Plus Code converter – Plus Codes to coordinates and back

Plus Codes are Google's free alternative to street addresses: a short string of digits and letters with a plus sign, such as 8FVC9G8F+6X, that names a small rectangle anywhere on Earth. Google Maps shows one for every dropped pin, and they are used for deliveries and emergency calls in places without house numbers, on event invitations, on parcels in parts of Africa and India, and in field data collected on phones. A code can be written in full or shortened to the last six or seven characters followed by a town, as Google Maps does: 9G8F+6X Zürich. This page reads both. It works out the missing first characters from the town, from a town you choose, or from the area the map shows, and it says which town it used. The result is the cell drawn on the map, its centre in decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds and UTM, and its real size on the ground. The other way round, click a point, search a town or use your location to get the code at the length you need, together with the short code for the nearest town. A whole list of codes or coordinates, such as a column from a spreadsheet, converts in one go to CSV, KML or GeoJSON.

How to use it

1. Paste a Plus Code, a short code with its town, or a Google Maps link, and press "Show".
2. Read the centre of the cell in decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds and UTM, and see the cell on the map.
3. Or click the map, search a town or use your location to get the Plus Code at the chosen length and the short code for the nearest town.
4. Copy single values, copy the share link, or convert a list to CSV, KML or GeoJSON.

How accurate is it?

A code is an area, not a point

Each pair of characters divides the cell before it into 20 by 20: two characters give 20° by 20°, four 1° by 1°, six 0.05° (about 5.5 km), eight 0.0025° (about 275 m) and ten 0.000125°, about 14 by 14 m at the equator. From the eleventh character on, each digit splits the cell into 4 columns and 5 rows, so 11 digits give about 3.5 by 2.8 m and 13 digits about 22 by 11 cm. East–west sizes shrink with the cosine of the latitude: at 56° N a 10-digit cell is 7.8 by 13.9 m. The page measures the width and height of each cell on the WGS84 ellipsoid. Coordinates of the centre are exact for the code; the place someone meant can be anywhere inside the cell.

The same codes as Google Maps

The codes are computed in your browser from the published Open Location Code specification, with the same integer arithmetic as Google's current reference code, so a point that lies exactly on a cell edge gets the same code as in Google Maps. Tested against Google's open-location-code package at 20,000 random points, every code from 2 to 15 digits, every decoded cell and every shortened code were identical. Plus Codes use WGS84 latitude and longitude, the datum of GPS and web maps.

Good to know

Short codes need the right town

A short code such as V75V+8R leaves out the first four characters, which fix a 1° square. They are recovered from the town written after the code: the page picks the nearest cell with those last characters to the town. With Paris, France the code is 8FW4V75V+8R at the Eiffel Tower; with Paris, Texas the same short code gives 8656V75V+8R, 7,800 km away. Write the country after the town when the name is common ("Paris, France"), or choose the town for short codes. The town must lie within about 50 km of the place.

Letters that are not used

Plus Codes use the digits 2 to 9 and the letters C, F, G, H, J, M, P, Q, R, V, W and X, chosen so that codes do not spell words and are hard to misread. A 0, 1, A, B, E, I, L, O or other letter is a typing error. A zero is only used as padding in shortened area codes such as 8FVC0000+, and the plus sign always comes after the eighth character of a full code.

Short codes from the map view

If a short code has no town and none is chosen, the page completes it from the centre of the map when the map shows a region, and says so. That is right when you know roughly where the place is, but check the cell: the same short code repeats every degree of latitude and longitude, about 111 km apart.