Why is relay country different from IP country?

[yummy_onion]

Reviewing Relay Search, I noticed that the country doesn’t match the geo location of the relay’s IP. Why is there a discrepency?

[maxzrbn]

The ‘tor’ package comes bundled with a GeoIP file for both IPv4 and IPv6 (i.e. files that map IPs to countries, you can find them in /usr/share/tor/). On Debian, it is automatically maintained as a dependency for the main package.

The preface explains where and when the data is obtained:

# This file has been converted from the IPFire Location database
# using Tor's geoip-db-tool, which is available in the
# scripts/maint/geoip/geoip-db-tool directory in the Tor source
# code repository at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/ .
#
# For more information on the data, see https://location.ipfire.org/.
#
# Below is the header from the original export:
#
#
# Location Database Export
#
# Generated: Thu, 24 Oct 2024 04:46:28 GMT
# Vendor:    IPFire Project
# License:   CC BY-SA 4.0
#
# This database has been obtained from https://location.ipfire.org/
#
# Find the full license terms at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#
...

Since it’s statically defined, some IPs can get outdated pretty fast, and that is the case for your relay. Also GeoIP accuracy will never be 100%, but it aims to be.
Check out IPFire if you’re curious about it.