Categories

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On June 1 2023, we released updates that contribute towards our goal of offering the most granular and accurate information, empowering you to build exceptional products. The June updates bring improvements to the category taxonomy for all API V3 developers.

If you are currently using API V2, we have even bigger improvements in store for the legacy category taxonomy. You can expect to see these changes implemented on June 15th.

Please review our Places Categories FAQs for detailed changes.

Foursquare attempts to apply accurate and granular categorization to each of our POI records. In order to accomplish this, we leverage our own proprietary taxonomy of 1K+ categories. Please see below for more information on how to use Foursquare Categories.

Categories are assigned to a Foursquare Place in two distinct attributes, both of which are included in Foursquare's 25 core attributes.

• Category IDs
  • A unique ID of the most granular category (or categories)
• Category Labels
  • A unique label, e.g. Dining and Drinking

Category Taxonomy

Foursquare Places includes a hierarchical taxonomy of categories from which each POI record is classified. The ten parent categories are:

• Arts and Entertainment
• Business and Professional Services
• Community and Government
• Dining and Drinking
• Event
• Health and Medicine
• Landmarks and Outdoors
• Retail
• Sports and Recreation
• Travel and Transportation

See below for a table of the full taxonomy.

NOTE: We aim to preserve all existing category IDs. Therefore, when new categories are added to the taxonomy, they are inserted at the tail of the list. As such, you will see instances of related categories whose IDs are distant from one another.

Find a Category ID