USPS is in a strange boat where a lot of people insist that it must be profitable, much like UPS or Fedex, while failing to realize the value it provides to the rest of the economy by being cheap. Last time I had to physically mail a check I was shocked that it costs 10-20x as much to use UPS or Fedex than it did for the USPS.

> They recently changed the pricing around address verification as well

And this same version of the API (the latest incarnation) is also very picky about addresses, to the point where many more addresses must be "verified" before it will let a label be generated. Sure, you can just set 'ignoreBadAddess' to TRUE, but then you're just kicking the can down the road. They knew exactly what they were doing when they released this new service with free address validation, and then did the rug pull. Fucking drug dealing dark patterns there.

The justification is they compete with private vendors and don’t want to undercut them.

It seems like corruption to me.

If you put extractors of wealth in positions of power they will turn public institutions into profit centers, for themselves. The leadership of the USPS is deeply compromised morally and ethically.

The justification is the same as when they scrapped all the huge working sorting machines after the president installed his unqualified lackey there to run it.

They want it to suck, and, in turn, fail. They are trying to dismantle public services in favor of private enterprise, preferably those of their buddies.

The people in charge think USPS should be ran like a business, not a public service.

Well, serving it costs money for USPS. And, come on... you're not trying just to make the job of the USPS easier here. This adds value to your product, and you're a for-profit entity.

I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.

My parents had this problem when I was growing up. We lived in town A but due to being on the border of town B and in the middle of nowhere we got our mail from town B. Anything addressed to town A wouldn't be delivered. They ended up getting a PO box in town A and post office would put all the undeliverable stuff in it.

With a growing population town A decided to start delivering their mail something like 20-25 years ago. I can see it being a bigger problem now with autofill addresses and such.

Any chance you're one of the Village Ventures[1] guys? I love their work!

1: https://www.villageventuresdev.com

Sounds as if maybe your post office branch can’t afford the maps either

> LICENSEE shall use the Database and Data for the Permitted Use only and shall not disclose, release, distribute, or deliver the Database or Data, any portion of the Data or Database, or any other information derived from the Data or Database to any third party without LICENSOR's prior written consent. For the avoidance of doubt, LICENSEE may incorporate the Data into the products or services listed in Exhibit B (ZCB Order Form), as allowed by Exhibit D (ZIP Code Boundaries Tiers of Access and Usage), but no Data either in whole or in part may be transferred or sold by LICENSEE.

https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_License

>USPS® ZIP Code Boundaries - Publication

>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.

Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?

Not if they want to use it for commercial purposes. You can't just use pirated data freely in a company

The data does change though, and I wouldn't be surprised if at this boutique subscription pricing it's individually fingerprinted

I vote you pay for it and share it with us for free.

(Or start a gofundme for it.)

You wouldn't steal from the post office would you?

But in this case, collecting the data is already a part of USPS core business so there isn't much overhead. And there's no individual processing needed per request like in your body cam example.

This is also a congress-made problem as they privatized the USPS and created this pointless exercise of making them turn a profit, while being regulated like no other company (because that's us admitting we need mail).

oh those horrid ZP4 discs... that always expired at the worst possible time.

ZIP codes aren’t even guaranteed to be polygons. Most data sets use the census bureau’s ZIP code tabulation area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code_Tabulation_Area

That’s not an accident. Congress made it a requirement that the USPS pre fund their pension plans, decades in advance. The only government institute required to do such a thing.

It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.

Due to Baumol's Cost Disease and email, it doesn't make sense to be paying labor to drop off junk mail every single weekday. Cutting this by 2/days a week in urban areas and by 3 days/week in rural would save incredible amounts.

Yeah, we're in weird times where things that should be non-partisan have become very partisan. The postal service has become a lightning rod for the most extreme elements; privatization and anti-democracy activists want to kill it, including the guy who's supposed to be running it. Since they can't easily kill it, they just make it suck in every way they can.

It always kind of weirds me out just how much of the inside of The Pentagon is dedicated shopping space. I mean, I get the full food court and maybe the barbershop. But the full-sized CVS? The candy store? The local chain specialty bundt-cake store with the punny name? The souvenir shop in the central area, away from the souvenir shop where the public tours go. It feels like it's trying to say "America's defense rests on exporting commerce" without knowing it's actually trying to say that.

USPS is run as a financially self-sustaining business wholly owned by the federal government. (So, not for profit, but also not funded by the government.)

For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses. It looks like new legislation (PSRA) was finally passed in 2022 to move that burden from USPS and onto the OPM.

