13 million places under CC BY, as files or an API
GeoNames is a worldwide gazetteer: over 13 million places and 32 million names. Each record has WGS84 coordinates, a feature class and code (city, stream, peak, building and so on), a country, admin codes, population and a time zone. You can download the whole database as tab-separated text files rebuilt every day, or query it through about forty web services. Data and services are CC BY 4.0, so commercial use is fine as long as GeoNames gets credit.
Daily diffs, dated alternate names and IANA time zones
- Alongside
allCountries.zip(403 MB compressed), the download server publishes the records modified and deleted the day before, which is what keeps a local copy in sync. - Population-filtered extracts run from
cities15000(about 25,000 places) tocities500(about 185,000), for a city list that doesn't need the full dump. alternateNamesV2ties each name variant to a language and flags it as preferred, short, colloquial or historic, with the period it was in use. The same file carries IATA and ICAO airport codes and Wikidata IDs.- Given a coordinate, the API returns the IANA time zone, the country and subdivision, the ocean, the elevation or nearby Wikipedia articles.
- The
searchendpoint tolerates typos, matches name prefixes and filters by country, feature class or bounding box.
Credit caps on the free API and as-is data
Street addresses are covered in a few regions only. Outside them there is no address lookup or street-level reverse geocoding: extendedFindNearby returns address details in the US and only the place hierarchy everywhere else.
The free API allows 10,000 credits a day and 1,000 an hour per username. Most calls cost one credit, but findNearby costs 4, which works out to 2,500 calls a day. Only the premium web services come with an availability commitment: from €40 for 100,000 credits valid for a year at 99%, or €250 for a million credits at 99.9%.
Postal codes cover about 120 countries, many of them partially. Ireland, Malta and Chile only get the first characters of each code, for copyright reasons, and Brazil only its major codes. For Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, full codes sit in a separate file. In many countries the coordinates are estimated, either by matching place names or by averaging neighbouring codes.
Most first-level subdivisions use FIPS codes. Only the US, Switzerland, Belgium and Montenegro use ISO codes, so joining GeoNames against ISO 3166-2 data takes a mapping table.
The free data comes as is, with no warranty of accuracy. It is aggregated from over a hundred sources and corrected by users through a wiki interface. The checked version is paid: Premium Data costs €840 a year for twelve monthly releases that go through consistency checks, with release notes and extra files, among them ISO codes for subdivisions and a UN/LOCODE mapping.
Coverage density differs widely between countries. On 26 October 2026 the statistics page listed 608,562 places in Norway, 222,254 in Germany and 174,771 in France. The US alone holds 2,241,408, a sixth of the database.
GeoNames is a project of Unxos GmbH in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Its running costs are covered by donations and sponsorship, and the files on the download server are dated 26 October 2026.