US Address Geocoder + Census Tract Lookup (Census Bureau)

Turn US street addresses into latitude/longitude and the census state, county, tract and block they fall in, using the official U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder (geocoding.geo.census.gov). No API key, no scraping. Addresses are sent in batches of up to 10,000 per request.

Typical uses: attach a census tract to a customer list (to join ACS/Census statistics), check which county or state an address falls in, add coordinates to a spreadsheet of addresses.

What you get (one row per input address, in input order)

Field	Meaning
input	Your address exactly as you sent it
matched	true = found, false = Census has no match, null = not decided (see matchStatus)
matchStatus	Match, No_Match, Tie (several equally good matches), Invalid (your input was unusable), Error (the lookup failed)
matchedAddress, matchType	Standardized address Census matched, and Exact / Non_Exact
latitude, longitude, tigerLineId, side	Interpolated point and the street segment it came from
stateFips, stateName, stateAbbr	State
countyFips, countyGeoid, countyName	County (3-digit and 5-digit code)
tractCode, tractGeoid, tractName	Census tract (6-digit and 11-digit GEOID)
blockCode, blockGeoid, blockName	Census block (4-digit and 15-digit GEOID)
benchmark, vintage, dataAsOf, source, disclaimer	Which Census data version answered, and when
error, note, sectionErrors	Why a row is undecided or incomplete

Input

{
  "addresses": ["1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500"],
  "structuredAddresses": [{"street": "350 5th Ave", "city": "New York", "state": "NY", "zip": "10118"}],
  "includeGeographies": true,
  "benchmark": "Public_AR_Current",
  "vintage": "Current_Current"
}

All fields are optional; with no input the Actor geocodes an example public building. Include a city and state, or a ZIP code, with every street. benchmark / vintage are checked against the Census Bureau's own lists before the run starts.

Read this before trusting a match

• matchType: Non_Exact can be a different address. In our test of 20 public buildings, 5 came back Non_Exact: for example 200 N Spring St, Los Angeles was matched to 200 S SPRING ST (about 350 m away) and 1 City Hall Sq, Boston to 1 CITY HALL AVE. Compare matchedAddress with your input when exactness matters.
• Coordinates are interpolated along a street segment's address range, not measured at the building. Address ranges include numbers where no building exists.
• Tie is not "no match". It means Census found several equally good candidates. Add a ZIP code or direction and retry. Ties are free and returned with matched: null.
• Connecticut: the batch service returns the legacy county codes (for example 09003 Hartford County). Census's single-address service with the "Current" vintage returns the newer planning-region codes (09110). Tracts have the same number, but the county part of the GEOID differs. Pick your join key accordingly.
• Some addresses lie across a state line from their postal name (the Census Bureau's own Suitland, MD headquarters is addressed "Washington, DC"): the state fields describe where the point is, not what the mailing address says.

No silent failures

• An address Census cannot find is matched: false (free).
• If the Census service is down, times out, or leaves out a row, the row is matched: null, matchStatus: "Error" with an error text. It is never reported as "no match", and it is free.
• If a county name cannot be resolved the code is still returned and sectionErrors says so.

Pricing event

address-record: one per address that matched. No-match, tie, error and invalid rows are free. Your spending limit is respected: when the limit is reached the run stops and says so in the log.

Privacy

The Actor never writes your addresses to its log (it logs counts only). Addresses are sent to the Census Bureau's public service to be geocoded and returned in your dataset.

Source and disclaimer

Data: U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder API (MAF/TIGER address ranges), provided as-is. This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau may limit access to its service; the Actor paces its requests and retries on 429/5xx with back-off.