DistrictByZip Every school district that touches your ZIP Code

The largest school districts in the United States

The 60 largest of the 13,468 school districts in the Census boundary files, ranked by the homes inside each boundary: New York City Department of Education comes first with 3,618,620 homes and 8,804,051 residents. Homes and residents are counted from the 2020 Census on the 2026 boundary file, not from enrollment, which this site does not hold. 44 of the 60 have a page of their own here, and their rows are links.

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.

What size does and does not settle

Covering many homes and covering many ZIP Code areas are not the same thing, but on this list they run together more than apart: the rank correlation between the two orders is 0.83, and 7 of the first ten by homes are also in the first ten by ZIP Code areas.

A district on this list covers between 19 and 215 ZIP Code areas: New York City Department of Education reaches the most at 215, Cypress-Fairbanks Independent the fewest at 19. Size buys reach, not exclusivity. In 44 of these 60 districts the areas where the district is the only real answer outnumber the areas it shares, which leaves 16 where it shares at least as many areas as it holds alone.

The list leans to the states with the largest unified districts (Florida (14), Georgia (5), Maryland (5) and Texas (5)) — and that is a fact about how those states organize schools rather than about crowding: a district drawn around a whole county or a whole city takes in every settlement inside it, while the same population in New England is divided among a dozen town districts. That is why the ranking by homes is a poor guide to where a ZIP Code answer is hard, and why the divided areas have a page of their own.

A row counts every ZIP Code area the boundary reaches, including areas where it holds no home counted; 47 of these 60 rows include at least one such area, which is why a state page, counting only areas with homes, can show a smaller number for the same district.

The homes counted here are homes inside the boundary, taken from census blocks, and not enrollment: a district of 3,618,620 homes does not have 3,618,620 pupils, and the two numbers move apart wherever households are older or younger than the country as a whole. The reason to count homes is that a home has a location and a pupil does not — the whole of this site is the question of which district a location falls in, and enrollment figures cannot answer it.

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.