DistrictByZip Every school district that touches your ZIP Code

Where grade school and high school are different districts

In 2,711 ZIP Code areas the districts that serve elementary grades are not the districts that serve high school. In 2,174 of them a district appears for high school that is named for no elementary grades at all, so a child at one address changes district between grade school and high school. In the other 537 nothing is added: an elementary district there simply has no high school of its own, and where its students go is a question for the town office rather than the boundary file. No lookup that returns a single name can say either.

Which of these have a page here

42 of the 60 areas listed above have a page of their own on this site, each with the full split by grade band, the districts that reach into it and how it compares inside its state. The other 18 are answered by the lookup, which holds every one of the 33,559 ZIP Code areas in the country with homes in them and needs no page to do it. A page is added where the set of districts is unique in the country and the two grade bands have something to disagree about; everywhere else a page would only repeat what the lookup already computes.

What the difference looks like on the ground

The 60 areas listed above are in 8 states, led by California (33), Arizona (10) and Illinois (6). In 58 of them a district turns up for high school that no grade school answer names, and 67 of those arrivals are secondary districts — districts that exist only to run the upper grades over several elementary districts at once. In the remaining 2 the movement is the other way: a district that runs the early grades has no high school of its own, and the file simply stops naming it.

The largest of them is ZIP Code 90250 · Hawthorne, California, where 34,677 homes sit under districts that do not agree between the two bands. A family there is told one district name by a listing site and meets a second one at the change of grade; nothing in the postal code warns them, because the postal code was never drawn to.

Why this happens

10,777 of the 13,279 school districts that reach a ZIP Code area run every grade themselves. The other 2,502 are the elementary and secondary districts that produce this list, and there are 2,030 elementary districts to 472 secondary ones, so a secondary district is usually drawn over more than one of them. The two boundaries were set at different times by different bodies and do not have to agree, and neither has any reason to agree with a postal route.

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.