About the National Address Register
The National Address Register is the closest thing Canada has to a national list of addresses. It is published by Statistics Canada, it is free, and it is the source behind the address downloads on this site.
It is also incomplete, published twice a year, and shipped in a form that most people cannot open. This page explains what it is. The data dictionary explains what we do with it.
What it contains
The register provides a list of valid georeferenced civic addresses in Canada in a standardized address structure, with the corresponding mailing version of each address following Canada Post’s addressing guidelines.
Addresses are extracted from Statistics Canada’s Building Register. They carry no information about who lives or operates at an address, and are published as non-confidential for that reason.
Each record carries the civic address, the mailing version of it, a coordinate, and — where the information is available — building usage and additional delivery information such as a rural route or post office box.
How it is structured
The register separates two things that most address files conflate.
A location is a physical building. An address is a building unit within it.
A detached house is one location with one address. An apartment building is one location with many addresses, one per unit. This is the register’s own data model, and it is why our downloads are published at both grains rather than flattened into one file.
It also means the raw release cannot be counted naively. A single tower can contribute hundreds of address rows, so any total that treats rows as buildings will be wrong.
How often it is published
Twice a year, with a lag. Each release reflects the state of the register at its reference period, not the date you download it.
We publish from the most recent release. The build date is stated on every download page and in the data dictionary.
What it does well
Coverage is national and consistent. Municipal open address data is current and detailed, but every municipality publishes on its own schedule, in its own schema, under its own licence. The register is one file, one structure, one licence, for the whole country.
Units are included. Both ownership and rental units appear, which municipal files frequently omit. That makes dwelling counts possible where municipal data would show a single address.
It is genuinely open. Free to use, redistribute and build on, under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.
Where it falls short
Addresses are incomplete, and predictably so. An address is published only once it has been validated against at least two independent sources. Combined with the twice-yearly release cycle, this means coverage is systematically weakest in recently built areas — new subdivisions are precisely where two independent sources have not yet agreed.
If your work concerns growth areas, treat the register as conservative. This is the single most important thing to understand about it, and it is why we publish current municipal address data alongside it where that data is available.
Positional quality is inconsistent. Coordinates originate from different contributing sources and vary in accuracy between them. Some records have no coordinate at all.
Geography identifiers are dated and partial. The register carries a census subdivision code at 2016 vintage and no census division code. We attribute both at current vintage by spatial join, which is what makes the data usable alongside current census products.
What it takes to use the raw release
The register is published as a national release, split into multiple parts for the larger provinces. A single large province runs to millions of address records, and the national release is many times that.
To get from the published release to a file you can work with, you need to:
- Download, extract and join the split parts
- Reproject the coordinates
- Attribute each address to its census division and subdivision, because the identifiers in the source are dated and incomplete
- Aggregate unit records to one row per building, so joins to parcels, boundaries or catchments do not multiply your counts
None of that is difficult in principle. It is difficult in practice, because a file this size will not open in a spreadsheet and the aggregation step is a database operation rather than a desktop one. Doing it properly needs specialist software and someone who knows how to drive it — and it has to be repeated every time Statistics Canada publishes.
We do it once and publish the result. Free, with registration.
Source and licence
National Address Register, Statistics Canada, Catalogue 46-26-0002.
- National Address Register — release page and archive
- National Address Register User Guide — concepts and variable definitions
- Statistics Canada Open Licence Agreement
Our downloads are adapted from the register. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.