Postcodes in Nominatim

The blog post Nominatim and Postcodes describes the handling implemented since Nominatim 3.1.

Postcode centroids (aka 'calculated postcodes') are generated by looking at all postcodes of a country, grouping them and calculating the geometric centroid. There is currently no logic to deal with extreme outliers (typos or other mistakes in OSM data). There is also no check if a postcodes adheres to a country's format, e.g. if Swiss postcodes are 4 digits.

Regular updating calculated postcodes

The script to rerun the calculation is build/utils/update.php --calculate-postcodes and runs once per night on

Finding places that share a specific postcode

In the Nominatim database run

SELECT address->'postcode' as pc,
       osm_type, osm_id, class, type,
       st_x(centroid) as lon, st_y(centroid) as lat
FROM placex
WHERE country_code='fr'
  AND upper(trim (both ' ' from address->'postcode')) = '33210';

Alternatively on Overpass run the following query

out body;
out skel qt;