What does decoding a geohash return?

Decoding gives the cell that the geohash represents. The tool reports the geometric center as a single lat, lng and the four bounds that enclose the cell.

Why is there a bounding box rather than one point?

A geohash always describes an area whose size depends on the string length. Shorter geohashes cover larger cells, so the bounding box tells you how much spatial uncertainty the code carries.

Which characters are valid?

Geohash uses base-32 with the symbols 0-9 and b, c, d, e, f, g, h, j, k, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z. The letters a, i, l and o are excluded, and any other character is rejected.

Does longer input give a more precise location?

Yes. Each additional character shrinks the cell by roughly a factor of eight, so an 11 character geohash pins a location to a few metres while a 5 character one spans a few kilometres.

How accurate is the center coordinate?

The center is exact for the decoded cell. The real point that produced the geohash lies somewhere inside the bounding box, so the center is the best single estimate.

Geohash to Lat/Lng Converter

Geohash decoding

Decoding reverses the geohash encoding: it takes a base-32 string and recovers the rectangle of latitude and longitude it represents. This is useful when you have stored geohashes in a database and need to map them back to coordinates, or when debugging a spatial index.

How it works

Each character is converted to its 5 bit value in the geohash alphabet. The bits are read most significant first and alternate between refining longitude (first) and latitude. Every 1 bit narrows the range to its upper half and every 0 bit to its lower half, starting from -180 to 180 for longitude and -90 to 90 for latitude.

gbsuv7ztq  ->  center near 50.998, -1.499 (with a small bounding box)

After all bits are consumed, the surviving range is the cell, and its midpoint is the reported center.

Example and tips

A short geohash like gcp covers a wide region, so its bounding box is large; a long one like gcpvj0duq localises to a few metres. When comparing two geohashes, a shared prefix means the cells overlap or nest, which is the property that makes geohashes efficient for proximity search. Use the bounding box to gauge how much rounding the original coordinate underwent.