Royal Mail increases address data prices

The Royal Mail licence fee behind a typical UK address lookup will increase by around 7% from 1 October 2026.

Royal Mail is increasing the price of its address data from 1 October 2026. As Postcoder uses Royal Mail data to power UK address lookup, this means some of the data licence fees behind our UK address searches will increase too.

Postcoder's address lookup features, including address autocomplete, use Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF) and other datasets to provide accurate, up-to-date UK addresses. Every time a customer performs a UK address lookup, part of the cost covers the licence fee that we pay to Royal Mail on their behalf.

From October, those fees are going up.

What's changing?

Royal Mail has reviewed the prices it charges PAF solutions providers like us to use its addressing data.

In announcing the changes, Royal Mail said:

We are committed to ensuring that our datasets remain the UK's most up-to-date and widely used source of addressing data. As a result, we have reviewed our pricing so that we can continue to provide high quality addressing data for all our customers.

The size of the increase varies depending on the licence involved and type of lookup. As an example, the Royal Mail licence fee behind a typical UK address lookup will increase by around 7% from 1 October.

That's a significant increase, particularly when compared with the 4% increase to the same licence fee last year.

For context, CPIH inflation was 2.8% in the 12 months to June 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics.

What does this mean for Postcoder pricing?

We're very conscious that businesses are dealing with plenty of rising costs already, so we don't intend to simply pass Royal Mail's increases straight through to our customers.

We'll absorb some of the additional cost ourselves.

However, given the size of the increases, we will need to pass on a proportion of the additional cost through some Postcoder price changes.

Where prices are changing, we'll publish the new prices on the pricing page during September, giving customers advance notice before they take effect in October.

There's nothing you need to do in the meantime.

Keeping Postcoder great value

Keeping our pricing straightforward and competitive has always been important to us.

We're working hard to keep the price of both credit packs and monthly plans as low as possible, while continuing to provide the things our customers rely on every day: innovative features, exceptional uptime and performance, and responsive support when you need it.

It also means continuing to invest in Postcoder. Over the past year we've added new features and capabilities across the platform, and there's plenty more on the way.

Royal Mail's price increase isn't one we can avoid but we'll do everything we can to limit its impact on our customers.