Or, since I’m not sure which is more typical, which countries DON’T have meaningful subdivisions?
When I say “meaningful” I’m pretty much talking about the standard mailing address. If I send mail there, do I need to put a “state” or not?
I’ve been doing a bunch of data entry for an international US-based company and I have to put addresses in a system that people have filled in from a web form. The web form includes a field for “State/Province” which is useful for the bulk of their customers - from the US and Canada. I haven’t seen too many other countries filled in but there’s a smattering. Sometimes people fill in the “state” and some don’t.
The system I’m using for input actually does do a country-specific dropdown for state for some countries - like I said, US and Canada. Also Mexico, the UK and Australia. The UK one seems to be counties really. Users from India tend to put a state but the system doesn’t have pre-defined Indian states.
So, just got me to wondering which countries have the equivalent of a state, that would be required/helpful in shipping. I can’t tell if that sort of subdivision is common or uncommon in the rest of the world.
Nearly all countries had subdivisions (the exceptions are usually small countries like Monaco or Andorra) for administrative purposes. These are certainly meaningful, with their own government and services.
Many of those don’t require it for mailing; that’s a decision of the postal service.
Ok thank you for the correction. I realize that all countries have subdivisions meaningful to administration. The US has subdivisions meaningful to administration that is not a part of the mailing address (counties). I didn’t have space to expound in my title. I should have put “meaningful when it comes to postal service, just to be clear, because I realize every country has subdivisions that are meaningful to them in a specific way but really I’m doing a project involving shipping addresses and was just pondering.”
I think in most countries, the post code and street name + number is already sufficient to uniquely identify an address, so explicitly writing the county / state / province / district / whatever is optional, regardless of the degree of autonomy of those subdivisions.
That’s how it is with my native UK, and since I’ve seen many web forms over the years where the State dropdown just lists US states irrespective of what country you select in the Country dropdown, it implies to me that the State being mandatory is almost unique to the US.
From googling, it seems that US zip codes do in fact identify cities or smaller subdivisions but in a somewhat complicated way, and not one in which a human could look at the number and know it’s for Big Hill, Mordor.
For the UK you just need the postcode but it’s best to also use the ‘post town’ if you know it. Using counties in an address is nowadays obsolete and confusing - address databases use them but they shouldn’t.
Was mentioned that UK counties are not necessary in postal addresses. Actually US states might not be either. If you put the right zip code I don’t think mail would be bounced back to you just because you forgot the two letter state code. We’re used to thinking of state as key to a US address in terms of humans recognizing where it is generally as well as disambiguating the many towns (and at least two sizable cities, Portland OR v Portland ME) in different states with the same name. And of course you’re supposed to put the state in the address. But it doesn’t really matter to a machine reading the zip code.
The canton in Switzerland is only useful for the local government. For shipping, only the post code and town are needed. Probably the town is actually optional, as the post code already indicates the town.
Can’t just be the town name though. There’s lots of duplicates.
It’s quite annoying when I want to order something from a company that has U.S. state dropdowns, but doesn’t have Not Applicable for other countries, even though the company says they ship to Switzerland.
The canton in Switzerland is only useful for the local government. For shipping, only the post code and town are needed. Probably the town is actually optional, as the post code already indicates the town.
Can’t just be the town name though. There’s lots of duplicates.
It’s quite annoying when I want to order something from a company that has U.S. state dropdowns, but doesn’t have Not Applicable for other countries, even though the company says they ship to Switzerland.
See Current federations. These are all countries where the regional governments have more autonomy. This list does not cover all the countries you want, but overlaps considerably. For example, Japan usually wants prefecture in the address.
In the US there are ten big regions the first digit. The next two digits indicate the city, town or area. The last two digits indicate which office of the post office handles delivery for that address. The last four digits, in Zip+4, indicates the route portion, which could be a street, a large building, the floor of some apartment building, etc. Basically an area that the postman might carry all the mail for in his bag before returning to his truck to reload. It does not indicate a single address. My neighbor and I have the same one, I know.
So 5 digit ZIP plus street address (and apt. number if relevant) is all you need strictly speaking (though the wrong person might open it there I guess).
The only European country I’ve sent mail to that requires administrative subdivisions to be given is Russia. For everywhere else (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, UK, Hungary, France, Italy, Poland, and many more), giving the street address, municipality, and post code is sufficient.
If the OP wants an authoritative and comprehensive answer to their question, they should consult the addressing guides of the Universal Postal Union. Almost every country is a member of the UPU, and their respective postal systems submit to the UPU a set of definitive specifications on how mail is to be addressed. The UPU collects and posts these on its websites for senders of mail to consult. Whether to include administrative subdivisions in the address is something that is mentioned (if applicable) in each country’s guide.
