There is some debate if we should use the abbreviation for provinces (like ON, QC, etc.) in the addr:province tag or the full name (Ontario, Québec). Maybe we should just remove these province tags and prefer the use of the official boundaries instead, like we do for addr:country (which is rarely used)?
What is you opinion on this? I would like to add a notice on this issue on the OSM Canada page so we have some official/consensus guidelines for the community.
Thanks!
I would vote for removing it from existing data and tell the user to use the main provincial boundaries to detect the correct province.
Personally I do not tag it and I think it’s unnecessary given admin relations as you said. (I also don’t tag addr:city in cases where it’s unambiguous with admin relation.)
I don’t know if any data users actually use addr:province? If they do, I imagine they are handling both abbrevations and full forms?
I imagine there will always be some use of the tag as long as iD editor has a field for it that some people might feel compelled to fill it out.
I don’t think it’s a huge problem to have it on some nodes but not on others, that’s not something I’d prrsonally spend my time cleaning up.
I would prefer removing the addr:province tag, but if we keep it, I’d rather have it non-abbreviated, as it is unambiguous and follows the OSM convention of avoiding abbreviations.
I can see no advantage in abbreviating the province name: OSM is not bound by size limits like a paper form is, and it is, in the general case, less error-prone to shorten a name into an abbreviation for specific needs than the other way around.
That said, removing the tag would likely break many OSM data consumers’ workflow and make the Overpass API requests more complicated and slower if a consumer wants to get the same data as before (e.g. fix the breakage in the data retrieval phase instead of inside the application itself).
My opinion is the tags are superfluous, because we have well-defined provincial borders. I don’t add them, and I’ve often deleted them as I’ve come across them when updating a shop=* node or something else with a addr:provinceor addr:state tag.
While I understand the rationale behind the recommendation at Key:addr:province - OpenStreetMap Wiki (and the corresponding country codes), it greatly amuses me that it flies in the face of the overarching OSM policy to not abbreviate. Canada Post’s official policy is to address mail using the two-character codes for province/territory, but in my anecdotal experience it’s still a mish-mash of those (e.g. ‘AB’), older abbreviations (e.g. ‘Alta.’) and just writing the province name out in full. This stands in very stark contrast to Americans’ use of two-character abbreviations for their states, which bears out in the overwhelmingly popular use of two-character codes in addr:state tags. In my experience the average American actually uses those codes often in daily life, and most Americans know almost all of the codes off the top of their heads. (I personally know a bunch, but god forbid you put me on the spot and ask me to name all the states that being with the letter ‘M’; pretty sure I’d forget one or two at least.)
That said, we often abbreviate the names of provinces and territories in common parlance too. Prince Edward Island is just ‘PEI’ [pee-ee-aye] to me and everyone I’ve ever known, including every Islander I’ve ever known. And I honestly couldn’t tell you the two-character code for Prince Edward Island: ‘PE’? ‘PI’? I also don’t know anyone who would say “British Columbia” aloud except in formal circumstances; it’s just ‘BC’ [bee-cee]. Likewise if I see Northwest Territories abbreviated it’s still often ‘NWT’, and people even speak of “the en-double-you-tee”.
I would prefer the tag to use the two-letter abbreviation as it is the standard form, and I agree with @hoserab here. I don’t see anything wrong about the province field taking an abbreviations given it’s the standard written form for an address. Abbreviation is also standard for the state field down south of the border.
I have been recently omitting city and province address tags when adding new addresses, but I still see a benefit for adding province tags for completeness of the data.
Hello from down South. Our understanding of addr:state in the US is that abbreviation guidelines don’t necessarily apply to addresses, which should instead match the standard format of your country’s postal service. Canada Post shows examples of two-letter abbreviations rather than the full names of provinces, though it doesn’t seem to make a recommendation either way except for addresses in the US.
With that in mind, it would be good to go by the most common address format. When you send mail or packages, do you usually prefer to write out the full name of the province/territory, or the two-letter code?
(We prefer to keep tagging addr:state over here because there are quite a few edge cases, no pun intended, where an address component doesn’t match the administrative boundary it lies within. Not sure if this is an issue in Canada.)
In other words, using province abbreviations today is akin to limiting oneself to computer filenames of no more than eight characters to ensure compatibility with 1980s MSDOS.
It’s PE, NL, NT and YT. I assume your guess for the two-letter code for the Yukon is YU or something similar, but it got its two-letter code from the abbreviation of its full name Yukon Territory.
For the record, here’s the current Taginfo data regarding addr:province usage by province and territory (standard abbreviation vs full name).
Alberta (AB): 55k for AB, 30k for Alberta
British Columbia (BC): 70k for BC, 5k for British Columbia
Manitoba (MB): 2k for MB, 6k for Manitoba
New Brunswick (NB): 2.5k for NB, 4k for New Brunswick
Newfoundland and Labrador (NL): 1.4k for NL, 300+ for Newfoundland and Labrador
Northwest Territories (NT): 40+ for NT, 20+ for Northwest Territories
Nova Scotia (NS): 100+ for NS, 200k for Nova Scotia
Nunavut (NU): 20+ for NU, 2 for Nunavut
Ontario (ON): 24k for ON, 78k for Ontario
Prince Edward Island (PE): 230+ for PE, 450+ for Prince Edward Island
Québec (QC): 505k for QC, 23k for Québec
Saskatchewan (SK): 20k for SK, 2.2k for Saskatchewan
Yukon (YT): 280 for YT, 650+ for Yukon
From this data, it looks like use of two-letter abbreviation prevails nationwide (680k) versus use of the full province/territory name (349k), but the present province/territory-level data shows some increased usage of full province and territory name, often following address data import from (compatibly-licensed) open government datasets.
I also noticed Ontario has increasingly drifted toward use of full province name over ON as of 2025, but this seems to be a result of the latest imports of open government address data that appear to use full name for the province field (Toronto? Guelph? Cornwall?). ON vs Ontario as addr:province seems to be affected by data import and later cleanup, and ON has been the predominant usage until the latest address data imports.
New Brunswick also have a similar uptick for full province name over NB. I would suspect this is most likely from another mass address data import.
YK! And I happen to know for a fact that the long form “Yukon Territory” had been officially deprecated decades ago; it’s like saying “the Dominion of Canada”.
Similarly I know Newfoundland is officially “Newfoundland and Labrador”, so I was pretty sure it was NL, but I was questioning my sanity trying to decide if it had been officially changed from NF.
Anyway, point being Canada Post be damned: anybody who addresses a letter to (e.g.) “Summerside, PE” instead of “Summerside, PEI” is a doofus.
Some further address data came from Statcan data import spearheaded by Metrolinx, e.g. in Cambridge, in Kitchener, north of Milton – all of those without addr:province.
addr:province=ON also looks like it’s been mass-added in some places, like Baden (population less than 20k) or Courtice, though the numbers are small enough that each of these localities is likely the work of one dedicated mapper:
Most of Ontario address imports haven’t bothered to specify addr:province.
There hasn’t been a recent (post-2020) import of address or province tags in Toronto proper that I know of.
My interpretation would be: From this data, it looks like QC and Nova Scotia account for a full two-thirds of addr:province tags in Canada, and everyone else doesn’t care much.
