Future Geocoding Service

NYS Geospatial Services is pleased to announce that we will be publishing a new geocoding service!

The NYS Geocoding Service has several key improvements over the outgoing service:

• Ease and speed of use - one composite locator vs three that the previous locator utilized.
  • Records that do not geocode are no longer exported and run through a second or third locator to find a potential match.
  • This new composite is made up of fewer total locators when compared to the previous geocoding service.
• The NYS Geocoding Service is faster than the existing service, meaning shorter geocoding times.
• Geocoding to sub-addresses and Points of Interest.
• ‘Suggest’ functionality has been enabled to provide potential addresses as the user types.

subject to change

April 2026

• Publish NYS Geocoder in Production environment (mid-April)

May 2026

• Stop updates to previous production geocoding service (mid-May) (Street_and_Address_Composite, Street_NoNum_ZipCode_Composite, NY_Place)

October 2026

• Retire previous production geocoding services (Street_and_Address_Composite, Street_NoNum_ZipCode_Composite, NY_Place)

Geospatial Services sends notifications about the geocoding service and other important topics through the GISNY Listserv. If you have not already joined or stopped receiving emails recently, please sign up here to be notified of updates from Geospatial Services.

We also encourage geocoding users to reach out to [email protected] and request to be added to our geocoding distribution list. We use this distribution list to announce updates, outages, and other geocoding specific topics. 

While NYS has had sub address records in our address database for many years, the current geocoding service is unable to utilize these records. The new locators can successfully geocode to the Building, Floor, and Unit level if the data is contained within our database.

Geospatial Services has also added a Point of Interest (POI) locator to the new composite. This locator is currently created using State owned buildings and work locations. This locator will be expanded to include other points of interest (State Parks, Historic Sites, etc.) in the future, however we felt including state owned buildings were an important first step in publishing a POI locator.

For users who are taking advantage of the geocoding service in an application or doing single geocodes within GIS software, we have enabled the Suggest functionality in the new geocoding service. This functionality searches as the user types, providing auto completed addresses to the user, similar to commercial online mapping applications. This can reduce the number of characters the user needs to type before a match is found. This can also help provide standardized input for applications resulting in cleaner data within the database. 

The NYS Geocoding Service is updated twice per month, on the second and fourth Friday, during scheduled change windows (5 am – 7 am).

The NYS Geocoding Service is supported Monday – Friday, 7:00 am to 4:30 pm. If an issue is encountered during off hours, please notify Geospatial Services and we will investigate the issue as soon as possible.

Currently, the NYS Geocoding Service is only able to locate addresses within New York State.