Random France Address Generator

Seeding a France sandbox CRM

Ops wants 50 contacts in a sandbox CRM without loading a production extract. They run the generator at count 50 for France, download CSV, and map street, city, region, code postal, and phone. Each code postal like 75001 keeps France recognizable. No names, no cards, no national IDs. The import is location-only, which is what legal asked for.

French address format rules

A French address runs from the most specific detail down to the town. A typical block looks like this:

Appartement 12, 3e étage
Résidence Les Tilleuls
8 rue des Lilas
75008 PARIS
FRANCE

The rules that matter for forms:

• Street line. Number, then the type of road (rue, avenue, boulevard, place, allée, chemin), then the name: 8 rue des Lilas. No comma after the number.
• Number suffixes. bis, ter and quater mark extra buildings on the same number: 12 bis avenue Victor Hugo.
• Extra lines above the street. Flat, floor and staircase go on one line; building or residence name on another. Both are optional.
• Last line. 5-digit code postal, a space, then the town in capitals: 75008 PARIS. The postcode always comes first.
• Line length. La Poste's standard allows up to 6 lines of 38 characters each.
• No region. French addresses don't include the région or département name. The code postal already carries it.

The code postal

The code postal is always 5 digits. The first two usually match the département number: 75 is Paris, 13 is Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille), 69 is Rhône (Lyon). Paris codes run 75001 to 75020, one per arrondissement, and 75116 is also used for part of the 16th. Départements 01 to 09 give codes with a leading zero, such as 06000 for Nice. Corsica uses 20 at the start of the code, and overseas départements use 97.

CEDEX. Organisations that get a lot of mail can use a CEDEX address: CEDEX after the town name, sometimes with a number, and a code postal that may not be the town's usual one. We don't generate CEDEX addresses, but your form should accept them if you have business customers.

French phone number format

French numbers are 10 digits at home, starting with 0, and written in pairs: 01 23 45 67 89. Internationally, drop the 0 and add +33: +33 1 23 45 67 89. 01 is the Paris region, 02 to 05 cover the rest of mainland France by area, 06 and 07 are mobiles, and 09 is used for internet-based lines. Our phones follow these shapes but aren't real lines.

French address bugs QA testers keep hitting

• Leading zero lost. 06000 saved as a number becomes 6000, and Nice disappears.
• Accents mangled. Town names like Saint-Étienne or Évreux get broken by ASCII-only fields or bad encoding, and uppercasing é to É fails in some libraries.
• Apostrophes and hyphens rejected. rue de l'Église, L'Haÿ-les-Roses and Saint-Denis all trip "letters only" validation.
• bis and ter parsed as street names. 12 bis rue ends up as number 12, street "bis rue".
• 38-character lines truncated badly. Long street names like avenue du Général Leclerc get cut mid-word in label exports.
• A required State or Region field. French users have nothing sensible to put there.
• Phone input that rejects spaces and so fails the pair format people actually type.

Use cases

• Checkout testing for French customers, where a billing address in France needs a correctly shaped code postal and a +33 number.
• Figma designs in French, where longer street types (boulevard, avenue) and an apartment line test your address card layout.
• Localisation QA, making sure your form moves the postal code before the city when the country switches to France.

FAQ