School districts in Montana
Montana splits the two grade bands between separate districts over a large part of the state: 85% of its homes sit under an elementary district that stops before high school, with a separate secondary district taking over from there. That is why 286 of its 368 ZIP Code areas return a different set of districts for grade school than for high school. In 59901 (Kalispell), the most divided of them, Kalispell Elementary leads the elementary answer and Flathead High leads the high school one. The two districts that share the most ZIP Codes here are Hardin Elementary and Hardin High, in 10 of them. Counted by homes rather than by ZIP Code area, 95% of the state's housing sits in a ZIP Code that more than one district serves.
Two districts at one address
Montana keeps 98 separate secondary districts — districts that pick students up partway through and run to the end of high school, over several elementary districts at once. Where one of those sits, an address has two district names and neither is wrong.
- ZIP Code areas with a district368
- Served by more than one district313 (85%)
- Grade school and high school differ286 (78%)
- No high school district named1
- Unified districts64
- Elementary districts233
- Secondary districts98
- Homes in no district at all0
The largest districts in Montana
The top of the list is unusually flat: Billings High, Billings Elementary and Missoula High are within a few percent of each other at around 59,155 homes apiece. Where districts are evenly matched, no one of them owns a postal area, and the shares below tend to be split rather than lopsided.
- Billings High School District59,155 homes · 8 ZIP areas
- Missoula High School District50,623 homes · 15 ZIP areas
- Bozeman High School District34,633 homes · 7 ZIP areas
- Helena High School District27,267 homes · 11 ZIP areas
- Columbia Falls Elementary School District7,558 homes · 10 ZIP areas
- Anaconda High School District5,417 homes · 5 ZIP areas
The most divided ZIP Code area in Montana
ZIP Code area 59901 is the most divided in Montana: 19 districts reach into its 24,589 homes, led for the early grades by Kalispell Elementary and Evergreen Elementary. No single name describes this postal code, and no lookup that gives one is telling the whole truth about it.
Each percentage here is a share of the 24,589 homes counted in ZIP Code 59901, not the chance that any one address is in that district. Enrollment follows the street: two houses on opposite sides of the same road can be in different districts, and only the district office can say which.
Every track below is 35 cells long and stands for all 24,589 homes counted in ZIP Code 59901, so one cell is 703 homes, rounded to the nearest whole cell. Cells lit solid are the homes one district holds, and the unlit cells are the homes held by the other districts in the same list.
- Kalispell Elementary School District13,945 of 24,589 homes57%
- Evergreen Elementary School District2,571 of 24,589 homes10%
- West Valley Elementary School District2,055 of 24,589 homes8.4%
- Cayuse Prairie Elementary School District1,161 of 24,589 homes4.7%
- Somers Elementary School District1,104 of 24,589 homes4.5%
- Smith Valley Elementary School District851 of 24,589 homes3.5%
- Helena Flats Elementary School District848 of 24,589 homes3.4%
- Creston Elementary School District551 of 24,589 homes2.2%
- Fair-Mont-Egan Elementary School District507 of 24,589 homes2.1%
- Whitefish Elementary School District213 of 24,589 homes0.9%
- Columbia Falls Elementary School District171 of 24,589 homes0.7%
- Bigfork Elementary School District157 of 24,589 homes0.6%
- Kila Elementary School District155 of 24,589 homes0.6%
- Marion Elementary School District150 of 24,589 homes0.6%
- Olney-Bissell Elementary School District150 of 24,589 homes0.6%
2 further districts reach into this ZIP Code area and hold no homes in them.
For grade school, an answer of one district name would be wrong for 10,644 of the 24,589 here.
How much of Montana a single district name misses
Across the 368 ZIP Code areas in Montana with homes in them, an answer of one district name misses 59,997 of the 515,144 homes they hold — 12% of the state. In 109 of those areas the single name is the whole truth; in the other 259 it is not.
ZIP Code 59901 · Kalispell, Montana names 19 districts. Kalispell Elementary is the largest of them for grade school, and an answer of its name alone misses 10,644 of the 24,589 homes there; Flathead High, Evergreen Elementary and West Valley Elementary hold the rest.
ZIP Code 59101 · Lockwood, Montana names 7 districts. Billings Elementary is the largest of them for grade school, and an answer of its name alone misses 6,102 of the 18,725 homes there; Billings High, Lockwood K-12 and Elysian Elementary hold the rest.
ZIP Code 59718 · Four Corners, Montana names 8 districts. Bozeman Elementary is the largest of them for grade school, and an answer of its name alone misses 4,299 of the 19,136 homes there; Bozeman High, Monforton Elementary and Belgrade High hold the rest.
Where a ZIP Code here names more than one district
Of the 368 ZIP Code areas in Montana that the federal file names a district for, 313 name more than one school district. These are the 12 with the most, starting at 19 districts in one postal area: Kalispell, Brockton and Stillwater County. Each row opens the full answer for that ZIP Code, with every district named for grade school and for high school and the share of the homes each one holds.
- ZIP Code 59901 · Kalispell, Montana19 districts · 24,589 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59213 · Brockton, Montana10 districts · 245 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59057 · Stillwater County, Montana9 districts · 248 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59069 · Reed Point, Montana9 districts · 348 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59201 · Wolf Point, Montana9 districts · 1,951 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59436 · Fairfield, Montana9 districts · 842 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59741 · Gallatin River Ranch, Montana9 districts · 2,150 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59911 · Bigfork, Montana9 districts · 6,018 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59718 · Four Corners, Montana8 districts · 19,136 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59410 · Augusta, Montana8 districts · 548 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59523 · Chinook, Montana8 districts · 1,090 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 59714 · Sedan, Montana8 districts · 8,931 homes · two bands, two answers
What to do next
Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.
A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: 313 of the 368 ZIP Code areas in Montana with a district named for 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.
This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.
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 this cannot tell you
The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.
A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.
A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.
A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.
Where these numbers come from
School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.
The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.
Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.