A postal code is a series of letters and/or digits appended to a postal address for the purpose of sorting mail.

The vast majority of the world's postal services and/or countries use postal codes. However, contrary to common misconception, not all do: The Republic of Ireland for example does not use postal codes¹.

Postal services using postal codes mostly use their own respective different formats and placement for them. (Their service area is usually defined by national borders.) In most English-speaking countries, the postal code goes after the name of the city or town, whereas in most continental European countries it goes before it and is often prefixed with a country code. This country code is similar to the one used on car license plates.

Although postal codes are usually assigned to geographical areas, sometimes this is not the case: special codes may be assigned to institutions with large volumes of post, such as government agencies and large commercial companies. One example is the French Cedex system.

Contents

1 Alphanumeric postal codes 2 Postal zone numbers 3 See also 4 External links 5 Footnote

Alphanumeric postal codes

Most postal codes are numeric. The few using alphanumeric postal code systems (with letters and digits) are:

• Argentina
• Bermuda
• Brunei
• Canada
• Malta
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• Venezuela

Postal zone numbers

Before postal codes as described here were used, large cities were often divided into postal zones (or postal districts), usually numbered from 1 up within each city. The newer postal code systems often incorporate the old zone numbers, as with London postal district numbers, for example. Dublin, Ireland still uses postal district numbers, as postal codes are not used in the country at all. (An Post relies on OCR analysis of the entire address instead.)

See also

• Universal Postal Union (UPU)
• List of postal codes — for all countries (shows each country system's respective syntax only)
• Lists of postal codes — index to full postal code lists for each country
• Category:Lists of postal codes

External links

• UPU files for every country in PDF
• Formats of all countries' postal codes
• International zip codes

Footnote

¹ Postal district/zone numbers (see above) are used for Dublin only. Confusingly, these postal zone numbers are sometimes also called postal codes—which could be seen as technically incorrect.