- Free allowance
- No request count and no key: an absolute maximum of 1 request per second per application, summed over all its users; a script running longer than a day or at regular intervals is held to 4 requests per minute, from a single thread on one machine
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- anonymousno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- request-rate1 request per second at most, summed over every user of an application; 4 requests per minute for a script that runs longer than a day or at regular intervals; one thread on one machine
- Evidence
- documented18 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-01checked 2026-10-31 (live); stale on 2026-12-01
| Free tier | no request count and no key: an absolute maximum of 1 request per second per application, summed over all its users; a script running longer than a day or at regular intervals is held to 4 requests per minute, from a single thread on one machine unit requests; metered on none; a rate ceiling, not a metered quota; the service runs on donated servers with a very limited capacity, and the policy may change without notice |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - request-rate (binding) 1 request per second at most, summed over every user of an application source
- request-rate (binding) 4 requests per minute for a script that runs longer than a day or at regular intervals; one thread on one machine source
- per-object-cap at most 40 results for one search source
auto-complete search, systematic queries (reverse queries in a grid, complete lists of postcodes or towns, all POIs in an area) and scraping of the details page are banned outright |
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| Binding | request-rate there is no counted quota, so the 1 request per second ceiling, and 4 per minute for a long-running script, is the whole capacity |
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| Identity | anonymous no account and no key; each request carries a valid HTTP Referer or a User-Agent that identifies the application, since stock library User-Agents are refused by the policy |
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| Egress | not applicable: a query API, not metered in bytes |
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| Per-object cap | one query per request, returning at most 40 results |
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| Interface | rest HTTPS GET to nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search (and /reverse, /lookup) with format=json, jsonv2, geojson, geocodejson or xml; no key; a valid HTTP Referer or an application User-Agent is required; without a format parameter the public instance answers with the web page |
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| Tooling | any HTTP client that sets an identifying User-Agent or Referer; the policy asks apps to go through a caching proxy |
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| Composes with | a keyless geocoder for low-volume, user-triggered lookups at 1 request a second; a stored data set of more than a few thousand addresses goes to a keyed provider with storable results (data-apis/geoapify, data-apis/opencage, data-apis/maptiler). Bulk path: no bulk geocoding (systematic queries are banned); the raw data is the weekly OSM planet file (89 GB PBF) or a regional extract. The last resort is self-hosted: the Nominatim software, which the user installs and runs on a rented machine with an imported planet or extract |
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| Reliability | a requester that sends the same query repeatedly may be classed as faulty and blocked, a banned use (auto-complete, systematic queries, scraping of the details page) leads to a ban, and access can be withdrawn when the definition of heavy use changes |
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| Notes | The hosted public instance of the Nominatim software. Bulk path: no bulk geocoding on the public instance; the raw data is the weekly OSM planet file or an extract. |
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| Evidence note | documented the rate ceiling is documented and was not exercised. |
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| Parsed numbers | - has-free-tier 1
- request-rate 1 request
- request-rate 4 requests / minute
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