Customer Service Above All. It is one of our core values here at Service Objects. Recently, we’ve received several requests for a list of the unique zip codes throughout the US and Canada. By leveraging our existing services, we’ve made this happen. We are now offering both the US and Canada list as a free downloadable resource.
So why is Service Objects providing this data? Our goal is to provide the best data cleansing solutions possible for our clients. Part of this means using our existing data to provide our users with the data they need. While other data providers might charge for this type of information, we’ve decided to make it freely available for anyone’s use. These files can be used for several purposes, such as pre-populating a list of cities and states for a form where a user needs to enter address information. The County and State FIPS information is widely used in census and demographic data or could be used to uniquely identify States and counties within a database. Additionally, the given time zone information can be used to determine appropriate times to place calls to a customer.
Where to download
allows you to access a .zip file containing two CSV records. One CSV contains the US information, the other is for Canada. The files indicate the month and year the records were created. Toward the middle of each month, the data in each record will be updated to account for any changes in US and Canadian postal codes.What other information is in the files?
Both files will have postal codes, states (or provinces for Canada) and time zone information. The Canadian zip code file will be much larger in size with over 800K records. This is due to Canadian Postal Codes generally being much smaller than US Postal codes. Where a US postal code can sometimes encompass multiple cities or counties, a Canadian postal code can be the size of a couple city blocks or in some cases a single high-rise building.
The US file has information for all United States postal codes including its territories. This file will also include the county that the zip code lies in. There will be County and State FIPS numbers for each of the records to help with processing that information as well. The US file will be considerably smaller than the Canadian file at only 41K records.
In making these files freely accessible, our hope is to make the integration and business logic easier for our users. If you’d like to discuss your particular contact data validation needs, feel free to contact us!
