Billions of people live, work, or receive deliveries somewhere that has no street address. Plus Codes — the friendly name for Open Location Code (OLC) — were built to fix exactly that. They turn any point on Earth into a short, free, shareable code that works like an address, even where no address exists. Released by Google's Zurich engineering office in 2014, the system is open source, free to use, and works entirely offline.
What is a Plus Code?
A Plus Code is a compact string of letters and numbers that represents a precise location based on its latitude and longitude. Instead of "123 Main Street," you might give someone 849VCWC8+R9. It looks a bit like a phone number, and that comparison is intentional: the system is designed to be easy to read aloud, write down, and remember.
Two things make Plus Codes distinct from a typical address:
- They exist for everywhere. Every square on the planet has a code — deserts, trailheads, market stalls, and unaddressed homes included.
- They describe an area, not a single point. A code names a small box on a grid. Add more characters and the box shrinks, so a longer code is simply a more precise one.
How Plus Codes work
Under the hood, OLC divides the world into a grid using a fixed set of 20 characters (digits and letters, with vowels and easily confused characters removed, and not case-sensitive). The encoding repeatedly subdivides the globe into smaller and smaller cells, with each pair of characters narrowing the box further. Because the math is deterministic, any device can encode or decode a Plus Code without an internet connection — no lookup server required.
A Plus Code and a pair of GPS coordinates carry the same information in different clothes. If you know your current latitude and longitude, you already have everything needed to produce a code, and vice versa.
How to read the format
A full Plus Code has 10 characters with a + sign before the last two: for example, 8FVC9G8F+6X.
- Area code — the first four characters identify a large region, roughly a 100×100 km block. Think of it like a telephone area code.
- Local code — the characters after that, including the two trailing digits past the
+, pin down the exact spot within that region.
You'll often see a shortened code paired with a town, like CWC8+R9, Mountain View. Dropping the area code keeps things short for everyday use; the locality fills in the missing context.
Precision: how exact is a code?
Precision depends on how many characters follow the + sign. More characters means a smaller box.
| Code length | Approx. cell size | Good for |
|---|---|---|
8 characters (e.g. 8FVC9G8F) | ~14 m | Same resolution as a street address |
| 10 characters (default) | ~3 m | A building entrance or front door |
| 11+ characters | under 1 m | A specific spot — a gate, pin, or bench |
For most purposes, the 10-character default lands you within a few meters — precise enough to find a doorway, a campsite, or a meeting point.
Converting between codes and coordinates
Because a Plus Code is just another way of writing a position, switching back and forth is easy. Our Plus Code generator and decoder turns a code into latitude/longitude and back again, and the all-in-one coordinate converter moves between Plus Codes, decimal degrees, DMS, UTM, and MGRS in one place.
A few common follow-ups:
- Need the raw numbers? Decode the code, then use the decimal to DMS converter if you prefer degrees, minutes, and seconds.
- Got a street address instead? Run it through address to coordinates lookup first, then generate a Plus Code from the result.
- Want your own location's code? Start with the find my location tool, then share your location as a code or link.
Why they matter
Plus Codes shine when a normal address falls short: directing emergency services to a rural property, marking a meeting point in a park, labeling a stall in an informal market, or simply giving a courier the precise gate to use. They're free, open source, and work offline — an address for the billions of places that never had one, and a sharper pointer for the places that did.