It wasn't intended to be profitable. It was intended to provide a public service in the national interest. Any funds raised through postage were to hopefully offset the considerable costs, but the considerable costs were in and of themselves seen as a necessary expenditure for a critical responsibility of the federal government, no more or less so than the considerable costs associated with the raising of armies and navies for the defense of the nation.

there might be an argument for it since DeJoy has been trying to run it like amazon ruining rural service

No??? It's an independent bit of the exec branch designed to operate as a public service. You should have learned this in high school civics class

No?

Back in the 1980s I built my own shapefiles from Census data. Not just zip codes but carrier routes.

> how do you then even know what ZIP code to use

There has always (since the late 90s) been a free look up webpage:

https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm

The data used to be available on CDROM (back in the 90s) but moved to an API in the early 2000s. Until August 2026, you used to be able to look up addresses for free.

To get the biggest discount on postage (one place I worked at mailed about 3k envelopes per month) you have ZIP+4, to pre-sort the mail and print a bunch of stuff on that barcode [0]. Next time you get an envelope, look at the barcode on the bottom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode

0 - doing it that way saved about $450/month versus not doing any of their work for them.

Zip codes do not have clear boundary lines. A zip code is a collection of postal routes, and their borders tend to move about.

This isn't the USPS charging for existing data. They created a new data set that's only relevant to data brokers, and are charging for it.

Iirc when I worked with these in the past ZIP codes did not map cleanly to boundaries, hence the ZCTAs. Zip codes are sometimes assigned to points, lines, they can overlap, and other weird arcana because they defined mail routes rather than tesselating areas.

It's become much easier to do this with the advent of tiled vector data and libraries like https://github.com/maplibre/geojson-vt

Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...

I'm confused, we did this on US Tiger line file data in 2006, rendering it on a early equivalent of Google Maps. You have to decimate the polygons to get them to render but doing bounding boxes around postcodes is fairly reasonable.

I think the one I enjoyed the most was a zipcode with 38 separate geographical areas, and the other example was a street where one half was one zip code, and the other was a different one, but half way down the street they swapped sides. Representing that with non-overlapping polygons was impossible. So we just let them overlap and shrugged.

Yes. I had my ZIP code change when I was a teenager.

Only if it’s 1:1 instead of many to many

I don't think zip codes in practice can be both convex & mutually exclusive.

Imagine a river that divides two zip codes, with river-front property on both sides. If that river has a bend in it (-∿-) that's greater than the width of the river+property, the polygon bounding one zip code would cut through the other, or the polygon is non-convex where it bends along the river.

Why is the government expected to be profitable? Is the military profitable? What about the national park service? I don't want government to be profitable--I want them to provide the service they are asked to provide in a way that his highly available and accessible.

USPS is being slowly killed at the behest of the real estate lobby who are licking their lips at the Post Office's multi-billion dollar real estate portfolio. There's no reason USPS needs to be profitable as a government service as a sibling comment has already pointed out.

Easy for private capital to make money of something everyone depends on that actually keep it free even if it “loses” money.

In my experience that API is also wildly inaccurate and is responsible for many misdelivered/undelivered packages because it will return random (well, previously used by someone else), different building/suite/apartment numbers for the same address line that already contains the correct one.

> I suspect the goal is to sell off a "money losing" USPS to some campaign contributor for $1 so that person can reap the $60B in pension funds.

it's not that complicated: FedEx and UPS and several other related business types have been trying to kill it for years

the "privatize everything" crowd that would charge you for air if they could.

> Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.

If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.

Yeah, it is definitely one of the most tortured organizations I know of. Congress as usual wants a ton of conflicting things:

1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.

2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything

3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes

4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)

5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded

6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.

If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.

This gave us such a headache 20 years ago in earlier ecommerce days. One of many edge cases. I'm in Colorado so we always tested with 82082 which covers areas in WY, NE, and CO.

This is historical.

The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.

Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.

It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.

Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.

I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.

In the US, your mailing address is essentially a routing label. The zip code is designed specifically to help route messages.

The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.

Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P

Changing ZIP codes to be geographical would significantly reduce the usefulness of ZIP codes for their primary use, sorting and delivering mail, so that's a non-starter. Use something else!

Well, Postal Code is a geographical region but it's not one aligned with legal boundaries.

These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:

- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.

- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.

- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.

The practical impact of these is twofold:

- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city. - Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.

Historically, only larger cities had things you might recognize as a postal code. For example: Boston 8, Mass. The current abbreviation for Massachusetts is MA. And some changed - such as NB being Nebraska (and is now New Brunswick) and Nebraska is now NE.

On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_and_territo...

