United States ZIP Codes

The United States has 41,488 ZIP codes. 33,468 of them are residential areas the Census Bureau reports on, so those pages carry population, income, housing, health and business figures alongside the code itself. The rest are PO box ranges, military addresses and codes assigned to single organisations.

ZIP codes are five digits. The first digit is a group of states, the next two a regional sorting facility, and the last two the delivery area it serves. They are routes rather than areas, which is why a ZIP code can cross a county line and why some have no population at all.

The full form is ZIP+4: five digits, a hyphen and four more, as in 99999-9999. The last four narrow the address to a city block, a building or a single large recipient. Five digits is all that is required, though the Postal Service asks for all nine.

ZIP codes also cover the US territories — American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands — and are still used by three former Pacific territories: the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.

Rankings

Every ZIP code ranked on the figures behind these pages — income, house prices, rent, education, health, natural hazard risk and walkability, each list showing both the highest and the lowest.

United States ZIP Codes

Rankings

By state