Reverse Geocoding API

Reverse Geocoding is useful when you have a certain set of coordinates and want to find out the corresponding address. For example, if you need to know your customer’s address by GPS coordinates or get an address of a building a user has clicked on.

Geoapify provides a powerful and easy-to-use Reverse Geocoding API. We return you a well-formed complete address and its parts, like city, postcode, and street, for the latitude/longitude coordinates.

Try the Reverse Geocoding API in the API Playground:

• Authentication and Geocoding API key
• API reference
• Reverse Geocoding examples
• Pricing

Authentication and API key

If you don't have an API key, create one from our registration page. Once you register, you can get a Geocoding API key for free! For an overview of our plans, please take a look at our price page.

How to get Reverse Geocoding API key

1. Register on Geoapify MyProjects page
2. Create a new project.
3. Go to the API Keys section. One API key is generated automatically. You can generate multiple API keys per project if required.
4. Optionally, you can protect the API key by listing allowed IP addresses, HTTP referrers, origins, and CORS.
5. Choose "Reverse Geocoding API" and an API key to get an URL and programming code.
6. Press the "Try" button to execute the API call and get the result object.

API reference

Reverse Geocoding API works via HTTP Get request. It accepts the latitude/longitude coordinates pair and returns the corresponding address. Optionally pass the type parameter to define address level to search: city, postcode, country, etc.

Request URL

https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?REQUEST_PARAMS

Here are some examples of Reverse Geocoding URLs to try out:

• Simple lat/long to address example ("52.47944744483806, 13.213967739855434"):

https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=52.47944744483806&lon=13.213967739855434&format=json&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY

• Get postcode by lat/long ("52.55795596809756, 13.47437607244808"):

https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=52.55795596809756&lon=13.47437607244808&type=postcode&format=json&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY

Request parameters

Response Object

The response returned contains a GeoJSON FeatureCollection, JSON, or XML object. Each address contains the following fields:

Note! Depending on the type of returned location some fields may be missing. For example, the "Asia" continent doesn't have a specific country, state and so on.

Code samples

We made Reverse Geocoding Examples for you to help you get started with the API:

Reverse Geocoding Javascript

Calling the API is simple. Just make an HTTP request with either the fetch() function in JavaScript or using the node-fetch library in NodeJS. The following example shows just a few parameters that are available to be sent with the location information:

fetch(`https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=${lat}&lon=${lon}&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY`)
.then(response => response.json())
.then(result => {
  if (result.features.length) {
    console.log(result.features[0].properties.formatted);
  } else {
    console.log("No address found");
  }
});

Get a building address on a Leaflet map click

If you want to get a building address a user clicked on, you need to add a click event to the map and call the Reverse Geocoding API when it happens.

Let's add a Popup element with the address for this location:

const mymap = L.map('mapid').setView([51.213826, 4.453636], 16);
...

function onMapClick(e) {
  // user clicked on a map
  fetch(`https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=${e.latlng.lat}&lon=${e.latlng.lng}&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY`)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(result => {
    if (result.features.length) {
      const address = result.features[0].properties.formatted;
      L.popup().setLatLng(e.latlng).setContent(address).openOn(mymap);
    } else {
      L.popup().setLatLng(e.latlng).setContent("No address found").openOn(mymap);
    }
  });
}

mymap.on('click', onMapClick);

Get a building address on a MapLibre GL map click

You can query an address on a MapLibre map click similar to Leaflet map way:

import { Map } from "maplibre-gl";

const map = new Map({
  container: "my-map",
  style: `https://maps.geoapify.com/v1/styles/klokantech-basic/style.json?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY`,
});

map.on("click", "places", function (e) {
  var coordinates = [e.lngLat.lng, e.lngLat.lat];

  // on small zoom levels it could happen that a location is present multiple times on the map
  while (Math.abs(e.lngLat.lng - coordinates[0]) > 180) {
    coordinates[0] += e.lngLat.lng > coordinates[0] ? 360 : -360;
  }

  fetch(`https://api.geoapify.com/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=${coordinates[1]}&lon=${coordinates[0]}&apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY`, requestOptions)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(result => {
    if (result.features.length) {
      const address = result.features[0].properties.formatted;
      new mapboxgl.Popup().setLngLat(coordinates).setHTML(address).addTo(map);
    } else {
      new mapboxgl.Popup().setLngLat(coordinates).setHTML("No address found").addTo(map);
    }
  });
});

Pricing

Geoapify Location Platform provides APIs which have different difficulty, execution times and require different resource capacities on our servers.

To make our pricing plans easy-to-understand and unify them we introduced "credits" currency that is used to describe conditions and options of each pricing plan. All the credits used for Geoapify API calls per 24 hours accumulated to Daily API usage.

Check Geoapify Pricing Plans and choose the one that fits your needs the best.

One Geocoding API / Reverse Geocoding API / Autocomplete API request is equal to one credit:

You can save up to 50% of API call costs when you send Batch Geocoding requests.