closest building, road, or feature
OpenStreetMap stores hundreds of millions of features (buildings, roads, parks, lakes, administrative boundaries) as polygons, polylines, or points, indexed by an R-tree spatial index. Given an input (lat, lng), the index returns the K nearest features in milliseconds. For a point inside a building polygon, the matching feature is that building. For a point on a road, the matching feature is the nearest road segment plus an interpolated house number. For an open-field point, the match is the nearest named feature in range.
Stage 2 — Walk the administrative hierarchy
Once a feature is matched, the reverse geocoder walks up the administrative hierarchy — building → street → suburb → city → county → state → country — collecting the names, codes, and postcodes it finds along the way. Each administrative level is its own polygon dataset (eg. US Census TIGER/Line for US counties; Eurostat NUTS for European regions; Natural Earth for countries). The result is the structured address you see on the result panel.
Stage 3 — Format the display name
The display name (the long comma-separated string you see at the bottom of the result) is constructed from the structured fields using country-specific rules — Japan starts with the prefecture, France starts with the street number, Brazil includes the bairro before the city, etc. Coordinates to Address returns both the display name and the structured fields, so you can use whichever fits your downstream system.
Nominatim, the engine behind this tool, is the open-source reverse geocoder operated by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Its source code, data, and documentation are all public — nominatim.org. The tool calls Nominatim\u2019s public endpoint directly from your browser, respecting the Foundation\u2019s 1-request-per-second usage policy.
Forward vs reverse geocoding — which one do I need?
The two operations are inverses; pick the one that matches your input.
| Direction | Input | Output | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forward geocoding | "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC" | (38.8977, -77.0365) | Address to Coordinates |
| Reverse geocoding | (38.8977, -77.0365) | "1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC, 20500, USA" | Coordinates to Address (this tool) |
| Forward to find a place | "Eiffel Tower" | (48.8584, 2.2945) | Latitude & Longitude Finder |
Round-trip the two as a quality check: forward-geocode an address into coordinates, then reverse-geocode those coordinates back. If the result matches, the original address was clean. If it doesn\u2019t match, the address was probably ambiguous, abbreviated, or misspelled — useful for QA on a contact list before a marketing send.
Coordinates to Address vs other tools
Honest comparison against the alternatives. Each tool wins different scenarios — the table is a feature checklist, not a value judgement.
| Feature | Coordinates to Address | Google Geocoder | Mapbox Geocoder | latlong.net | OpenCage API | gps-coordinates.org |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free, no sign-up | ✓ | ✓ (free tier) | ✓ (free tier) | ✓ | Limited / paid | ✓ |
| Map preview + click-to-pin | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| DD, DMS, DDM all parsed in | ✓ | — (DD only) | — (DD only) | — (DD only) | — (DD only) | — (DD only) |
| Smart paste (any format) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Structured address breakdown | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Limited | Limited | ✓ |
| Elevation included | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Time zone + local time | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Batch mode (CSV) | 25 / batch | ✗ | ✗ | Paid only | Paid only | ✗ |
| Mobile / touch-first | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial |
| No watermark, no key required | ✓ | — (key required) | — (key required) | ✓ | — (key required) | ✓ |
Google\u2019s and Mapbox\u2019s reverse geocoders are the most accurate at street-number granularity in the US and Western Europe — they also have the broadest commercial integration story. The trade-off is that you need a paid account, an API key, and you can\u2019t use them for one-off lookups without setup. Coordinates to Address is for the spectrum of users who need an answer right now without configuring an SDK — and the Nominatim data behind it is competitive at the city, county, and state levels.
Tips for accurate reverse geocoding
Use enough decimal places
Six decimal places of latitude / longitude resolve to ≈ 11 cm — more than enough for building-level accuracy. Three decimal places resolve to ≈ 110 m, which lands you at the right block but not the right building. Always pass the full precision your source has; truncating a coord costs precision permanently.
Trust the structured fields more than the display name
The display name is a country-specific concatenation of the structured fields — it can include or omit different levels depending on locale. The structured fields (city, county, state, country) are stable across countries and easier to integrate. Use the display name for human-facing output, the structured fields for everything else.
Watch for ocean / wilderness coordinates
OpenStreetMap doesn\u2019t have addresses for the open ocean, the Antarctic interior, or very remote desert regions. The tool returns "no nearby address" for those points — but still returns elevation and time zone, which always have global coverage. If you expected an address and got "none", verify your coords are on land in a populated region.
Pair with the forward geocoder for QA
Round-tripping addresses through forward → reverse is a cheap QA check. If your forward geocode of "200 Oxford St" returned (51.515, -0.142) and reversing it returns "Oxford Street, London, England, UK", the result is clean. If reversing returns "St James, North York, ON, Canada", the forward geocode disambiguated to the wrong country.
Use batch mode for anything bigger than ~5 points
Single-mode is for one-off lookups; batch mode handles up to 25 at once with CSV export. For more than 25 (1,000+ point asset databases, fleet logs, etc.), break the list into chunks of 25 and submit each chunk separately. The Nominatim usage policy allows 1 req/sec sustained; the tool already enforces this pacing, so chunked batches are safe.
Related tools and resources
For the inverse direction (address → coordinates), use Address to Coordinates. For finding the lat / lng of a named place or landmark, use Latitude & Longitude Finder. For converting between coordinate formats (UTM, MGRS, Plus Codes, OS Grid), use GPS Coordinate Converter and UTM to Lat/Long. For pure elevation lookups, see Elevation Finder; for time zones, Time Zone Finder. For dropping a pin on a map, see Latitude & Longitude Map. US-specific lookups: county from address (Address to County) and ZIP code from coordinates (What ZIP Code Am I In).
Frequently asked questions
Reverse geocoding: OpenStreetMap Nominatim public endpoint (nominatim.openstreetmap.org), 1 req/sec policy. Address data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL licence. Elevation: Open-Meteo Elevation API backed by the Copernicus GLO-30 Digital Elevation Model at 30-metre resolution worldwide. Time zone: geo-tz npm package, an offline IANA timezone polygon database. Map basemap: OpenFreeMap Liberty vector tiles, free and unlimited. Coordinate format conversion: pure JavaScript on the client, sphere math via standard trigonometric formulas with R = 6,371 km mean Earth radius. All API calls happen directly from your browser; no data is logged or stored on our servers.
More SimpleMapLab tools
The forward direction — turn any address into latitude and longitude. Same map UI, batch CSV mode.
Find the GPS coordinates of any named place or landmark. DD, DMS, and DDM formats.
Convert between 8 coordinate formats — DD, DMS, DDM, UTM, MGRS, Plus Codes, OS Grid, and more.
Find the elevation of any point on Earth. Copernicus 30 m DEM via Open-Meteo.