Dang, the prices are crazy. $10k for the lowest tier? I expect federal data to be free. Most federal data related to stuff like regulation (e.g. FCC spectrum use coverage maps), maps for federally-managed lands, etc. is free. And, it should be free. It's a core part of accountability and transparency. Historically there was a copying cost (having a human print physical copies on paper or CD/DVD/tape), which is understandable, but now that the incremental cost of each new copy approaches $0, that's what it should cost users of the data.
This is interesting. For a long time it was pointed out that ZIP codes, unlike say, city or state boundaries, were not properly representable as polygons, since they don't divide up acreage into zones, but rather label postal delivery routes. Suppose I build a new neighborhood way out in the middle of nowhere. The "polygon" concept suggests that we could look and see what polygon I'm in, and that will determine what post office delivers my mail. But in reality, if there was no route to that area already, they could decide to make it part of any one of the surrounding routes.
I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.
Yea same, then I realized they're not free either :(
The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.
wait how can ZIP code boundary lines not be free information, that's totally wild, how do you then even know what ZIP code to use if you can't look it up...
what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??
The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.
To get the biggest discount on postage (one place I worked at mailed about 3k envelopes per month) you have ZIP+4, to pre-sort the mail and print a bunch of stuff on that barcode [0]. Next time you get an envelope, look at the barcode on the bottom.
> The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.
What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some government should be run like a business (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?
Iirc when I worked with these in the past ZIP codes did not map cleanly to boundaries, hence the ZCTAs. Zip codes are sometimes assigned to points, lines, they can overlap, and other weird arcana because they defined mail routes rather than tesselating areas.
Congress keeps passing laws to make USPS appear to be as "unprofitable" as possible. Such as pre-funding pensions & healthcare for people who have not been born yet [0]. I suspect the goal is to sell off a "money losing" USPS to some campaign contributor for $1 so that person can reap the $60B in pension funds.
One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].
Notes:
0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.
> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.
Why is the government expected to be profitable? Is the military profitable? What about the national park service? I don't want government to be profitable--I want them to provide the service they are asked to provide in a way that his highly available and accessible.
A profit is the net value given to society minus the cost taken from society. Example: you take floor worth 1 from society, make a cake and sell it for 3. You gave 3 and took 1, enriching society by 2.
It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.
This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but is the poorest people who gets the worst of it.
It is ideological. Many point to private courier services as an 'obvious' point of comparison.
However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.
In my experience that API is also wildly inaccurate and is responsible for many misdelivered/undelivered packages because it will return random (well, previously used by someone else), different building/suite/apartment numbers for the same address line that already contains the correct one.
Apparently it is because the USPS has a special carve out from congress exempting it from disclosure of "information of a commercial nature", subsection (c) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/410
Probably because of the silly idea of quasi-privatization,
> But, beginning in the 1970s, the Postal Service largely stopped receiving any taxpayer money for ongoing operations. Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.
> Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.
If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.
Yeah, it is definitely one of the most tortured organizations I know of. Congress as usual wants a ton of conflicting things:
1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.
2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything
3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes
4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)
5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded
6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.
If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.
> he Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations
Pretty much every state charges for some data and not others.
The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?
This move roughly aligns with the administration's broader desire to take data generated by the government at taxpayer expense, and hand it over to his buddies to privatize and profit from it. See also weather data.
I feel like this should be public. I wonder what would be the repercussion of a gofundme to buy it once and make it publicly available. There aren't many downsides of updating every couple years.
The point of the USPS data is that it is official, correct, and up-to-date, getting it from some GitHub kind of defeats the entire point. If you want free data from unofficial sources you can already get that.
There are plenty of 'good enough' options that are free; just ignore the USPS' offerings unless you ABSOLUTELY have to match them 1:1 for business reasons.
Some important context - Zip codes were not established as geographic markets. A "Zip Code" is collection of routes USPS uses - so it's whole goal was to get the right package on the right truck.
The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.
...Can someone please explain why ZIP codes are even a thing people need to bother about? Like, there's an address on the letter/parcel — that should be enough for the USPS to deliver it, right? If they use some internal classification/address grouping for better routing — fine, whatever, they can use it but surely they themselves can look it up in their internal DB quicker and more reliably than I can on some random web-site of dubious progenity?
I'm not sure how many fields will find this useful -- other core geo/spatial datasets use the related-but-not-identical ZCTAs, especially Census demographic data. Perhaps transportation operations?
Fun fact, a postcode can represent up to 100 addresses, apartment buildings with more than 100 units have multiple postcodes. Sometimes third-party systems will only recognize a subset of those postcodes (e.g: a system might assume a building only has 1 postcode) which can lead to some residents being in the geographic region for a service while others are not despite being in the same building.