I agree basically. Our 5 digit zip, the only one for our small city, indicates the main post office, the three substations have the same one. And since post offices know which state they’re in, it would seem only an obtuse attitude by USPS would cause them to return items lacking a state in the address, if the street and zip are correct. But whether that would actually ever happen I’m not sure.
The town definitely does not have to be correct. This comes up frequently in discussion of the somewhat odd use of municipalities in addresses in NY (the City). As is well known, only mail going to Manhattan is addressed ‘New York, NY’. In the other boroughs the borough serves as the ‘city’, except generally in Queens where a set of older municipality names are used. But everyone in every part of Queens is not consistent about those, and some people in some parts actually do write addresses as ‘Queens, NY’ rather than the traditional Flushing, Jamaica, etc. But in age of zip codes USPS doesn’t actually care: if the zip and street address are correct it gets there.
My zip+4 consists of consists of the addresses on my side of the street between the two nearest cross streets, urban area rectangular street grid.
The first letter of a Canadian postal code also unambiguously identifies the province* (and for large provinces, the particular region), so I suppose mail should also reach its destination if you neglect to write the province but have the correct postal code. Still, it isn’t a bad idea to add redundancy.
*I just checked, and postal codes in both the Northwest Territories and Nunavut start with X, but I’m still correct since they aren’t provinces.
Having the option to put in a subdivision name is a useful checksum against errors in the official postcode - less of a thing in online orders where you don’t have to read someone’s terrible handwriting, but people can still fat-finger a postcode, or have a brain fart and put in the one for their old house. I always include ‘town name’ when mailing my parents in the UK for that reason, even though in theory the postcode has all that information already (way more information, in fact) and the post office is still capable of stuffing it up even so (I got a piece of mail very clearly labelled to an address in West Australia - ie, the other side of the continent - last year, and one to a random street name in the next suburb just last week)
However, I wouldn’t make it a dropdown except in cases where you’re really rock-solid certain of the division names and that they’re never ever going to change, because nothing is worse than trying to put info into a field and discover that you can’t because the field-creator had a different idea of what the possible values were than you do…and they’re wrong!! Free text is better.
You might find this site useful for comprehensive information about addressing letters to different countries. I think I got it from an earlier Straightdope thread, and have found it useful from time to time.
About Singapore it says:
*Singapore is a bit unusual in that it is a city that is also a country. And it has postal codes. (Vatican City is another such city/country.) Logically we would write Singapore addresses like this:
Person’s Name
Dept of Info Systems and Computer Science
National University of Singapore
Lower Kent Ridge Road
SINGAPORE 119081
But the USPS does not want postal codes on the country line, so instead we pretend that Singapore is the city name as well as the country name:
Lower Kent Ridge Road
Singapore 119081
SINGAPORE
Singapore postal codes were changed from 4 to 6 digits in 1995. All the street signs also had to be changed, since they had 4-digit postcodes on them. Under the new system, each building in Singapore has its own unique postcode.*
Italy’s top level subdivisions are “regions,” equivalent to US states or Canadian provinces. Each region is subdivided into “provinces” that are relatively small and the equivalent of counties. But Italian mailing addresses use the 2-letter province code the way US addresses use the 2-letter state code; the regions are ignored.
Azerbaijan is the biggest country I know of that has no equivalent of states/provinces/regions. Its regions are economic divisions, not administrative ones. The only administrative subdivisions are the 68 rayons (districts), 12 cities, and 1 autonomous republic.
Estonia has only counties as its top level subdivisions—small counties like in the US or Canada, not big counties like in the UK or Ireland.
Mail to rural Thailand is addressed
hhh M. vv T. ssssss A. dddddd J. pppppp zzzzz THAILAND
where the lower-case fields are replaced with house and village numbers, and names of subdistrict, district and province. zzzzz is the zip-code. The first digit of the zip-code denotes one of nine regional centers; the 2nd digit denotes a province within that region; the 3rd and 4th digits point to a specific post office; the 5th digit AFAIK is always Zero. Most Districts have exactly one post office; some have 2 or more.
Our own post office is just 2 miles away, and the employees know me so, as an experiment, I addressed a postcard to “Septimus 46170.” It wasn’t delivered — I’ll guess it was shunted off to Dead Letter before ever reaching our local post office.
— I’ll guess it was shunted off to Dead Letter before ever reaching our local post office.