France Address Generator

How a French address is written

The French postal standard (AFNOR NF Z10-011, used by La Poste) allows up to six lines of 38 characters each, from the most specific to the most general: recipient; apartment, floor or staircase (Appartement 12, escalier B); building or residence (Bâtiment C); number and street (18 rue des Tilleuls); an optional locality or lieu-dit; and finally the postcode and commune (69003 Lyon). The number comes before the street, with bis or ter for subdivided plots (18 bis rue des Tilleuls), and there is no comma after the number.

La Poste recommends capitals and no punctuation on the last lines, and the street type in full or with standard abbreviations (BD, AV, IMP). Region and département are not written on the address.

Code postal structure

French postcodes have five digits. For most of the country the first two digits are the département number (69 Rhône, 33 Gironde, 59 Nord), and the last three identify the distribution office. Paris, Lyon and Marseille end in the arrondissement number: 75003 is the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, 13008 the 8th of Marseille. Corsica uses 20 in postcodes even though its départements are 2A and 2B, and the overseas départements use three-digit prefixes (971 Guadeloupe, 974 La Réunion).

• Leading zeros matter: Nice is 06000 and Bourg-en-Bresse 01000.
• Validate with ^\d{5}$. The postcode is not the same as the INSEE commune code, which is used in official datasets.
• Businesses can receive a CEDEX code, written after the city (75008 PARIS CEDEX 08).

Regions and départements

Since 2016 metropolitan France has 13 regions, plus 5 overseas regions. They matter for tax and logistics rules, but they never appear on an envelope. If a form needs an administrative area, the 101 départements are usually more useful than regions because they are encoded in the postcode. Keep accents in region names (Île-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur), and remember that many older datasets still use the 22 pre-2016 regions.

Testing tips for French address forms

• Allow two or three extra address lines for apartment, building and residence names; one line is not enough for many flats.
• Accept apostrophes and accented capitals: rue de l'Église, ÉCOLE.
• Do not reject 18 bis in the house-number field.
• Phone input should accept 06 39 98 12 34, 0639981234 and +33 6 39 98 12 34 as the same number.

What makes these addresses fictional

Communes, regions and postcodes are real; street names are combined from generic words (trees, flowers, la Gare, le Moulin) with random numbers. Names like rue de la Gare exist in thousands of towns, so a match with a real address is possible but coincidental. Use the output only in test systems.

Regions of France

The generator uses the 18 first-level regions below, with the codes used in addresses. Cities are picked from 22 places spread across the country, each with postcodes from its own range.

Example France test addresses

Validation pattern used for the Code postal: ^\d{5}$. It checks the format only — whether a code is actually in use is known only to the postal operator.

Phone numbers in France test data

French numbers have ten digits written in pairs (01 23 45 67 89; +33 1 23 45 67 89). The generator uses only the blocks ARCEP reserves for audiovisual works: 01 99 00, 02 61 91, 03 53 01, 04 65 71 and 05 36 49 by region, and 06 39 98 for mobiles, each followed by four digits.

Source: Arcep – Plan national de numérotation (numéros pour œuvres audiovisuelles) (checked October 2026). All ranges: test e-mail addresses and fictional phone numbers.

Sources

• Postal codes in France
• ISO 3166-2:FR
• ARCEP – Plan national de numérotation (numéros pour œuvres audiovisuelles)

Postcode ranges, region lists and address conventions checked against these sources in October 2026. Street names in the generator are synthetic.

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