Nominatim API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Eiffel+Tower+Paris&format=json&limit=1

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 539 bytes · compressed

Response time

29 ms (median of 3) · fastest 23 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 · certificate issued by Let's Encrypt

Browser CORS

Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Served by

gunicorn/asgi

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Eiffel+Tower+Paris&format=json&limit=1 on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

[
  {
    "place_id": 97582011,
    "licence": "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. http://osm.org/copyright",
    "osm_type": "way",
    "osm_id": 5013364,
    "lat": "48.8582599",
    "lon": "2.2945006",
    "class": "man_made",
    "type": "tower",
    "place_rank": 30,
    "importance": 0.6205937724353116,
    "addresstype": "man_made",
    "name": "Tour Eiffel",
    "display_name": "Tour Eiffel, 5, Avenue Anatole France, Quartier du Gros-Caillou, Paris 7e Arrondissement, Paris, Île-de-France, France métropolitaine, 75007, France",
    "boundingbox": [
      "48.8574753"
    ]
  }
]

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Eiffel+Tower+Paris&format=json&limit=1";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Eiffel+Tower+Paris&format=json&limit=1"
headers = {}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl -H "User-Agent: MyApp/1.0 ([email protected])" "https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Eiffel+Tower+Paris&format=json&limit=1"

What Can You Build?

// Geocode an address to latitude/longitude
const address = '1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA';
const response = await fetch(`https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/api/Overview`);
const data = await response.json();
const location = data.results?.[0] || data;
console.log('Latitude:', location.lat || location.latitude);
console.log('Longitude:', location.lon || location.longitude);

// Get location from IP address
const response = await fetch(`https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/api/Overview`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log('Country:', data.country || data.country_name);
console.log('City:', data.city);
console.log('Coordinates:', data.lat || data.latitude, data.lon || data.longitude);

// Get coordinates and calculate distance
const response = await fetch(`https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/api/Overview`);
const data = await response.json();
const loc = data.results?.[0] || data;
const lat1 = loc.lat || loc.latitude || 0;
const lon1 = loc.lon || loc.longitude || 0;
// Haversine distance formula
const R = 6371;
console.log(`Location: ${lat1}, ${lon1}`);

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

{
  "title": "404 Not Found"
}

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.