📍 ZIP Code & Postal Code Lookup
Find city names, states, counties, latitude, and longitude coordinates from any US or international postal code. Instant verification tool.
What ZIP Code & Postal Code Lookup Does
This tool resolves a postal code to its place name, region and coordinates across six countries — the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France and Spain.
Postal codes are not a single system. They differ in length, in what they identify and in how precisely they locate anything, and a tool covering several countries has to accommodate all of that. A US ZIP identifies a mail delivery route; a Canadian postal code identifies a block or a single large building; a British postcode can identify a handful of addresses.
One practical thing to know before you use it: enter a full postcode and it will still work, because the input is normalized first. The underlying dataset only resolves the outward part — the first three characters in Canada, the outward code in Britain, the five-digit ZIP in the US — so "M5V 3L9" is queried as "M5V" and "90210-1234" as "90210". Without that step, typing your real postcode returned nothing.
How to Use ZIP Code & Postal Code Lookup
- Select country code (US, CA, UK, DE, FR, ES)
- Enter the 5-digit ZIP or postal code
- View primary city name, state, and geographic coordinates
Formula Used by ZIP Code & Postal Code Lookup
What gets sent to the data source
Canada: first 3 characters · Great Britain: all but the last 3 · US: the 5 digits before any hyphen
- forward sortation area
- The Canadian outward unit — the first three characters, e.g. M5V
- outward code
- The British equivalent — everything before the final three characters, e.g. SW1A
Worked example
Real postcodes as people actually write them.
- "M5V 3L9" → M5V → Downtown Toronto, Ontario
- "SW1A 1AA" → SW1A → Westminster Abbey, England
- "EC1A 1BB" → EC1A → London, England
- "90210-1234" → 90210 → Beverly Hills, California
Result: All four resolve. Queried unnormalized, all four return 404 — which is why this step exists and why the result is a place rather than an error.
What a Postal Code Actually Identifies, by Country
The systems are not equivalent, which is why precision varies so much between them.
| Country | Format | Resolved here to | What it identifies |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 5 digits (+4 optional) | The 5-digit ZIP | A mail delivery route, not an area boundary |
| Canada | A1A 1A1 | First 3 characters (FSA) | Full code reaches a block or a single large building |
| Great Britain | Outward + inward | The outward code | Full code reaches roughly 15 addresses |
| Germany | 5 digits | The full code | A town or a district of a city |
| France | 5 digits | The full code | A commune or arrondissement |
| Spain | 5 digits | The full code | A municipality or city district |
Live Lookups
Queried 11 September 2026 after normalization.
| Entered | Queried as | Result |
|---|---|---|
| M5V 3L9 | M5V | Downtown Toronto, Ontario |
| SW1A 1AA | SW1A | Westminster Abbey, England |
| EC1A 1BB | EC1A | London, England |
| 90210-1234 | 90210 | Beverly Hills, California |
| 10115 | 10115 | Berlin, Germany |
How to Read Your Result
A US ZIP is a delivery route, not a region
This is the most consequential misunderstanding about ZIP codes. They were designed to organize mail carriers, not to divide territory, so a ZIP is fundamentally a collection of delivery points along routes rather than a bounded area. Some ZIPs cross city lines; some cross county lines; a few are assigned to a single high-volume building and have no geographic extent at all. Any map showing ZIP boundaries is showing an approximation someone constructed after the fact, which is why ZIP-based demographic analysis is a well-known source of error.
The place name is the postal name, not the municipality
A ZIP's associated city name is the one the postal service uses for addressing, and it frequently differs from the town you actually live in — unincorporated areas inherit the name of the nearest post office, and a single ZIP can carry several acceptable place names. Getting "not the town I live in" back is usually correct postally and wrong colloquially. For anything official, the municipality is the authority, not the postal designation.
Coordinates here are a centroid
The latitude and longitude returned represent a central point for the code, not your address and not a boundary. For a compact urban postcode that point is a reasonable approximation; for a large rural ZIP covering many square miles it can be some distance from any particular address in it. Use it to place a code roughly on a map, not to measure a distance you care about.
For US address validation, use USPS
The Postal Service publishes the authoritative ZIP data and free lookup tools, including address standardization and ZIP+4 assignment, and it is updated continuously. A third-party dataset is a convenience for quick lookups and multi-country coverage; it is not a substitute for the authority when the answer has to be correct for mail, for a form, or for a record.
Limitations & Accuracy Notes
- Six countries. Most of the world is not covered, and the underlying dataset's coverage varies by country even where it exists.
- Resolves outward codes only. Full Canadian and British postcodes are truncated before the query, so the result describes the wider outward area rather than the specific block the full code identifies.
- US ZIP+4 is not supported — the +4 is dropped. That extension identifies a specific delivery segment and this tool cannot resolve it.
- Not authoritative and not continuously updated. New and retired codes may be missing or stale; USPS and the national postal operators are the sources of record.
- No reverse lookup. You cannot enter a place name or coordinates and get the postal codes covering it.
- No address validation, standardization, or deliverability checking, and no boundary polygons.
- Coordinates are a single centroid per code, not a boundary, and carry no accuracy figure.
Frequently Asked Questions
What information does the ZIP Code lookup provide?
Does this tool support international postal codes?
Which countries are covered?
Why does only part of my postcode work?
What is ZIP+4?
Do postal codes map neatly onto towns?
Is the data current?
Is my search recorded?
References & Further Reading
- USPS — ZIP Code Lookup — The authoritative US source for ZIP codes, address standardization and ZIP+4 — the right tool when the answer has to be correct for mail
- Zippopotam.us — postal code API — The open dataset this tool queries, and the source of the outward-code behavior documented above