What the Worldwide Postal Code Finder does
Look up what a postal code actually refers to - the places behind it, the state or region, the district and the coordinates - from the open GeoNames postal export vendored on this site. Pick a country, type a code or a place name, and the matching records appear with their administrative divisions and a local plot of where they sit.
One thing has to be said first, because most pages that call themselves worldwide postal code finders do not say it: a complete free worldwide postal database does not exist. Postal authorities own their address files and most license them commercially. What is openly published, country by country, is what you can search here, and the covered-country list on this page is the honest boundary of that. A code that is missing is missing from the open data, which is not the same as not existing.
How to use it
- Choose a country. The list holds only the countries whose postal file is vendored here, each with the number of records it contains.
- Read the coverage note for that country. Several - the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and others - publish only part of the code, and the note says which part.
- Switch between searching by postal code and by place name. A code matches from the start, so a partial code finds the whole range beneath it; a place name matches anywhere in the name and ignores accents.
- Read the results table: every place recorded against the code, with admin 1 (state, region or province), admin 2 (district, county or municipality) and coordinates.
- Export as CSV for a spreadsheet, or GeoJSON if the points are going into a mapping tool.
Reading the results
One postal code often covers many places. In India, 110001 carries more than twenty entries - the head post office, Parliament House, Connaught Place and the rest - all sharing the same six digits. The table lists them all rather than picking one.
Coordinates are the dataset's representative point for the record, given to four decimal places, which is about eleven metres of precision on the number but far less in meaning. A postal code covers an area; the point is somewhere sensible inside it, not a building.
"Matched on the leading part of the code" means the full code you typed is not in the open data but its prefix is. For a UK postcode that is expected: the free dataset carries outward codes only, so SW1A 1AA matches as SW1A.
Nothing matched means nothing matched in this dataset. It is not a verdict on the code, and the page will not turn an absence into a confident negative.
Worked example: looking up 110001 in India
Choosing India loads a file of about 155,500 records and searching for 110001 returns twenty-one of them. The first is New Delhi G.P.O., admin 1 Delhi, admin 2 New Delhi, at 28.6369, 77.2183. Others include Parliament House and Connaught Place, both recorded under admin 2 Central Delhi.
That difference is the useful part. The code alone tells you central New Delhi; the records tell you the code straddles two districts as GeoNames records them, which matters if you are aggregating anything by district.
Switching to a place-name search for "Connaught" in the same country returns the Connaught Place entries and anything else carrying the word, each with its own code - the reverse lookup, done on the same file with no service involved.
Why the data stops where it does
The GeoNames postal export is assembled from what postal authorities and national mapping agencies release under open terms. Some publish everything: Germany, France, the United States and India all appear at full code precision. Others publish a partial file, and a few publish nothing at all, which is why the coverage list has gaps rather than a row for every country in the world.
The United Kingdom is the clearest example. Royal Mail's Postcode Address File is a licensed commercial product; what is open is the outward code - the part before the space - so this dataset holds SW1A rather than SW1A 1AA. Ireland's Eircode routing keys, Dutch four-digit areas and Canadian forward sortation areas are the same story. Each is genuinely useful at the level it covers, and misleading if you pretend it covers more.
How this differs from the ZIP code validator and extractor
The ZIP Code Format Validator checks whether a string matches a country's pattern, and the ZIP Code Extractor pulls codes out of a block of text. Both work on shape alone - neither has any idea what a code refers to. This page is the lookup: it searches a real dataset for the places a code names, with their divisions and coordinates, and tells you honestly when a country is not covered.
Limitations: what the result does not prove
- Coverage is partial and stated. The countries listed are the ones vendored here; several of them hold only part of their codes, and the per-country note says which part.
- This is not an address validation service. A record here shows that a code appears in an open dataset with a place attached; it does not prove an address exists or that post will arrive.
- The data is a dated snapshot, not a live feed. Postal authorities add and retire codes, so a very new code may be absent and a retired one may linger.
- Coordinates locate the code's area, not a building. They are fine for mapping a district and wrong for anything that needs a doorstep.
Privacy: where your data goes
Everything you paste, type or drop is processed in this browser tab. It is not uploaded, logged, stored or sent to analytics. Session recording and tag-manager scripts are switched off on this page.
Standards and sources
- GeoNames postal code export (CC BY 4.0) - checked 19 Sep 2026
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence - checked 19 Sep 2026
- ISO 3166 - Codes for the representation of names of countries - checked 19 Sep 2026
- Universal Postal Union - addressing solutions
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free database of every postal code in the world?
No. Postal authorities own their address files and most sell them under licence, so no complete free worldwide set exists. The GeoNames postal export is the largest openly published collection, and it covers what each authority releases openly - which for some countries is everything and for others only the leading characters.
Why does a UK postcode only match its first part?
Because the open dataset holds outward codes - the part before the space, such as SW1A or M1 - and not the full unit postcode. The complete UK file is Royal Mail's licensed Postcode Address File, which is not open data. Searching SW1A 1AA therefore matches SW1A, and the page says so rather than reporting an exact hit.
Why does one postal code return several places?
Because in many countries a code covers a whole area with several named localities, or a city centre code is assigned to a post office as well as to landmarks and streets around it. The dataset holds one row per named place, so the table shows them all instead of choosing one for you.
Is anything sent to a server when I search?
Only the country's own data file is fetched, from this site, and it is decompressed and searched inside your browser. What you type is never sent anywhere - no geocoder is involved and no map tile is requested.
How accurate are the coordinates for a postal code?
They are a representative point for the record, usually the centroid of the place, given to four decimal places. Treat them as locating the area to within a few hundred metres in a town and rather more in a rural code. They are not a building location and should not be used as one.
Can I use this data in my own project?
The GeoNames postal export is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, so yes, provided you attribute it. The licence link and the attribution line appear on this page; copy them into whatever you build with the exported CSV or GeoJSON.
What should I do if my country is not in the list?
Take it at face value: there is no open postal file for it here, so this page has nothing to search and says so rather than showing an empty result. Your national postal operator may publish a lookup of its own, and that will be more current than any open snapshot.
Last reviewed by the A2Z.Tools team against the sources listed above.
