The National Change of Address

The Royal Mail provides a mail redirection service to people who wish to have mail permanently forwarded to a new address. The NCOA File is a list of all the people who have taken out a permanent redirection and given permission for their data to be used in the service.

The National Change of Address file is updated monthly and is growing by around 100,000 records per month. The Royal Mail estimates that around 50% of people moving house will have their mail redirected, and around 50% of these will give permission for this information to be used on the NCOA.

The National Change of Address Update (NCOA Update) File from the Royal Mail allows you to stay in touch with your valuable customers. NCOA Update lets you trace customers who have moved home and keep your customer records clean and up to date.

The NCOA Update file goes back over 10 years and contains some 20 million records of customers who have taken out a permanent redirection service with the Royal Mail – so you can be confident they have moved and your address data is updated

It makes more sense to retain customers than to spend time and money finding new ones. Using transparent data provided by customers themselves through the Royal Mail's Redirections service, data cleansing with the NCOA Update File can help you find where your customers have relocated to when they move home.