USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons
https://postalpro.usps.com/zcbI really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.
After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?
They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.
So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an recent idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.
I was confused by this until I realized you are missing some logical steps in your (accurate) argument.
The 2006 law took away the safety net (ie the ability to charge whatever is needed to break even).
The “you can now make a profit” rule actually made it HARDER since it came with a price cap.
It told the USPS: You can keep any profits you make, but you cannot raise prices above the rate of inflation to get them.
This forced the USPS to absorb rising costs through internal efficiency rather than passing the bill to mailers
I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.
>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.
Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?
(Or start a gofundme for it.)
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.
But the cost of preparation isn't, government humans are still involved
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
makes sense as its really enterprise level activity -- polling/marketing, government, banking, insurance, etc -- who live or die by zip code data
the rest of us should be good with US Department of Commerce's free (last time I looked anyway) geo services. Google em down
:lightbulb: :huggingface:
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses. It looks like new legislation (PSRA) was finally passed in 2022 to move that burden from USPS and onto the OPM.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I once built an interactive map for some areas in Switzerland with postcodes rendered on it. I had to use a lot of tricks to keep it down to a few hundred KB for just about 5% of Switzerland's area. If I tried to add more areas, I'd have to abandon the approach of rendering polygons directly with Leaflet and move to static, pre-rendered images. Now, if you add 10 or 100 times more points, you would barely be able to render it fast enough on the CPU anymore.
So, nice idea, but the polygons become hard to work with then.
Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...
I think the one I enjoyed the most was a zipcode with 38 separate geographical areas, and the other example was a street where one half was one zip code, and the other was a different one, but half way down the street they swapped sides. Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.
Imagine a river that divides two zip codes, with river-front property on both sides. If that river has a bend in it (-∿-) that's greater than the width of the river+property, the polygon bounding one zip code would cut through the other, or the polygon is non-convex where it bends along the river.
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...
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?
Just a visualization of zip codes. Start typing a number and it highlights the zip codes on a map. Mildly interesting at best, maybe someone will like it.
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.
The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.
Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P
Changing ZIP codes to be geographical would significantly reduce the usefulness of ZIP codes for their primary use, sorting and delivering mail, so that's a non-starter. Use something else!
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.
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.
you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).
thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?
sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.
back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.
also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.
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.
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.
https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
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.
Very complex problem globally, but the consequences can be high if you sell the wrong number type to a customer in the wrong location (and sometimes the EU and its member states can have precisely opposite legal requirements).
The US is relatively simple, with rate centers, but in some countries you actually have to draw geojson boundaries and find out exactly which location the company's headquarters resides within, down to the meter. If your boundaries aren't precise enough, you can get into trouble.
It's been about a decade since I was involved in that, so I'm curious if it's easier these days. There's not, however, a lot of incentive to fix it, as in many countries a few telco providers control everything.
I believe the demand for this was to visualize attributes on a map by coloring polygons, and the dataset was addresses that already had zip codes.
(Please stop coloring polygons by attribute: it gives false impressions because areas are unequal. Instead, use a scale of dot density. Or marker size, which has its own perceptual issues.)
However misguided, coloring zip code polygons gives you things like maps of customer data. But you could just as well geocode each address and assign it to a county or other boundary. (news flash: the geocoding database is derived from the same line data as the ZIP code project.)
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.
The "city" on my address growing up was a CDP[1], and it is now a city that I live 2 miles from rather than the one that I live less than a mile from.
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
The ATMs never got mail.
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.
Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system. In July 2015 all 2.2 million residential and business addresses in Ireland received a letter notifying them of the new Eircode for their address.[4] Unlike other countries, where postcodes define clusters or groups of addresses, an Eircode identifies an individual address and shows exactly where it is located. The system was criticised...[5]
...for using an unsequenced code limited to postal addresses...[67][68]Blog post: https://austinhenley.com/blog/coord2state.html
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175356
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/...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=fcc+broad...
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.
At first I thought maybe this could be used to correct gerrymandering, but then I remembered all my cynical deductions.
s/offers/sells/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.
USPS can charge funny money for the latest version.
> Getting a human to sort mail without looking up a big list was pretty useful.
Mail gets sorted several times. At the ingress, there is a rough sorting of "okay, this one leaves the city, this one doesn't" kind, where the former ones are thrown in a large bag and sent upstream, and the latter ones get divided into delivery groups — yes, by a person looking up a list of local addresses. They don't need to have a list for the whole country, only for their city/local district, so it's not that big of a list. And not making this list of internal routing codes public has the benefits that A) that number needn't be double-checked for correctness, saving the labour, B) the list can be changed often to better suit the way the delivery routes are organized, and you don't need to notify the general public about the changes.
I'd be willing to bet $50 that USPS has some internal DB, changed very often, that they use to remap zip codes into something actually useful for both the bulk- and last-mile delivery.
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.
> they can't declare bankruptcy
According to Amendment 14, section 4:
> The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
According to that clause, especially the bit with the comma, Congress & courts have held that government bodies cannot discharge debts in bankruptcy. They go through Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Every other chapter in BK allows for some debts to be wiped away.
It's especially annoying in the UK case because there is such rich national data, but for so much of it the only join key is the postcode unit, which can change over time and for which no public polygon is available. Evidently the Ordnance Survey doesn't even keep historic vintages of its releases...
I don't think this will stop the bleed, but maybe it'll help that they are charging??
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...
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.
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.