Bulk Address Validation Tool: Web Interface

With access to our Web Interface, a person with zero programming experience can process lists of addresses in only a few minutes. Using a simple copy and paste process, you can standardize and validate your addresses and enrich them with relevant data like county name, congressional district, latitude, longitude, and more. The tool can process up to 25,000 US addresses or 2,500 international addresses at once. (For longer lists of US addresses, try our Command-Line Interface.) Additionally, the Web Interface has a US ZIP Code mode in which you can submit ZIP Codes and get back all the corresponding cities and states, or put in cities and states and get back all the matching ZIP Codes.

You may want to set up a free account to try out your list.

Quick-Start Video
Step-by-Step Instructions
Help

Quick-Start Video

Step-by-Step Instructions

Compile your data in one of these file formats: Excel, CSV, or tab-delimited text.

Organize your data into columns, using one of the combinations shown below. (The more data provided, the better.) The top row MUST consist of column titles, spelled exactly as you see here.

For US Addresses:
street | city | state | zipcode
street | city | state
street | zipcode
address (entire address in a single column)

If you have secondary information (apartment/suite/etc.) in a separate column, label that column secondary. Such a column can be added to any of the first three combinations shown above. For example:
street | secondary | city | state | zipcode

street	city	state	zipcode
11310 Old Seward Highway	Anchorage	AK	99515
3211 Edwards Lake Pkwy	Birmingham	AL
11219 N Rodney Parham Road			72212
4507 North US Highway 89	Flagstaff	AZ	86004

Still not quite sure? Take a peek at this sample spreadsheet.

For ZIP Codes:
city | state | zipcode
city | state
zipcode

city	state
Anchorage	AK
Birmingham	AL
Montgomery	AL
Little Rock	AR
Flagstaff	AZ
Bakersfield	CA

country	address1	locality	administrative_area	postal_code
AUS	200 River Terrace	Kangaroo Point	Queensland	4169
DEU	Hainichener Strasse 64	Freiberg	Sachsen
PYF	21 Allée Pierre Loti	Papeete		98714
RUS	ул. Фурштатская, д. 13			191028
JPN	きみ野 6-1-8	大和市	神奈川県	242-0001

Select the columns that contain your address data, including the column titles themselves. Optionally, you can include columns that contain non-address data (like ID number or business name). All the data that is pasted into the tool will always be returned untouched as part of the output. If you do include columns of non-address data, be sure to give those columns non-address titles.
Once you have selected the data, press Control-C (Command-C on a Mac) to copy the data.
Go to the page for the Bulk Address Validation Tool Web Interface. Note that, when you are not logged in, this tool offers you only 10 free lookups, but when you are logged in, it draws lookups from your account subscription.
("Step 1") Choose the appropriate item from the drop-down menu. If you want to add ZIP Codes to street addresses, choose "validate US addresses." (Note that, according to the selection you make in this step, the steps below will change a bit. The instructions that immediately follow here assume you have chosen "validate US addresses" in this step.)
("Step 2") Click in the big data input box, then type Control-V (Command-V on a Mac) to paste in your input data.
("Step 3") We would recommend that you click the checkbox to use our "enhanced matching" capabilities when processing your addresses. Note that if you have one of our older "Legacy Standard" plans, you will need to leave this box unchecked.
("Step 4") This is optional. If you have multiple licenses that could be used to process US addresses, and you want to specify which of those licenses to use, enter the license value here. (The most common license value here would be us-core-cloud. To see the exact license values for your subscriptions, see the Subscriptions page of your account.)
("Step 5") Press the pretty button. If, after a moment, the screen appears frozen, don't worry; the browser is still working. Just give it a minute.
("Step 6") After the output appears in the output box, click the highlighted word "here" in the instructions, to copy all of the output data to your clipboard.
Go back to your spreadsheet and click in the cell that you want to become the top-left cell of the output data. You can choose to paste on top of your original data, or off to the right in the same sheet, or in a new, blank sheet.
Type Control-V (or Command-V) and voila! Your original data is on the left; the output data is on the right, with column titles in brackets.

Help

What does all that data mean?

If you need help understanding the many output fields, please see either US Address Output Fields, US ZIP Code Output Fields, or International Output Fields.

My list failed to process.

Check if your input data has line breaks (two lines in the same cell) or quotation marks. These interfere with the tool's ability to sort the data correctly. Here's the solution:

Save your original Excel file in a different file format: "Tab Delimited Text."
Open the new file in a text editor, like Notepad++ for Windows or TextWrangler for Mac.
Copy and paste from the text file into our web page, then continue to follow the instructions above.

My browser crashed, and I lost my processed list.

Please see the "Help" section at the bottom of the Web Interface page.

I pasted the output data into my spreadsheet, and now it's a mess.

Excel sometimes makes the wrong assumption when deciding whether to delimit your data by tabs or commas. If this happens:

Check if the pasted output data ended up in a single column. If so, go to the Data menu and choose "Text to Columns." In the dialog box that opens, experiment with choosing to delimit by tabs or commas. Getting the delimiter right will usually solve the problem. If the data did not end up in a single column, proceed with the steps below.
Undo the paste that made a mess.
Open a text editor, like Notepad++ for Windows or TextWrangler for Mac.
Paste the Smarty (formerly SmartyStreets) output data into a new window of the text editor, and save the file.
Go back to your Excel spreadsheet and click on the cell where you want to paste the output data.
From the Excel File menu, choose Import.
Specify "Text file" and click Import.
Navigate to your text file, select it, and click on Get Data.
In the Text Import Wizard, choose the default values.