Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte has announced the roll-out of the system, which is designed to help emergency, postal, and other service providers to locate households.
A consortium headed by Capita Ireland has been awarded the tender to develop, implement and operate the new system.
Houses, apartments and offices in large developments will each have an individual code as long as specific post-boxes are provided.
The postcode will be a seven-character code in the format A65 B2CD, with the first three characters relating to a general area or postal district in which the address is located.
In Dublin, existing postal districts will appear as the first three characters of the new postcode.
Currently, over 30% of all domestic addresses in Ireland are not unique.
"The Irish code will be the first in the world to be unique to each individual address."
Householders will be informed of their postcode in early 2015 and will be able to use it from then on.
The Capita consortium is expected to operate the postcode under licence for an initial ten-year period.
