DistrictByZip Every school district that touches your ZIP Code

School districts in West Virginia

23% of the 738 populated ZIP Code areas in West Virginia are served by more than one school district — 171 of them, which puts the state 44th among the fifty-two. It is organized into 55 unified districts, the largest being Kanawha County at 90,294 homes. Its most divided ZIP Code area, 26143, is split between 4 districts for elementary grades alone. The two districts that share the most ZIP Codes here are Braxton County and Gilmer County, in 6 of them. Counted by homes rather than by ZIP Code area, 31% of the state's housing sits in a ZIP Code that more than one district serves.

How often a ZIP Code here crosses a district line

The state sits well below the national rate of 53%. Kanawha County alone covers 90,294 homes, and districts that size swallow whole postal areas rather than splitting them. Where a ZIP Code area here does cross a line, it is worth checking precisely because it is unusual.

  • ZIP Code areas with a district738
  • Served by more than one district171 (23%)
  • Grade school and high school differ0 (0%)
  • No high school district named0
  • Unified districts55
  • Elementary districts0
  • Secondary districts0
  • Homes in no district at all0

The largest districts in West Virginia

Ranked by the homes inside their boundaries: Kanawha County leads at 90,294, then Berkeley County and Monongalia. Only districts with a page here are linked; 53 more exist in the state without one.

The most divided ZIP Code area in West Virginia

ZIP Code area 26143 holds 2,024 homes and 4 districts take a real share of them for the early grades, but Wirt County holds 90% on its own at that level. This is the shape that makes a single-name lookup look right: it names Wirt County and describes most of the homes here, and silently not the rest.

Grade schoolWirt County School District90%1,829 of 2,024 homes
High schoolWirt County School District90%1,829 of 2,024 homes

Each percentage here is a share of the 2,024 homes counted in ZIP Code 26143, 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 2,024 homes counted in ZIP Code 26143, so one cell is 58 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.

  • Wirt County School District1,829 of 2,024 homes90%
  • Wood County School District143 of 2,024 homes7.1%
  • Jackson County School District36 of 2,024 homes1.8%
  • Ritchie County School District16 of 2,024 homes0.8%

For grade school, an answer of one district name would be wrong for 195 of the 2,024 here.

Where a single district name still works in West Virginia

Across the 738 ZIP Code areas in West Virginia with homes in them, an answer of one district name misses 31,769 of the 855,495 homes they hold. That is 3.7% of the state, and in 561 of the areas one name covers everything: this is a state where the familiar answer is usually the right one, and the areas below are where it is not.

In ZIP Code 25704 · Huntington, West Virginia the largest district for grade school is Wayne County, and naming it alone misses 2,493 of the 7,442 homes counted there. The rest are with Cabell County.

In ZIP Code 26062 · Weirton, West Virginia the largest district for grade school is Hancock County, and naming it alone misses 2,021 of the 10,395 homes counted there. The rest are with Brooke County.

In ZIP Code 26003 · Wheeling, West Virginia the largest district for grade school is Ohio County, and naming it alone misses 1,411 of the 20,576 homes counted there. The rest are with Marshall County.

Where a ZIP Code here names more than one district

Of the 738 ZIP Code areas in West Virginia that the federal file names a district for, 171 name more than one school district. These are the 12 with the most, starting at 4 districts in one postal area: Newark, Fairmont and Alderson. 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.

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: 171 of the 738 ZIP Code areas in West Virginia 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.