Find your India DIGIPIN

What is DIGIPIN?

DIGIPIN, short for Digital PIN, is a geo-coded addressing grid published by the Department of Posts, Government of India. It was developed together with IIT Hyderabad and the National Remote Sensing Centre at ISRO, and released openly after public consultation as part of India's digital address infrastructure.

The idea is simple. A bounding box is drawn over the region containing India — 2.5° to 38.5° North and 63.5° to 99.5° East — and split into a 4×4 grid. Each of those sixteen cells is split into sixteen again, and again, ten times over. After ten rounds the box has been divided into about a thousand billion cells, each roughly 3.8 metres square, and each one has a unique 10-character label made of the symbols picked at every level. That label is the DIGIPIN.

Because the code is worked out purely from latitude and longitude, there is no database to look anything up in. The same coordinates always give the same DIGIPIN, anywhere, on any device, with or without a network connection.

Which characters does a DIGIPIN use?

Only sixteen symbols are valid: the digits 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and the letters C F J K L M P T. Look-alike characters were deliberately excluded, which is why 0, 1, A, B, D, E, G, H, I, N, O, Q, R, S, U, V, W, X, Y and Z never appear in a DIGIPIN. If a code you have been given contains a letter O or the digit 0, something has gone wrong in copying it — most often an O typed where a zero was meant, or the reverse.

Under the May 2026 standards revision a DIGIPIN is stored and transmitted as a continuous 10-character string with no punctuation. Hyphens are not permitted. For readability on a page or a label, spaces may optionally be used in a 3-4-3 grouping — C4P 8K63 M4M — and DigiPinV shows codes that way while always storing and sharing the continuous form.

How to find my DIGIPIN

1. Open DigiPinV and tap Use My Location.
2. Your browser asks for permission to read your position. DigiPinV never asks until you tap the button, and you can refuse without losing any other feature.
3. The app reads the latitude and longitude your device reports, works out the DIGIPIN on the spot, and shows it along with the accuracy your GPS claims.
4. Tap Copy, Share or QR Code to pass it on, or Save Location to keep it for next time.

For the best accuracy, stand outdoors with a clear view of the sky and wait a few seconds before reading the result. Indoors, a phone often falls back to Wi-Fi positioning, which can be out by fifty metres or more — enough to land you in a different DIGIPIN cell entirely. If you know the exact coordinates already, typing them into the Coordinates to DIGIPIN box will always beat a weak GPS fix.

How to decode a DIGIPIN

Paste the code into the DIGIPIN to coordinates box and tap Decode. DigiPinV walks the same ten levels in reverse, narrowing the box one character at a time, and returns the centre point of the final cell as a latitude and longitude. Since the cell is about 3.8 metres across, the centre is never more than about 2.7 metres from wherever inside the cell the original point actually was.

Spaces and lowercase letters are accepted, because that is how codes arrive in practice — from a WhatsApp message, a printed label, or someone reading it aloud. Anything genuinely invalid is rejected with an explanation rather than being quietly corrected: if a character is not part of the DIGIPIN alphabet, the app names the offending character instead of guessing what you meant.

DIGIPIN vs PIN code

They answer different questions. A PIN code identifies a postal delivery area, typically covering thousands of homes across several square kilometres. A DIGIPIN identifies one specific 3.8-metre square. One tells a sorting office which bag a letter belongs in; the other tells a delivery rider which gate to stop at.

The two are meant to sit side by side. A complete address in the DIGIPIN era still has a house name, a street, a locality and a PIN code — the DIGIPIN is added to remove the ambiguity in the last few metres.

Does DIGIPIN replace my postal address?

No. DIGIPIN complements existing addressing systems; it does not replace them. Your written address and PIN code remain exactly as they are and should keep being used. What a DIGIPIN adds is precision where words run out: a flat in a large complex with several entrances, a shop in a market lane with no numbering, a farm or construction site with no street address at all, or the specific gate of a hospital an ambulance needs to reach.

It is also worth being clear about what a DIGIPIN is not. It carries no name, no ownership, no property record and no information about who is at that spot — it is only a compact way of writing down a place on the map.

Can DIGIPIN work offline?

Yes, and that is one of the more useful properties of the design. Converting coordinates into a DIGIPIN is arithmetic on those coordinates: repeatedly quartering a rectangle and noting which quarter the point fell into. There is no table to consult and no server to ask, so it can be done on a phone with no signal at all.

DigiPinV is built as an installable app for exactly this reason. Once the page has loaded once, the app shell and the DIGIPIN logic are cached on your device, and encoding, decoding, QR generation and your saved locations all continue to work with no connection. The only part that genuinely needs the internet is the map picker, because map tiles are images that have to be fetched — when it cannot load, the app says so plainly and everything else carries on.

Does DigiPinV store my location?

No. Your latitude and longitude are read by your browser, used in your browser, and discarded when you close the tab. They are never transmitted to Apps by V, and there is no server-side location history to leak, sell or subpoena, because there is no server involved in the calculation at all.

Saving is always deliberate. Nothing is written down unless you tap Save Location, and what gets written goes into your own browser's local storage on that one device. Clearing your browser data removes it. There is no account, no sign-up, no sync and no way for us to see your saved list. You can read the full privacy policy for the detail.

How accurate is DIGIPIN?

The grid itself resolves to about 3.8 metres at the tenth character. In practice the limit is your phone, not the grid: a good outdoor GPS fix is accurate to somewhere between 3 and 15 metres, so the DIGIPIN you get may sit one cell away from the one you would get standing in the same place a minute later. DigiPinV shows the accuracy figure your device reports so you can judge this for yourself.

A shorter prefix of the code is still meaningful, which is useful to know when reading one out. Each character you drop widens the area by a factor of four in each direction:

So the first six characters put you inside the right kilometre, and the last four narrow that kilometre down to a specific doorway. If someone reads you a code and you mishear the final character, you are still within about fifteen metres of the right spot.

Frequently asked questions

Is DigiPinV an official India Post app?

No. DigiPinV is an independent utility built by Apps by V. It implements the DIGIPIN specification exactly as published in the Department of Posts' open-source repository, but it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by India Post or any government body. For official services, go to India Post directly.

Why does my DIGIPIN change when I stand still?

Because your phone's idea of where it is keeps moving slightly. GPS fixes drift by a few metres from second to second, and each 3.8-metre cell is small enough that ordinary drift crosses a boundary. If you need a stable code for a fixed place, take a reading outdoors with good accuracy and save it, rather than re-reading it each visit.

Can I use a DIGIPIN outside India?

The grid only covers 2.5°–38.5° N and 63.5°–99.5° E. Coordinates outside that box cannot be encoded, and DigiPinV will tell you so rather than returning a meaningless code. The box is a rectangle, so it does take in some area beyond India's borders; a code existing for a point does not imply anything about that point.

Is the QR code standard?

The DIGIPIN-only mode encodes the plain 10-character code, so anything that scans it reads the code as text. The Location mode encodes a standard geo: URI with the decoded latitude and longitude, which most phone cameras will offer to open in a maps app. Nothing tracking-related is embedded in either.

Does it work on iPhone?

Yes, in Safari and in Chrome on iOS. Location, QR codes, sharing and saving all work. You can add DigiPinV to your Home Screen from Safari's Share menu, after which it opens full-screen like an ordinary app and continues to work offline.