And due to historical inertia, very little has changed since the current (5 digit) system was created 60+ years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code

routing. how do we route a physical package to someone, what route does the mail carrier take?. is where the networking term stems from.

you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).

thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?

sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.

back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.

also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.

I don't want to spam this, but I spent too much time writing it to explain this particular case: https://skaldmaps.com/blog/2026/07/zip-codes-are-a-bad-spati...

tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.

Postal codes are designed to help with delivering mail so it is less linked to geographic in terms of other things we care about and mostly linked to things that are relevant to mail delivery.

Not saying Id condone breaking the license here - but wouldnt it be nice to have it drop on Github somewhere.

Host this in a jurisdiction that doesn't give a damn about some funny US license

ZIPs don't represent areas either. They represent routes, so a collection of paths on a road map is bundled together and named with a ZIP. If you built a new house in between towns, whichever post office decides to serve it would extend one of their lines to go past your house, and then you are assigned that ZIP code. Since it's all based on their convenience, they don't pay any mind to things like city limits or even in some cases state lines.

I know what you're saying, but Ordnance Survey sells the polygons anyway.

https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...

Given how postcodes are supposed to work, this is what I would expect. Curious if many of the polygons in the data set contain more than one polygon and or if there is any overlap

In the US, outside of grid systems, it's common for house addresses to be distances, with even numbers to be on the right hand side. For example, 567 Oak Street would be 0.56 miles down Oak, on the left. Very helpful for first responders and delivery people. Not that helpful if you do not know where Oak street is.

And even for those where it isn’t one exact person/box there is a 2 digit delivery point code that often is included on the end.

Some 5-digit zip codes represent the PO Boxes at a post office building.

Some zip codes represent a single building. Example 20500 is the White House. The Pentagon is so big it has several zip codes.

https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...

It used to be that the first 3 digits of a zip code sent that mail to the "main" post office building (the one that has loading docks for like 10-30 tractor trailers on one side of the building). Even if you were mailing a letter to the same zip, it went to that building to be sorted and returned to the local office before delivery. Nowadays, everything goes to central facilities where stuff is scanned and sorted. In Kentucky, almost all mail goes through Louisville.

A lot of people also don't know that your written address is also disconnected from municipal government boundaries.

The "city" on my address growing up was a CDP[1], and it is now a city that I live 2 miles from rather than the one that I live less than a mile from.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census-designated_place

I know that many people do use ZIP codes for grouping locations, and polygons may be useful for tieing a lat/long to a zipcode if it doesn't have a delivery location. But it's all kind of silly unless you're sorting mail. Also, I'd hate/love to see some of the polygons where delivery boundaries get weird.

Whatever you're grouping is likely better served by some grouping based on geography, not based on delivery routes. You probably wouldn't group by telephone company central office either, unless you're telco related.

We want to group by geography, zip codes are easy and vaguely geographic, lets use that is kind of a valid decision, but it's deeply frustrating :p

Yes, it's on the order form https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_Order_Form

No, it didn't. I admit I don't know the history of zip codes in the US, but over here the postal codes weren't a thing until the 70s when the OCR devices were introduced: the idea was that you'd write a 6-digit postal code in the weird 9-segment font in the specific place where the machine would be able to scan it, and then sort and route it automatically. Of course quite quickly it turned out that people wrote wrong postal codes, or postal codes needed to be changed, so in the end the post service started filling those themselves, and they later started printing and sticking barcodes with internal routing information onto the letters, and using those.

> Getting a human to sort mail without looking up a big list was pretty useful.

Mail gets sorted several times. At the ingress, there is a rough sorting of "okay, this one leaves the city, this one doesn't" kind, where the former ones are thrown in a large bag and sent upstream, and the latter ones get divided into delivery groups — yes, by a person looking up a list of local addresses. They don't need to have a list for the whole country, only for their city/local district, so it's not that big of a list. And not making this list of internal routing codes public has the benefits that A) that number needn't be double-checked for correctness, saving the labour, B) the list can be changed often to better suit the way the delivery routes are organized, and you don't need to notify the general public about the changes.

I'd be willing to bet $50 that USPS has some internal DB, changed very often, that they use to remap zip codes into something actually useful for both the bulk- and last-mile delivery.

No, it doesn’t. Congress is granted the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads” - it is not required to do so.

I thought junk mail was keeping it in business. Doesn’t someone have to pay to send?

Explain how “American tax-payers” are “funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates”. The USPS does not receive any tax money.

physical SPAM that you can not opt out of

That's not true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619939

Doesn't get rid of all of it, but gets rid of the vast majority, IME.