Google's Geocoding API costs less per request but lists no census tract, and 1Lookup returns the tract and its districts for $0.010 when the address is matched.

Converting addresses into geographic coordinates and coordinates into addresses. A result carries typed address components, such as street_number, route, locality, sublocality, neighborhood, postal_code, and administrative_area_level_1 for a state and administrative_area_level_2 for a county in the United States, and the documentation also covers geocoding a place. It works in many countries, which its coverage page lists country by country.

It is pay-as-you-go, billed per request under the Geocoding SKU, and billing must be enabled on the project with an API key or OAuth token sent on every request. The pricing list prints 10,000 free billable events a month, then $5.00 per 1,000 up to 100,000 events, $4.00 from 100,001 to 500,000, $3.00 from 500,001 to 1,000,000, $1.50 up to 5,000,000 and $0.38 above that, counted monthly. Checked October 2026.

2 credits per address matched, free when the address is not matched. On the Starter plan ($99 a month for 20,000 credits) a lookup is about $0.010, which covers 10,000 addresses a month and is $9.90 per 1,000. At the Enterprise end of the rate card it is about $0.004. Google is the cheaper bill per request: 10,000 free a month and $5.00 per 1,000 after that, against $99 for a Starter month, but a Google request does not return a census tract.

Not among the address component types its documentation lists, which run from country and administrative_area_level_1 to level_7, locality, sublocality, neighborhood and postal_code. None is a census tract, block group, FIPS code, congressional district or school district. The documentation says the list is not exhaustive and is subject to change, and that the API is not guaranteed to return any particular component, so the tract has to come from another source. 1Lookup returns the tract id and name, the block group and block ids, and the districts as fields.

The Census Bureau's geography for the address: the 11-digit tract id and tract name, the block group and block ids, the county and state with their FIPS codes kept as text, the congressional district, the metro area with its code, the place and the school district. It also returns the matched address as the Census Bureau has it, the coordinates and how many possible matches there were. Google returns coordinates and address components in its own typed format.

On price per request, reach and options. It is free up to 10,000 requests a month and costs $5.00 per 1,000 or less after that, which is less than 1Lookup's Starter rate. It geocodes in many countries, reverse geocodes coordinates, returns typed components and place types, and its v4 methods have a default quota of 25 queries per second with a higher quota available on request. 1Lookup takes US addresses only and does not reverse geocode.

The usage page says Geocoding API v4 methods have a default quota of 25 queries per second, and that usage is subject to limits including a daily quota and a queries-per-minute restriction of 3,000. A daily quota can be set in the Google Cloud console to cap spend. 1Lookup bulk jobs take a CSV with an address column of up to 2M rows.

If you need coordinates or address components, in the US or in other countries, at the lowest price per request, Google's Geocoding API is the better fit. If you need the census tract and the districts behind a US address, in one flat answer, with a free miss and one balance that also pays for phone, email and IP checks, 1Lookup's Census Tract Lookup bills 2 credits only when the address is matched.

For coordinates and address components, yes: 10,000 requests a month are free and the price falls with volume. For a census tract, the component types it documents do not include one, so compare the per-lookup price of 1Lookup, which returns the tract and its districts directly.