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The most divided ZIP Codes in America

In these ZIP Code areas, 8 or more school districts each hold a meaningful share of the homes. The record is 19. Counting the two grade bands separately, the 60 areas below give 120 answers, and in 31 of them the district holding the most homes still holds fewer than half of them — there a single-name lookup describes a minority of the homes, and in the rest it describes most of them and silently not the remainder.

Which of these have a page here

13 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 47 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.

Where these places are, and what they have in common

The 60 areas above sit in 10 states, and 39 of them are in the same three: Illinois (19), California (11) and Montana (9). That is not an accident of size. A ZIP Code area crosses many district lines where the districts are small and the postal area is large — the shape of a rural county with half a dozen town districts inside it, and of an older suburb where elementary districts were drawn one settlement at a time and never merged.

The largest of them by homes is ZIP Code 59901 · Kalispell, Montana in Flathead County, 24,589 homes under 19 districts. The four ZIP Code areas at the top of the list are in Kalispell, Chicago Heights, Mount Vernon and McAlester. In 56 of the 60 areas listed the districts named for grade school are not the districts named for high school, and in 7 of them part of the homes have no high school district named at all — so opening a row here answers two questions, not one.

Districts holding under half a percent of the homes named at their own level in a ZIP Code area are not counted on this page; with them the counts would be larger and less true. Of the 33,555 ZIP Code areas in the country with homes in them, 17,865 have two or more districts by that measure, which makes the rows above the extreme tail of an ordinary condition rather than a set of oddities.

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.