DistrictByZip Every school district that touches your ZIP Code

Can a ZIP Code have two school districts?

Yes, and more often than not. Of the 33,555 ZIP Code areas in the country with homes and a school district, 17,865 (53%) are served by more than one district, and in 2,711 the district that runs grade school is not the one that runs high school. The share runs from 0% in District of Columbia, Hawaii and Puerto Rico to 85% in Montana, so the national figure describes no state in particular.

One example: ZIP Code 90250, Hawthorne, California

This ZIP Code area holds 34,677 homes. For grade school the federal boundary file splits them between 4 districts: Hawthorne Elementary 77%, Wiseburn Unified 13%, Lawndale Elementary 6.9%, Los Angeles Unified 3.0% of the homes. For high school the answer changes: Centinela Valley Union High 84%, Wiseburn Unified 13%, Los Angeles Unified 3.0%. One address there can belong to one district for the early grades and to another for high school, and a lookup that names one district for the whole ZIP Code is wrong for part of it either way.

Why it happens

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes drawn by the Postal Service; a school district is a unit of local government drawn by the state. Neither follows the other, so a district line runs through a ZIP Code wherever it happens to. The second reason is structural: in states such as California, Arizona, Illinois and New Jersey, many places have an elementary district for the early grades and a separate high school district over several of them. There, one address has two districts at once by design.

How often it happens, state by state

Share of ZIP Code areas with a school district named that are served by more than one, counted from census blocks: highest first.

If your ZIP Code has two

Look it up to see every district with its share of the homes, then check the exact street address: the district boundary follows streets, not ZIP Codes.

Have a street address?

A ZIP Code names every district that can serve the area; a street address settles which one serves a home. The Census Bureau geocoder takes an exact address and returns its school districts from the current boundary files, free and with no account.

Check an exact address with the Census Geocoder

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.