What the Administrative Division Lookup does
Enter a postal code or a coordinate and this tool shows the administrative hierarchy behind it - the country, the admin 1 division (a state, region or province), the admin 2 division (a district, county or municipality) and the place name the dataset records - together with how many postal records each division holds and what the neighbouring divisions are.
It deliberately does not produce a postal address. Divisions are what you need when you are grouping customers by state, checking which district a site falls in, or building a report that has to roll up cleanly; an address is a different question with a different answer. Everything is resolved from the GeoNames postal export vendored on this site, in your browser, with no service involved.
How to use it
- Choose the country. The hierarchy comes from that country's vendored file, so the level names - state, region, prefecture, province - follow whatever GeoNames records for it.
- Choose whether you are looking up a postal code or a coordinate. A coordinate is matched to the nearest recorded code, and the distance to that code is shown so you can judge how firm the match is.
- Read the hierarchy cards. Each level carries the name, a short note on what that level means, and the number of postal records in the dataset that sit inside it.
- Look at the sibling divisions table to see the other districts inside the same state or region, with their record counts and share - useful for spotting a division that is far larger or smaller than you expected.
- Expand the full admin 1 list to browse the whole country, or export the hierarchy as CSV or JSON.
Reading the results
Admin 1 and admin 2 are GeoNames' own labels, not each country's legal terminology. Admin 1 is the state in India, the constituent country in the United Kingdom, the region in France and the prefecture in Japan; admin 2 is the district, county, municipality or borough underneath it.
Record counts are a count of postal records, not of population or area. A dense urban district with many codes can outnumber a large rural province several times over.
An empty division is recorded as "not recorded", never guessed. Germany, for example, leaves admin 2 empty for a good many rows, and this page leaves the level out rather than inventing one.
A coordinate match carries a distance. Within a few kilometres the divisions are almost certainly right even if the exact code is not; at fifty kilometres, treat everything with suspicion.
Worked example: PIN 560001 and a coordinate in Delhi
Looking up 560001 in India gives four levels: country India; admin 1 Karnataka; admin 2 Bengaluru; place Bangalore G.P.O. The admin 1 card shows how many postal records in the dataset sit inside Karnataka, and the sibling table lists the other districts of the state with their shares.
Switching to a coordinate and entering 28.6128, 77.2292 matches the nearest recorded code, a few hundred metres away, and returns country India, admin 1 Delhi, admin 2 New Delhi. The distance is shown next to the result, which is what tells you the division is trustworthy here.
The same lookup for the United Kingdom postcode SW1A 1AA matches on the leading part SW1A - the open dataset holds outward codes only - and returns admin 1 England, admin 2 Greater London. The match is reported as a leading-part match rather than an exact one, because that is what it is.
How this differs from Address by Latitude and Longitude
The existing Address by Latitude and Longitude tool returns a formatted postal address from Google's reverse geocoder: a street, a number, a town, a country, ready to put on an envelope. This page answers a different question with different data. It gives you the administrative hierarchy - country, admin 1, admin 2, place - resolved from the offline dataset, with record counts and sibling divisions attached, and never produces an address line at all. If you are labelling data by region rather than posting something, this is the shape you want.
Limitations: what the result does not prove
- This is not an official administrative register. It is what one open dataset records, and boundary changes, renamings and mergers reach it slowly.
- Level names vary by country and are GeoNames' labels rather than legal ones. Check what admin 1 and admin 2 mean for the country you are looking at before using them in a report.
- A coordinate is matched to the nearest recorded code, not to a boundary. Near a district edge the nearest record can sit on the wrong side of the line.
- Admin 3 is not carried in the postal export for most countries, so the hierarchy usually stops at admin 2 and a place name. Where the dataset has nothing, the level is omitted rather than filled in.
Privacy: where your data goes
Everything you paste, type or drop is processed in this browser tab. It is not uploaded, logged, stored or sent to analytics. Session recording and tag-manager scripts are switched off on this page.
Standards and sources
- GeoNames postal code export (CC BY 4.0) - checked 19 Sep 2026
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence - checked 19 Sep 2026
- ISO 3166 - Codes for the representation of names of countries - checked 19 Sep 2026
- ISO 3166-2 - Codes for the names of subdivisions
Frequently asked questions
What do admin 1 and admin 2 actually mean?
They are GeoNames' generic names for the first and second levels of administrative division below the country. Admin 1 is a state, region, province, prefecture or constituent country depending on where you are; admin 2 is the district, county, municipality or borough beneath it. The labels are consistent across countries even though the real-world units are not.
Can I find the district for a coordinate rather than a postal code?
Yes - switch to coordinate mode. The point is matched to the nearest recorded postal code and the divisions of that record are returned, with the distance to the match shown so you can see how much weight it deserves. Within a few kilometres the divisions are usually right even where the exact code is not.
Why does my lookup show no admin 2 division?
Because the dataset does not record one for that record. Several countries have large numbers of rows with an empty second level - Germany is the clearest case - and this page leaves the level out rather than guessing a district that the source does not contain.
Are the record counts a measure of population?
No. They count postal records in the dataset, which is closer to a measure of how finely the postal system divides an area. A city district with hundreds of codes will outnumber a sparsely populated province with a handful, regardless of how many people live in either.
Is this data good enough for official reporting?
Treat it as a working aid rather than an authority. For statutory reporting, use your national statistics office's own classification, which defines the units legally and updates them on a published schedule. This is an open snapshot, useful for grouping and sanity-checking.
Why does a UK postcode match only its first part?
The open dataset holds outward codes - SW1A, M1, EH1 - rather than full unit postcodes, because the complete file is a licensed Royal Mail product. The lookup falls back to the outward code and says so, and the divisions it returns are those of that wider area.
Does the lookup send my postal code or coordinate anywhere?
No. The country's data file is downloaded from this site and everything is matched inside your browser. Nothing you type is transmitted, which is worth knowing when the coordinate is a home, a customer site or anything else you would rather not log elsewhere.
Last reviewed by the A2Z.Tools team against the sources listed above.
