Test addresses laid out the way NZ Post sorts mail: unit and number, suburb, an RD line for rural roads, then town and postcode. Every postcode belongs to the town on the same line. The street is invented, so no row receives mail.
Town, suburb, and postcode are real. Street, number, and RD are random.
New Zealand addresses run from the person down to the postcode, with no commas, no full stops, and no region. The label on the left is the first card the tool shows on page load, minus the country line. The notes on the right walk through each row.
Mere Tipene
4/18 Totara Avenue
Mount Eden
Auckland 1024Add New Zealand as a last line only for mail posted from overseas. Copy as NZ Post label keeps the country line, and the one-line format adds commas for web forms, where a single text field expects them.
A form with one numeric house number field fails on four of these five rows. Split the street line into unit, number, and suffix before the row reaches your database.
| Written | Means | Store as |
|---|---|---|
4/18 Totara Avenue | Unit 4 at street number 18 | unit 4, number 18 |
Flat 2, 30 Hobson Street | Longer form of 2/30 | unit 2, number 30 |
9A Kereru Street | A second lot split off number 9 | number 9, suffix A |
2/9A Kereru Street | Unit 2 on lot 9A | unit 2, number 9, suffix A |
1482 Valley Road | Rural number, about 14.8 km along the road | number 1482 |
Watch spreadsheets. Open a CSV of unit addresses in Excel and a cell like 4/18 turns into a date. Import the street column as text, or keep unit and number in separate columns, which the CSV format here does. Pick Unit in the tool for a batch of slash rows. Mixed adds letter suffixes such as 9A.
Rural properties take a number from their distance along the road, measured in 10 metre steps from where the road starts. Odd numbers sit on the left, even on the right. 1482 Valley Road is about 14.8 km in, which is why rural numbers run into the thousands.
RD 2 names one Rural Delivery run out of a post town. The last line holds the post town, not the nearest settlement, so a farm 15 km from Te Puke still writes Te Puke 3182. Rural postcodes differ from the town's street postcode.
Callum Fraser
1482 Valley Road
RD 2
Te Puke 3182Test the RD line on its own. Address forms built for cities often have no field for RD 2, so the line ends up glued to the street or dropped. Choose Rural RD above for a full batch.
NZ postcodes have four digits. The first one places the address in a broad area, running roughly north to south.
Outside the two biggest cities, the last two digits split by delivery type. 00 to 39 cover street delivery, 40 to 69 PO Box lobbies, and 70 to 99 rural delivery. Te Puke shows the pattern with 3119 for town streets, 3153 for PO Boxes, and 3182 for RD runs. Auckland and Christchurch break the rule: Remuera is 1050 and Burnside is 8053, both street codes. Never infer delivery type from the digits in code.
Store postcodes as text. Northland and the North Shore start with 0, so 0630 for Browns Bay becomes 630 in an integer column. Offline, ^\d{4}$ is as far as validation goes. The pattern accepts codes NZ Post never issued, so check against the NZ Post postcode finder when the code has to exist.
Official names in the New Zealand Gazetteer carry macrons on long Māori vowels: Whangārei, Taupō, Whakatāne, Ōtaki, Ōpōtiki, Hāwera, Paekākāriki. A name filter built on [A-Za-z ] rejects all seven. A Latin-1 database column stores ā as a question mark.
Both spellings turn up in real data, so test both. Generate a batch With macrons, push the batch through every form and export you own, then switch to Plain ASCII and compare what got stored.
PO Box 1234, Shortland Street, Auckland 1140. Write them by hand when you need them.Suburb and postcode pairs were checked against the GeoNames postal dataset (CC BY 4.0).
The town, suburb, and postcode on each card are real and belong together. The street name, number, unit, and RD number are random, so most rows point at no property. A row still lands on a real house now and then, since streets named Totara or Kowhai exist in dozens of towns.
Recipient on the first line, then unit and street number with the street name, then the suburb in cities, then the town or city with the four-digit postcode on the same line. Rural addresses add an RD line above the town. NZ Post asks for no commas or full stops on the label, and the region never appears.
RD stands for Rural Delivery. RD 2 names one rural mail run out of a post town, and the town on the last line is where the run starts. A farm 15 km from Te Puke still writes Te Puke 3182 under its RD line.
Unit 2 at street number 15. The unit or flat number comes first, then a slash, then the street number. Store the two parts in separate fields, and import CSV columns holding them as text, since spreadsheets read 2/15 as a date.
No. NZ Post sorts on the town and postcode, so a region line adds nothing. This generator shows the region on each card for filtering and testing, then drops the region from the copied label and one-line formats.
No. Banks, couriers, and government agencies verify addresses, and a false one breaks their terms. Keep these rows to test data, screenshots, and demos.