What is NCOA? (National Change of Address)

Royal Mail provides a redirection service to members of the public who wish to have mail which is addressed to them forwarded to a new address. The NCOA File (National Change Of Address File) is taken from the redirection database containing the names and both the new and old addresses of residential customers who have taken out a permanent redirection. NCOA data is made up from only those customers who have not ticked the opt-out boxes and thus given the Royal Mail permission to pass on their information to selected companies and other organisations. NCOA is not available to buy direct. Due to the sensitive nature of redirection data and to comply with the Data Protection Acts of 1984 and 1998 the NCOA file is held only by specially recruited data management bureaux such as The Data Processing Company.

 

(If you require your forwarding details to be removed from the main Royal Mail NCOA file then please contact Royal Mail directly by e-mail at:- address.management@royalmail.com)

NCOA is updated monthly. At November 2006 the file contained just over 15 million records. Details of movers on the file date back as far as April 1994 right up to the present day. It is growing at a rate of approximately 100,000 names per month.

 

It costs just £75 'run' charge, regardless of the size of your file (whether 5,000 or 5,000,000) - plus a 'hit' charge of 25p for each replacement forwarding address found. Of all the licenced NCOA bureaux we believe we offer the most efficient service and that our charges are the lowest. [If not please tell us!] - (For example a competitor for a 24,000 record file charges £360 to run the job plus 60p per redirection - compared with our run charge of £75 and 25p per redirection - i.e. 3 times the cost for exactly the same job!)