Open Places API Overture Places release digest: June 2026
Overture published 2026-06-17.0 on June 17, 2026, and lists it as the current release in the release calendar as of this post.
For Places, this is a cleanup release more than a feature release. That is still worth attention, because cleanup changes can move counts and search behavior.
What is in the June 2026 release notes
Overture’s June 2026 release notes say:
- the data release is
2026-06-17.0 - the schema version is
v1.17.0 - base, buildings, divisions, places, and transportation are GA
- addresses remain alpha
- Places now filters out features whose location falls outside the boundary of the country named by the feature’s country code
- the
categoriesproperty remains deprecated and is planned to be removed in the September 2026 release, replaced bybasic_categoryandtaxonomy
That country-code filter is the meaningful Places change. Overture notes that it applies everywhere but is most visible as a large reduction of features in the ocean.
Why the country-code filter matters
Badly located POIs are worse than missing POIs. A restaurant record floating offshore can pass a naive text search and then confuse ranking, distance, and map display.
Filtering places whose location falls outside the boundary named by their country code is a data-quality improvement. It does not mean every remaining feature is perfect, but it removes a class of obvious geographic mismatch before downstream services ever index the data.
If you self-host Overture Places, this is the kind of release that should trigger a before/after check:
- total feature count by country
- zero-result rates in coastal cities
- nearest-neighbor oddities around islands and borders
- category counts after filtering
- any internal overrides that targeted now-removed records
The category transition is still coming
The June notes say categories is deprecated and planned for removal in September 2026, with basic_category and taxonomy replacing it.
If your pipeline still reads categories directly, do not wait until the removal release. Add the new fields to your internal model, compare behavior, and update downstream code while both shapes are available.
Open Places API still returns a small categories array in the public API. That is our response contract, not a promise about Overture’s upstream fields. We absorb source schema movement behind the public API.
Open Places API production status
Open Places API production coverage now references Overture release 2026-06-17.0. The promoted index serves 39,626,258 places across 19 selected countries and territories, including Denmark. It also introduces Unicode-preserving name normalization, folded Latin spellings, indexed Overture aliases and brand names, and two-character CJK name search.
We did not promote the release just because it existed. The source inventory, 75 SQLite shards, compact response payloads, checksums, full warm-cache plan, and Danish/Korean/Japanese search cases all had to clear validation first. A hosted API has a different obligation than a public data bucket: the bucket can publish new data, while the API has to keep customer search behavior stable enough to trust.
FAQ
What is the latest Overture release?
As of July 14, 2026, Overture lists 2026-06-17.0 as the latest data release.
What changed for Places in June 2026?
Overture now filters places whose location falls outside the boundary of the country named by the feature’s country code. The release notes say this applies everywhere and is especially visible as a reduction of ocean features.
Is Open Places API serving the June release?
Yes. Open Places API promoted the 2026-06-17.0 source release on July 14 after the selected build cleared validation and warm-cache checks.
Last validated 2026-07-14.