Also postcode data is licensed by the Royal Mail, not free.
As someone from the Netherlands I’ve been very surprised at how far “ahead” we seem to be here. Just a postcode can point you to a street, even the side of the street (right or left hand), a house number than gives you the exact building. That is how people are used to enter their address here.
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
Interestingly, there are no polygons for UK postcodes, because UK postcodes don’t represent a geographical area; instead, they represent one or more discrete points.
Given how postcodes are supposed to work, this is what I would expect. Curious if many of the polygons in the data set contain more than one polygon and or if there is any overlap
ZIPs don't represent areas either. They represent routes, so a collection of paths on a road map is bundled together and named with a ZIP. If you built a new house in between towns, whichever post office decides to serve it would extend one of their lines to go past your house, and then you are assigned that ZIP code. Since it's all based on their convenience, they don't pay any mind to things like city limits or even in some cases state lines.
"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."
The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.
Using ZIP codes to define geographic regions is always a bad idea. A ZIP code is an address attribute, not a geographic boundary. Some ZIP codes are assigned to PO boxes or parcel lockers, while entire cities may share a single ZIP code. You can even have streets stretching 30 km across a city, all under the same ZIP code.
Also, there are a few zip codes that cross state boundaries. Those rare cases involve very rural areas where the nearest post office is across the state line.
The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.
The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.
Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.
It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.
Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.
I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.
Historically, only larger cities had things you might recognize as a postal code. For example: Boston 8, Mass. The current abbreviation for Massachusetts is MA. And some changed - such as NB being Nebraska (and is now New Brunswick) and Nebraska is now NE.
On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:
Postal codes are designed to help with delivering mail so it is less linked to geographic in terms of other things we care about and mostly linked to things that are relevant to mail delivery.
Well, Postal Code is a geographical region but it's not one aligned with legal boundaries.
These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:
- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.
- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.
- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.
The practical impact of these is twofold:
- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city.
- Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.
tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.
As someone who has done tons of geospatial work I hate this. A ZIP code was never technically a geospatial boundary. Being "inside" a boundary does not guarantee you have that ZIP code, just that the space is surrounded by a bunch of postal delivery addresses bearing the ZIP code.
most people dont know that zip codes are specific to the postal service and dont have anything to do with actual municipal government boundaries. the hierarchy of geo boundaries and the ways to locate and communicate within them is way more interesting than one would believe!
It used to be that the first 3 digits of a zip code sent that mail to the "main" post office building (the one that has loading docks for like 10-30 tractor trailers on one side of the building). Even if you were mailing a letter to the same zip, it went to that building to be sorted and returned to the local office before delivery. Nowadays, everything goes to central facilities where stuff is scanned and sorted. In Kentucky, almost all mail goes through Louisville.
Polygons do have value in some workflows, if used with the appropriate caveats.
And in no instances have I ever run across use cases where these are worth paying any substantial money for. If USPS is going to jump into the fray here, really bad look (and probably net negative revenue for them) to offer as a paid product.
I know that many people do use ZIP codes for grouping locations, and polygons may be useful for tieing a lat/long to a zipcode if it doesn't have a delivery location. But it's all kind of silly unless you're sorting mail. Also, I'd hate/love to see some of the polygons where delivery boundaries get weird.
Whatever you're grouping is likely better served by some grouping based on geography, not based on delivery routes. You probably wouldn't group by telephone company central office either, unless you're telco related.
We want to group by geography, zip codes are easy and vaguely geographic, lets use that is kind of a valid decision, but it's deeply frustrating :p
Completely agree on this. Something I have used for a few applications is the DMA (designated market area) boundaries. It's not ideal for everything, but it's very human-focused: If you live just a few miles across a state boundary from a major city, grouping you with the city makes more sense than with anything in your state.
In fact, these were invented by Nielsen, and they determined them just by measuring which city's TV stations are predominantly watched in each county, and assigning each county to one DMA based on that.
The bummer thing about their data is it's ZIP, not ZIP+4. Technically ZIP+4 is internal to USPS because it identifies a specific route (or something like that), but it's also is more precise than ZIP.
The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.
The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.
Property lines are a whole other rabbit hole USPS has nothing to do with. Property lines are maintained by county/parish/... (GIS) departments and a few companies managed to aggregate them all. And they are famously inaccurate. "GIS" stands for "Get it surveyed"...
Reminds me of one of my favorite little rabbit holes, trying to find this data for Canada:
Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.
Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.
Wow. That's some terrible behavior. In the US you can't copyright simple facts (such as "this lat/long has this postal code"). But by that logic, it's hard for me to see how USPS can lay claim to the dataset being discussed here either, but I assume they have attorneys who told them why they can.
