Plus Codes vs traditional street addresses

Every place on Earth already has a coordinate — a latitude and longitude — but nobody says them out loud. What we say out loud is street addresses, and street addresses have real gaps: they don't exist in some countries, they change over time, and they don't map cleanly to specific spots on a large property. Google's Plus Codes (formally, the Open Location Code) are an attempt to give every 3.5-meter square on Earth a unique, memorable, offline-computable identifier that fills those gaps.

Here's what they are, how they work, and where they're useful.

What a Plus Code looks like

A full Plus Code is 11 characters split into two parts:

849VCWC8+R9

That's roughly a 3.5m × 3.5m square — small enough to identify a specific parking spot or the front door of a house.

The first 8 characters (849VCWC8) narrow the location to a 14m × 14m square worldwide. The + is a delimiter. The final 2 characters (R9) refine to the 3.5m × 3.5m square. If you want block-level precision instead of house-level, you can drop the last 2 characters — a "10-digit Plus Code" like 849VCWC8+R is enough to identify a specific block.

There's also a short form that pairs 4 or 6 characters with a nearby place name:

CWC8+R9 Mountain View

Short Plus Codes read more like conventional shorthand and can be typed into Google Maps directly.

How Plus Codes are calculated

The math is fully open-source. Google published the Open Location Code specification under Apache 2.0. Any two people with the same lat/lng and the same reference document will get the same Plus Code, without contacting a central server.

That matters for three reasons:

1. No API required. You can compute a Plus Code offline from any coordinate.
2. No usage license required. The algorithm and character set are free to use.
3. No account or subscription. Anyone can generate one, anyone can look one up.

Contrast with what3words, a proprietary alternative that assigns three English words to every 3m × 3m square. The what3words algorithm and word list are closed-source; using it commercially requires an API license; caching the results is contractually restricted.

For a public directory of every US home, Plus Codes are the right choice: free, offline, no downstream licensing worry.

Where Plus Codes are useful

The problems they solve:

Addressing where street addresses don't exist. Rural roads without house numbers, informal settlements in developing countries, remote cabins with only mailbox numbers on a shared drive. Plus Codes work anywhere on Earth — every square inch of land has a code.

Precise pickup and delivery. A driver getting to 123 Main St might arrive at the front door, the driveway, the side gate, or the wrong side of a large complex. A Plus Code identifies exactly where.

Emergency response in dense areas. 911 systems increasingly accept Plus Codes as an alternative to street addresses because they resolve ambiguity — "the front door of the building" vs "the loading dock in back."

Meeting at specific spots in parks or events. "Meet me at the picnic table" doesn't work in Central Park; the Plus Code for that specific table does.

Country-scale addressing infrastructure. Several countries — including India, parts of Africa, and Kolkata's postal system — have adopted Plus Codes as official addressing.

Where street addresses still win

Plus Codes are not a replacement for street addresses in most cases. Where street addresses still win:

Human memorability. "802 First Street" is much easier to remember than 87F43RR4+HRF. For the address you live at, memorability matters.

Cultural and legal context. Street addresses carry with them the neighborhood, city, and state, which is what most legal documents (mortgages, deeds, tax records) reference. Plus Codes strip context; that's a feature for pickup locations and a bug for legal ownership.

Directional intuition. From "802 First Street" you can guess it's the 8th block, first street, in a specific city. From 87F43RR4+HRF you can guess nothing without decoding.

Search engine behavior. When people search for a specific home, they type a street address, not a Plus Code. Property websites rank for address queries; Plus Code queries barely exist.

For that reason, HomeStoop uses street addresses as the canonical URL structure and Plus Codes as an additional identifier on the property page — useful for delivery, meetings, and coordinate-level precision, but not the primary way to find your home.

How HomeStoop uses Plus Codes

Every HomeStoop property page shows the Plus Code for the property's coordinates, generated offline via the open-source open-location-code library. Clicking the Plus Code opens Google Maps at that exact square — helpful for guiding a delivery driver to the front door, a friend to a specific spot on the property, or a contractor to the correct side of the building.

Plus Codes appear as small monospace text under the address, cited to Google's Open Location Code standard.

What to check next

If you want to play with Plus Codes:

• Open plus.codes and search any address to see its code
• Type any Plus Code into Google Maps search to jump to the exact square
• If you build a service that shows locations to users, the open-location-code npm package generates codes offline in ~5KB

Plus Codes don't replace addresses. They add a layer of precision for situations where addresses aren't precise enough — and that layer is free, open, and works anywhere on Earth.