Address enquiry
Find customers, debtors and friends again

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Find the addresses of former customers, donors and individuals again, even if you haven’t had contact with them for years. Swiss Post uses partially automated search processes to look up individual personal addresses – both within Switzerland and abroad. If the person you are looking for has died, Swiss Post can often locate their next of kin.

If you regularly send mailings, you know from experience that address details change frequently. The more time has passed since you last had contact with a customer, debtor or former classmate, the more difficult it becomes to find their current address.

You need a partner who knows every letter box and every P.O. Box to keep you up to date at all times. The quality and quantity of the Swiss Post address data are unrivalled throughout Switzerland.

We do not sell or lease address data. The data that we acquire merely serves to help us find someone that you are looking for.

Address maintenance online

With “Address maintenance online”, all movers’ addresses and officially published notifications of death are available for an address comparison.

Service and features

The address search initially covers Switzerland but can be expanded further afield if requested. The Address Competence Center serves you individually in accordance with your specifications: you decide which step to begin with. After each step, you will receive feedback about the results and can then decide whether you want to keep going and what steps you wish to take.

Level 1: information sources within Swiss Post

This database contains every address from the past ten years and every address which is currently valid in Switzerland. It also contains the details of 4.8 million change of address notifications and 480,000 official death notices from the past ten years. Our team of around 12,000 mail carriers are another source of information. They have a huge store of local knowledge – they know who used to live where, who moved away without leaving a forwarding order, or who has changed their name. The search takes a maximum of five working days.

Level 2: Switzerland’s residents’ register offices

Using a partially automated, anonymized process, we contact the residents’ register office in the last known location at which the person in question deregistered, to find out where they intended to move – or whether they have perhaps died in the meantime. The search takes a maximum of ten working days.

Level 3: international addresses

Research into international address data based on various data sources: post offices, residents’ services, official directories and address service providers. At present, we can cover the following countries:

  • Belgium
  • Germany
  • France
  • United Kingdom
  • Italy
  • Luxembourg
  • Netherlands
  • Austria
  • Portugal
  • Spain
  • USA

The search takes a maximum of 30 working days.

High success rate

Thanks to our multistep procedure that draws on different data sources, most requests to locate someone’s current address produce a positive result, even if the original address contained errors (i.e. incorrect spellings of the names, streets or towns/cities, incorrect house number or incorrect postcode). The success rate for searches within Switzerland stands at around 60 percent, and the figure for foreign addresses is in the region of 40 percent. If the person has died, Swiss Post can sometimes trace their heirs.

Preconditions

Anyone who wants to use this service needs a Swiss Post Customer Center login (user account), a billing relationship and a franking licence. Your customer advisor will be more than happy to provide you with assistance.

Data is transferred using a secure server. We use standardized input and output structures (text files with semicolons as dividers) to facilitate automated, machine-based data exchange. Information about these structures can be found in the instructions for the “Address enquiry” service.

Data transfer / procedure

Enter the addresses you want Swiss Post to research (containing the following data: first name, last name, street, house number, postcode, town/city, country, own identification features) on our or your own SFTP or FTP server, and indicate the search step you want us to use for each address. You can request individual addresses or ask for an address file.

The request can cover one search step (1, 2 or 3), or a bundle (1 and 2). You will receive the answers via your selected channel.

Prices for individual addresses

We charge an input price for every address you want us to search for, and there is a match price if we are successful. If our research yields a new address or information about an address, it is counted as a match.

Level 1: search in Swiss Post’s reference databases

  • Basic price of CHF 15 for each address in the search
  • Additional fee of CHF 10 for each match

Level 2: search using Switzerland’s residents’ register offices

  • Basic price of CHF 25 for each address in the search
  • Additional fee of CHF 10 for each match

Steps 1 + 2 as a bundle:

  • Basic price of CHF 35 for each address in the search
  • Additional fee of CHF 10 for each match

Level 3: searches outside Switzerland

  • Basic price of CHF 45 for each address in the search
  • Additional fee of CHF 10 for each match

There is a discount model for companies with annual sales of more than CHF 200,000.

All prices exclude VAT.

Documents

Do you need some advice?
Address Competence Center

Give us a call

Monday to Friday: 8 a.m. – 12 noon and 1.30 p.m. – 5 p.m.

+41 58 386 67 67

+41 58 386 67 67

Write to us

We are here to help
address-maintenance@swisspost.ch

Contact form

For hearing impaired persons

For deaf or hearing impaired persons

In sign language

How to find us

Post CH Ltd
PostMail
Address Competence Center
Sternmatt 6
P.O. Box 2151
6010 Kriens 2

Map and directions (PDF)