For everyone saying it should be free, the USPS charges for services. They charge to deliver mail.
Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.
Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.
Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.
Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.
Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.
My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.
Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.
Structural changes are required for then USPS to be financially stable. Chief among them is modifying the Universal Service Obligation (USO).
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
The USPS is losing money hand over fist delivering the unwanted junk mail
The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.
Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.
USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.
blame EDDM, aka junk mail, aka physical SPAM that you can not opt out of. its a jobs program that I suppose also benefits the paper product recycling industry
nice! but DMAchoice has no effect on EDDM delivery, it only affects mail that is directly addressed to you. anything addressed to Postal Customer, Residential Customer, or any of the other names they use can not be stopped. Even if you put a sign on the mailbox that says 'No Junk Mail', a postal carrier is legally obligated to deliver EDDM correspondance to every stop on their route
I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.
FWIW if you're willing to deal with some 'fuzziness' and the occasional missing zip code that's commercial only, the ZCTA shapefiles are free and are close enough for many purposes: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.
[1] https://geojson.tools/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubusercont...
[2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2026/ZCTA520/
what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??
There has always (since the late 90s) been a free look up webpage:
https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm
The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.
To get the biggest discount on postage (one place I worked at mailed about 3k envelopes per month) you have ZIP+4, to pre-sort the mail and print a bunch of stuff on that barcode [0]. Next time you get an envelope, look at the barcode on the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode
0 - doing it that way saved about $450/month versus not doing any of their work for them.
What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some government should be run like a business (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?
This isn't the USPS charging for existing data. They created a new data set that's only relevant to data brokers, and are charging for it.
Can someone with expertise in govt data rights explain? Do any other US govt agencies sell data to the private sector?
One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].
Notes:
0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/what-did-po...
> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...
1 - https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3
It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.
This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but is the poorest people who gets the worst of it.
However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.
it's not that complicated: FedEx and UPS and several other related business types have been trying to kill it for years
the "privatize everything" crowd that would charge you for air if they could.
> But, beginning in the 1970s, the Postal Service largely stopped receiving any taxpayer money for ongoing operations. Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...
If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.
1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.
2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything
3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes
4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)
5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded
6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.
If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.
So yeah, they can sell that data legally.
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/
> he Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations
The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?
You can even get it from ... the government: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.
"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
Also postcode data is licensed by the Royal Mail, not free.
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...
The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4
The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.
Sample picture: https://postalsupply.net/2023/03/maintenance-and-upkeep-tips...
Do you know of anywhere I can learn more about why this is?
Have they ever thought about changing it so a “postal code” IS a geographical region?
The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.
Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.
It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.
Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.
I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.
On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_and_territo...
And due to historical inertia, very little has changed since the current (5 digit) system was created 60+ years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:
- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.
- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.
- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.
The practical impact of these is twofold:
- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city. - Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.
tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.
We use https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON - it's from 2010, but open it in Claude and use the free-to-download data source to regen from the most recent census.
Some zip codes represent a single building. Example 20500 is the White House. The Pentagon is so big it has several zip codes.
https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...
It used to be that the first 3 digits of a zip code sent that mail to the "main" post office building (the one that has loading docks for like 10-30 tractor trailers on one side of the building). Even if you were mailing a letter to the same zip, it went to that building to be sorted and returned to the local office before delivery. Nowadays, everything goes to central facilities where stuff is scanned and sorted. In Kentucky, almost all mail goes through Louisville.
And in no instances have I ever run across use cases where these are worth paying any substantial money for. If USPS is going to jump into the fray here, really bad look (and probably net negative revenue for them) to offer as a paid product.
Whatever you're grouping is likely better served by some grouping based on geography, not based on delivery routes. You probably wouldn't group by telephone company central office either, unless you're telco related.
We want to group by geography, zip codes are easy and vaguely geographic, lets use that is kind of a valid decision, but it's deeply frustrating :p
In fact, these were invented by Nielsen, and they determined them just by measuring which city's TV stations are predominantly watched in each county, and assigning each county to one DMA based on that.
Because, well, ZIP codes aren't a spatial thing. I guess I have to update that?
And the fact that this isn't free is... a decision.
The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.
The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.
Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.
Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1655227/...
Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.
Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.
Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.
Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.
Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.
My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.
Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.
https://maps.huge.info/zip.htm
I don't think this will stop the bleed, but maybe it'll help that they are charging??
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.
Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.
USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/us-postal-service-losing-money-what...
That's not true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939
Doesn't get rid of all of it, but gets rid of the vast majority, IME.
oh, so are you having someone come out to patch the hole and fix it?
no, the hole is still there. we are spending 3k per month to get a water delivery truck to refill the pool.