Which school districts serve a ZIP Code?
The lookup works the answer out in your browser from an index that travels with the page; no server is asked for it.
Find your school district by ZIP code: every district for grade school and high school, with the share of homes each one holds.
Can a ZIP Code have two school districts? · How to find your school district number
More often than not, more than one. The Census Bureau publishes 33,559 ZIP Code Tabulation Areas with homes in them — the closest thing to a ZIP Code that has an area at all. The federal boundary file counts homes for a school district in 33,555 of them, and that is the denominator for every figure on this site. 17,865 of those are served by more than one school district: 53% of those areas, not of the country's people or its land. The rate is not the same everywhere: it runs from none at all in Hawaii, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, where one district covers everything, to 85% in Montana. Where it is not zero, a lookup answering with one district name is wrong for some of the homes.
- Served by more than one district17,865 of 33,555
The answer has two halves, and they do not always agree
A ZIP Code area is served by one set of districts for elementary grades and another for high school. They are usually the same set. In 2,711 of them they are not: the elementary district stops before high school and a separate secondary district takes over, so a child at one address attends two different districts as they grow up.
In 768 ZIP Code areas the federal file names an elementary district and leaves more than 2% of the homes counted there with no high school district named. That is a real arrangement rather than a hole in the data: the town runs grade school itself and pays tuition somewhere else for the rest.
What this site computes
The Census Bureau publishes which school district each census block belongs to, and how many homes are in each block. It does not publish what happens when you group those blocks by ZIP Code area. Everything on this site is that grouping, worked out here: which districts touch each ZIP Code area, how many of its homes each one holds, whether the two grade bands agree, and how the answer varies from state to state.
- Look up a ZIP Code33,555 areas
- Every state, ranked by how often the lines cross50 states, DC and PR
- The most divided ZIP Codes in the countryup to 19 districts
- Where grade school and high school differ2,711 areas
- Where no high school district is named768 areas
- The largest school districts in the United Statesthe 60 largest by homes
- Districts that never hold a ZIP Code alone7,590 districts
- Every district with a page here260 with pages
- Every ZIP Code with a page here170 pages
Where the lines cross most
The share of a state's ZIP Code areas that more than one district serves runs from none at all to 85%. The six at the top of that range keep 2,097 school districts between them over 3,983 populated ZIP Code areas — close to one district for every postal area, and that ratio is the whole of the explanation.
What to do next
Ask the district office to confirm your street address: look on its site for a school locator, a find my school tool or an attendance zone map, or call the office.
A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: 17,865 of the 33,555 ZIP Code areas in the country with homes in them are served by more than one school district, and the line between two of them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.
District websites and phone numbers here come from the NCES Common Core of Data directory, 2024-25 school year, filed under the same district ID as the Census boundary files. Where it lists no usable website, none is printed rather than guessed.
If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.
Where these numbers come from
The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file, so a fast-growing area may have changed since; ZIP Codes here are the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Areas; a share is a share of homes, not the chance that one address is in a district; and a district is not a school attendance zone. Every source, file and caveat is on the method page.