The Royal Mail PAF Service
The Royal Mail PAF is the most complete and up-to-date address database in the UK, containing the full address for every place the Royal Mail delivers to in the UK. The PAF file, also known as The Postcode Address File, contains over 30.5 million addresses and has over 4,000 updates a day!
The PAF data is owned and meticulously maintained by the Royal Mail's army of postal workers who are continually feeding data into the company’s Address Management team. The whole process makes PAF the most accurate source of address validation available in the UK.
PAF Database
The Royal Mail makes on average over 4,000 changes to the PAF database each day, which means that your database can soon become out of date. At data8, we update the PAF files on a daily basis which makes our address validation files up to date and ensures you are receiving the cleanest PAF data.
Check out the video on how PAF works.
We also use PAF Cleansing at data8. You can get a free data quality report to find out how many of your records are postally correct by using our data cleansing service. You may be surprised to see how much your data has changed since it was last updated.
Our postcode lookup solution and address validation uses PAF as part of the process to provide methods to obtain full, accurate addresses from a postcode or partial address details. We deliver the data via web services so that it can be easily integrated into your website or business process.
Facts & Figures
The PAF database is continually evolving. Here's some stats direct from the Royal Mail
30 million +
UK Postal Addresses
1.8 million
UK Postcodes
1.4 million
UK Business Names
The February 2020 statistics for the Postcode Address File*
| Additional Delivery points added to PAF this month | +34,500 |
| Total number of actual delivery points in PAF | 30,723,328 |
| Total number of Post Towns on PAF | 1,500 |
| Total number of business names held in PAF | 1,310,409 |
| Total number of postcodes on PAF | 1,766,895 |
*Source Royal Mail