Is Eircode mandatory in Ireland?
Eircode is not mandatory for citizens, but every operational address in the Republic has one. It is required on most government forms, vehicle registration, and electricity / gas / broadband connections.
Glossary
Eircode — Ireland's postcode system
Eircode is the Republic of Ireland's national postcode system, launched in 2015. Every individual delivery address — every front door — has a unique 7-character Eircode. Unlike most postcode systems, Eircode does not group nearby buildings: two adjacent houses have different Eircodes.
Format: routing key + unique identifier
An Eircode is 7 characters long, formatted as 'XXX YYYY'. The first three characters are the routing key — a geographic prefix shared by all addresses within a sorting area (e.g. D02 for Dublin 2, A94 for Blackrock/Stillorgan/Booterstown, T12 for Cork city centre).
The remaining four characters are a randomly assigned unique identifier — they are not sequential and do not encode location. This is by design: it makes Eircodes hard to guess and prevents proximity inference from the code alone.
There are 139 routing keys covering the Republic. Dublin uses D01–D24 (the old Dublin postal districts). The rest of the country uses a single letter (A–Y) plus two digits.
What Eircode replaces
Pre-Eircode, Ireland had no national postcodes outside Dublin. Rural addresses relied on locality + townland + county, which was often ambiguous (many townlands share names across counties; many houses share the same surname-based address).
Eircode was deliberately built to disambiguate at the individual-property level — a critical feature for emergency services, online deliveries, and property records.
How iHouse uses Eircode
Eircode is iHouse's canonical key. Every property record is uniquely identified by its Eircode where one exists; addresses without an Eircode (a small minority of older rural properties) are merged using fuzzy address matching plus geocoded coordinates.
Because Eircodes don't cluster, two properties with adjacent Eircodes can be on opposite sides of the country. Spatial proximity is handled by iHouse's PostGIS layer, not by Eircode prefix.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find the Eircode for an address?
Use the free Eircode Finder at finder.eircode.ie. iHouse also returns the Eircode for any property in its index — search by address or pin location.
Can two homes share an Eircode?
No. Every distinct delivery point — every individual front door — gets its own Eircode. Apartments within the same building each have a unique Eircode.
Authoritative sources
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