The conscription number is a special kind of address that relates to a settlement instead of a street. The tag is used only in places where an object both has an address referring to a street and also one referring to the settlement.

Conscription numbers are known in Austria as  Konskriptionsnummer, in Czechia as "Číslo popisné"(cs), in Slovakia as "Číslo súpisné"(sk) and in Hungary as "Helyrajzi szám" and can usually only be found there.

This key is accepted as a part of the widely used, official address tagging system in Czechia and Slovakia.

History

The "conscription number" name is result of their initial purpose - numbers were assigned due to needs of military administration. And initial use was for conscription-related purposes.

Conscription numbers are old form of addressing, predating house numbers in some regions. The main differences are that conscription numbers are not separate for each street - but there is one pool for each settlement. In addition conscription numbers often were assigned independent of a location within settlement - for example in order of construction. It means that unlike street numbers that are typically sequential it is normal for conscription number to be independent of location (so group of three houses next to each other may have number 10, 100, 102 with number 101 on other side of the village).

Tagging

The addr:conscriptionnumber=* and addr:streetnumber=* keys are only used in regions where both numbering systems are used on the same objects. So usually, these two tags are present on the same object.

If each object has only a single assigned number then only addr:housenumber=* is used because it is already unambiguous. For example, in places where streets have no names, such as it is the case for many villages and smaller towns around the world, house numbers relate to the addr:place=* instead of the addr:street=*.

Usage in Czechia

For instructions on tagging addresses in the Czech Republic see Czech address system(cs).

Usage in Slovakia

A page in Slovak documents the current practice in Slovakia.

Here’s a common usage example for a building with multiple entrances sharing the same conscription number: