I feel like this should be public. I wonder what would be the repercussion of a gofundme to buy it once and make it publicly available. There aren't many downsides of updating every couple years.
The USPS has a long history of protecting its data. I worked there 1999–2003, and the data was licensed separately from the code that processed it. It’s also seeded with fake addresses (look up DPV false positives). I don’t think the public availability part of this plan would work out.
As someone who has done tons of geospatial work I hate this. A ZIP code was never technically a geospatial boundary. Being "inside" a boundary does not guarantee you have that ZIP code, just that the space is surrounded by a bunch of postal delivery addresses bearing the ZIP code.
most people dont know that zip codes are specific to the postal service and dont have anything to do with actual municipal government boundaries. the hierarchy of geo boundaries and the ways to locate and communicate within them is way more interesting than one would believe!
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.
I made ZIP boundaries from the TIGER database in 1993. (Giant Delaunay triangulation/ Voronoi diagram. Fun algorithms for dealing with millions of points! Then merge polygons.)
I believe the demand for this was to visualize attributes on a map by coloring polygons, and the dataset was addresses that already had zip codes.
(Please stop coloring polygons by attribute: it gives false impressions because areas are unequal. Instead, use a scale of dot density. Or marker size, which has its own perceptual issues.)
However misguided, coloring zip code polygons gives you things like maps of customer data. But you could just as well geocode each address and assign it to a county or other boundary. (news flash: the geocoding database is derived from the same line data as the ZIP code project.)
The USPS is losing money hand over fist delivering the unwanted junk mail
The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.
Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.
USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.
Structural changes are required for then USPS to be financially stable. Chief among them is modifying the Universal Service Obligation (USO).
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
wait how can ZIP code boundary lines not be free information, that's totally wild, how do you then even know what ZIP code to use if you can't look it up...
what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??
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.
> 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.
What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some "government should be run like a business" (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?
My university used to get copies of the CDs in the 1990s. I think they came out quarterly. You had to pay for the CDs, but the data was free. We bought one copy and put it on a server for everyone to use.
All governments provide some services for "free" and charge for others. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it really is BS.
this in itself is quite unusual/seem kinda not clever
because now you are exposing a "implementation detail" about how you deliver the mail now to people in a way which is hard to change (or at least high friction for the people living there). But you should be able to change your postal routs ad-hoc whenever needed.
At the same time you lose many of the "dual-use" benefits many other countries get from it.
Like often (outside of the US) "zip" codes:
- are used for mail disambiguation (in combination with city/region and street names)
- cover (very very very roughly) a similar amount of people
- hence can be used for polls, statistics etc. etc.
- and due to not being to narrow scoped disclosing your zip code doesn't feel like major privacy invasion, so you actually get data for polls where e.g. your customers are from by asking at the checkout if they are willing to tell you their zip code
- are often also used for all kinds of administrative area scoping (not all, e.g. not voting areas or zoning laws)
so the us using a collection of postal routs which kinda somewhat but not maps to boundary lines seem like a major lost opportunity
Crazy, right? I found this out when I didn't get a wedding invitation from my friend who lives 4 blocks away. The only indication was that the invite returned to sender. Turns out we're in different zip codes.
Yea same, then I realized they're not free either :(
The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.
"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."
The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.
Interestingly, there are no polygons for UK postcodes, because UK postcodes don’t represent a geographical area; instead, they represent one or more discrete points.
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.
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
Yes, I know that (...and I said it in my comment?)
My point is that postal codes aren't "supposed" to work any particular way. They work in what ever way they are specified to work at any particular point in time in any particular place.
In the US they were always tied to routes. The first number gives a set of distribution centers, and the second two numbers where specifically to go. If you look at a map of the first number, you'll see sharp lines separating the states. It'd be hard to verify historically, but if you look at zip codes near the border for, say, 89439, several addresses on the California side use the 89439 zip code.
It'd find it difficult to believe that when the system was originally created, mail delivered by a Nevada post office to a physical location in California had a zip code starting with a 9 rather than an 8.
Fun fact, a postcode can represent up to 100 addresses, apartment buildings with more than 100 units have multiple postcodes. Sometimes third-party systems will only recognize a subset of those postcodes (e.g: a system might assume a building only has 1 postcode) which can lead to some residents being in the geographic region for a service while others are not despite being in the same building.
Also postcode data is licensed by the Royal Mail, not free.
As someone from the Netherlands I’ve been very surprised at how far “ahead” we seem to be here. Just a postcode can point you to a street, even the side of the street (right or left hand), a house number than gives you the exact building. That is how people are used to enter their address here.
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
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.
Congress keeps passing laws to make USPS appear to be as "unprofitable" as possible. Such as pre-funding pensions & healthcare for people who have not been born yet [0]. 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.
One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].
Notes:
0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.
> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.
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.
This move roughly aligns with the administration's broader desire to take data generated by the government at taxpayer expense, and hand it over to his buddies to privatize and profit from it. See also weather data.
Pretty much every state charges for some data and not others.
The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?
For everyone saying it should be free, the USPS charges for services. They charge to deliver mail.
Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.
Reminds me of one of my favorite little rabbit holes, trying to find this data for Canada:
Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.
Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.
Wow. That's some terrible behavior. In the US you can't copyright simple facts (such as "this lat/long has this postal code"). But by that logic, it's hard for me to see how USPS can lay claim to the dataset being discussed here either, but I assume they have attorneys who told them why they can.
This is interesting. For a long time it was pointed out that ZIP codes, unlike say, city or state boundaries, were not properly representable as polygons, since they don't divide up acreage into zones, but rather label postal delivery routes. Suppose I build a new neighborhood way out in the middle of nowhere. The "polygon" concept suggests that we could look and see what polygon I'm in, and that will determine what post office delivers my mail. But in reality, if there was no route to that area already, they could decide to make it part of any one of the surrounding routes.
I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.
As someone who has worked with geodata quite a lot, that wouldn't be a good idea in terms of resource usage. You are blowing up the size of the dataset by one or two orders of magnitude. Maybe even more. Processing these polygons would be extremely annoying.
I once built an interactive map for some areas in Switzerland with postcodes rendered on it. I had to use a lot of tricks to keep it down to a few hundred KB for just about 5% of Switzerland's area. If I tried to add more areas, I'd have to abandon the approach of rendering polygons directly with Leaflet and move to static, pre-rendered images. Now, if you add 10 or 100 times more points, you would barely be able to render it fast enough on the CPU anymore.
So, nice idea, but the polygons become hard to work with then.
Thank you for the links. The postcode project I mentioned was 5 years ago. So this definitely didn't exist back then. Great to see such progress with these libraries.
Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back then.
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.
I was talking about runtime rendering. It's a bit of a hard topic to talk about, as there are a multitude of use cases and approaches.
But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.
Well, we did it real time using VML in IE6 of all things, and we used adaptive decimation based on the zoom level, so from a practical perspective there's no point in rendering subpixel detail levels
Yeah, I always thought that was a bit of an aCkTcHUuaLly type of point. Okay, okay, it's about routes. But, when you can draw perfectly mutually exclusive convex hulls around the unions of the lots receiving mail for a given zip code, then you can draw zip code polygons.
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.
The Pentagon has six zipcodes and they're divided up by floor.
(My standard example used to be the World Trade Center, which had two - not one for each tower, but one for the state government offices and one for everything else.)
Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.
Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.
Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.
Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.
My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.
Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.
The US Constitution requires them to exist. Congress keeps passing laws screwing with their operation. Such as requiring pre-paid funding pensions/healthcare for people who have not been born yet.
> they can't declare bankruptcy
According to Amendment 14, section 4:
> The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
According to that clause, especially the bit with the comma, Congress & courts have held that government bodies cannot discharge debts in bankruptcy. They go through Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Every other chapter in BK allows for some debts to be wiped away.
Using ZIP codes to define geographic regions is always a bad idea. A ZIP code is an address attribute, not a geographic boundary. Some ZIP codes are assigned to PO boxes or parcel lockers, while entire cities may share a single ZIP code. You can even have streets stretching 30 km across a city, all under the same ZIP code.
Also, there are a few zip codes that cross state boundaries. Those rare cases involve very rural areas where the nearest post office is across the state line.
The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.
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.
The bummer thing about their data is it's ZIP, not ZIP+4. Technically ZIP+4 is internal to USPS because it identifies a specific route (or something like that), but it's also is more precise than ZIP.
The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.
The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.
Some important context - Zip codes were not established as geographic markets. A "Zip Code" is collection of routes USPS uses - so it's whole goal was to get the right package on the right truck.
The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.
I'm not sure how many fields will find this useful -- other core geo/spatial datasets use the related-but-not-identical ZCTAs, especially Census demographic data. Perhaps transportation operations?
Dang, the prices are crazy. $10k for the lowest tier? I expect federal data to be free. Most federal data related to stuff like regulation (e.g. FCC spectrum use coverage maps), maps for federally-managed lands, etc. is free. And, it should be free. It's a core part of accountability and transparency. Historically there was a copying cost (having a human print physical copies on paper or CD/DVD/tape), which is understandable, but now that the incremental cost of each new copy approaches $0, that's what it should cost users of the data.
In Europe that kind of geodata is typically free and maintained by a governmental agency. I haven't checked for every country, but the three countries I needed that for had that on websites. In fact I didn't even had to go to websites it was a standard map layer in QGIS (great software btw.)
USPS is in really rough shape, budget-wise, to the degree that they needed an emergency cash infusion earlier this year (I highly recommend reading up on it, it's a bad situation). Sadly, it's not that surprising to see that they're charging commercial rates for this service.
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.
I don’t understand why recent Congresses haven’t repealed that requirement. It seems well known to be a bad thing that hamstrings USPS. There have been multiple congresses dominated by Democrats since that original law.
I missed the announcement where they were opening the subsidized parcel delivery to all businesses, not just ones owned by people with the last name of Bezos that start with an A and end with an N.
Nah, they're not trying to strangle the USPS. They're trying to fatten it up for privatization.
If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).
This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
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.
The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t make financial sense because it is fundamentally not a financial idea. Like other aspects of Constitutional U.S. governance, its purpose is to stitch a people together into a nation.
Your argument rests on a pretty narrow definition of "financial sense".
Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.
At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.
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.
Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.
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.
Check out the National Technical Information Service, which publishes some federal data sets like the SSA Death Master File (https://dmf.ntis.gov). They charge $1,531 per seat per year to do online queries or $2,930 + fees to download the data set.
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
Well just wait a day or so and the data will be free. It’s not like these polygons are constantly changing (or that the impact of slightly stale data is of any consequence). The speed is at best mail-scale, and someone will surely leak it to an open data source.
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.
Only one person has to pay for it, then they can share it with the rest of us for free. It's not like the data is trade secret or protected by copyright or patent. It's public data.
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?
>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach
by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR
irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees
that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to
equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any
other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond
or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate
remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may
be available at law, in equity, or otherwise
Maps have a lengthy history of including "Trap streets" to identify copies.
Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.
> 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.
Sooo... You can't compel the government to create a document or data as part of FOIA, but...
You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.
I worked somewhere that purchased ZIP code polygons from somewhere at one point, pretty sure it was way way cheaper than this. Idk if there was a difference in quality.
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).
The corporate agenda of the past several decades has been to destroy the Constitutional government (including our narrowly-construed Constitutional rights) in favor of ceding authority to unaccountable corporations.
The USPS is getting really difficult as a vendor for fintechs to work with. They recently changed the pricing around address verification as well (it used to be free).
I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
Congress has mandated that USPS has to be self-funding. If the leadership at USPS fails to raise revenue, they are forced to cut services. You could write a letter to your senator.
No to remove the cap on pricing. USPS was break even from 1970-2006 until the 2006 law that forbid them from raising prices. The business mailers love it though.
Companies are already using the roads, police, fire services (where applicable) and many other government services without paying directly for them. But the taxes! you'll scream - yes exactly!
Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
>Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
New developments incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms. Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…
All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs proportionally to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…
Of course Congress risks a potential Constitutional Crisis in that mandate. The USPS is one of the only services of the federal government that is Constitutionally mandated. The contradiction of Congress wanting USPS to act as if it were a for profit business remains an interesting balancing act versus the Constitution.
(It's also not a surprise that the Congressional mandate to run the USPS as a for-profit has been used as much to make the USPS profits a slush fund of "free money" that Congress can use for non-USPS projects, including pork barrel projects. The for-profit mandate isn't just for threatening the shutdown of USPS services.)
Perhaps we are entering an era where it should be.
Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.
Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.
I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.
Should email be also run as a public service, not a business?
Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.
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.
>USPS is in a strange boat where a lot of people insist that it must be profitable, much like UPS or Fedex
This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.
After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?
They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.
So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.
They sort of do this by having the spam business mailers package/submit in ways which cost USPS less to deliver, and the discount is less than the savings. Also covers fixed costs due to volume, which is important due to universal service obligation.
(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)
> So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests.
Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.
The problem is that there are categories of spammers willing to pay more than what the poorest regular people can afford. Much more reasonable to make junk mail illegal just like other countries already have.
No need to treat them the same. Charge spammers a ton, then make personal letters free. The poorest regular people get a great service with less junk mail, and advertisers pay for the trouble they cause.
In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022. But it was just this phony accounting that messed them up, more than the other factors you mention.
>In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
That’s $2B less than the first six days of the Iran war ($11B). We could just cut a check each year from the general fund. It’s a paperwork issue. The fact that we can spend $100B+ on an illegitimate conflict on a whim while costs like this are bikeshedded over boggles my mind.
US Military costs ~$1T/year and the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in the last eight years, comparatively, but not a lot of similar complaints of that waste versus pensions for citizens operating and serving a national public service agency.
USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates. The only difference between the two is that the US military happens to fight wars with what its logistics operation it provides itself.
It's not a business; it's an independent agency of the executive branch. The persistent attempts to view it as a business are a category error and the difference between public and private sectors.
Yes, thats exactly right. The ability to profit was granted and they were kneecapped by the price cap. They haven't profited since the legislation and immediately started incurring large losses. That's all in my comment already.
By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.
I'm guessing that was what the lobbyists intended. Nominally the law permitted a profit, and that's how it was sold, but it was structured as a bulk mailer subsidy. Strategic discourse subterfuge.
A big thing they could do for costs is reduce mail delivery to the final destination to once or twice a week. They would need anywhere from 1/2 to 1/5 the number of delivery drivers and vehicles that they have today.
The vast majority of first-class and bulk-rate mail is not anything can't wait a few days. For truly urgent deliveries, use a courier service or pay a higher postage that covers the expenses of that.
> They would need anywhere from 1/2 to 1/5 the number of delivery drivers and vehicles that they have today
And that's why it (unfortunately) won't happen lol the USPS is as much of a jobs program as it is an actual mail delivery service.
As the guy above you pointed out, the postal workers union exists, and would fight this tooth and nail. Additionally, without legislation forcing it, management at USPS doesn't really have any incentive or ability to fire 1/2 to 4/5ths of their workers, those saved tax dollars don't really matter to them.
As much as I agree it could be made much more efficient, doing so would probably be very unpopular politically. For as often as people have negative experiences with the USPS, no one wants to see their friendly neighborhood post carrier (who walks around in a fun outfit dropping off letters and packages to them) get canned.
I like the fact that I can get mail delivered timely. I'd rather see the post office operate at a loss than stop delivering mail except for once or twice a week. If the post office wants to make more money, I'd rather pass a law that lets the raise prices for spam while requiring them to keep stamp prices for personal mail low.
People receive tons of mail, it's just packages. The USPS handles packages, but we've allowed it to be replaced by labor-unfriendly private organizations like UPS and Amazon.
> is an recent idea
> This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006.
No, the idea that USPS should break even is a recent idea. 1970 is recent.
The idea that USPS routes should be money-losing is almost intrinsic to the institution. It's the reason that there is universal pricing for stamps when many routes are far more difficult to deliver to than others, and the difference between some routes and others was far more extreme in the past than it is now.
The USPS is an institution that is meant to flatten the distance between places in the United States, in a similar way to the Interstate Highway System.
It's also one of the reasons you have a country. If we rid ourselves of all economies of scale and commercial lubrication, there's no need for a central government.
Instead of preventing the USPS, an institution whose purpose is to deliver mail, not to make a profit or to break even, from providing services that will make it profitable, then complaining that it is not profitable, maybe we should realize that the existence of Amazon and UPS is a sign of profiteers taking advantage of government failure.
>So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an recent idea
There is a union involved, a union which can be counted on to vote loyally. For this reason, the USPS will exist 900 years from now.
I would be just as happy if it were dissolved and no longer existed. It is as obsolete as the Pony Express. If your counterarguments are "but it delivers Amazon!", then you are subconsciously admitting that its purpose has already ended.
I think what crushed USPS’s finances was a change where they had to account for future pension obligations in their current spending.
One can argue whether this approach, which is followed by no one either in the private or public sector is appropriate (I’m torn. I see the benefit of this change), but what isn’t arguable is that the way it was implemented, falling on USPS almost immediately without a gradual transition period, was ridiculous.
It forced USPS to make decisions that were harmful in the mid to long term, solely to meet an accounting change.
What I was alluding to with "a lot of people", is Trump's administrations specifically.
Requiring the post office to be profitable is like requiring the highway system to be profitable from tolls. The freeway system being free generates so much more economical value for the country than what it costs to maintain them.
I would say the post office should be free, if it were not for the insane amount of spam mail we already get.
Make it free for letters sent as personal mailings (residence to residence) and much more expense for bulk senders to help offset the loss of stamp money. I wouldn't even mind of they operated at a loss year after year.
>while failing to realize the value it provides to the rest of the economy by being cheap
but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Parent poster is exactly the kind of person who argues that using tax dollars for school is wrong because they, personally, do not have kids. Because they can't realize that they indirectly benefit from it.
John Green: "So let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools, even though I don't personally have a kid in school: It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people."
We (the public) have already been forced to accept that students' education is directly linked to the property taxes. In other words, students only deserve the education linked to an average the the worth of the community. Its some of the grossest discrimination against student, based purely on family and locality worth.
Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.
Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.
Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.
I'm not describing a theory. I'm describing the world in which I live every day. It's much better for me, right now, in the real world, for the service to be cheap. Even though I've mailed nothing for at least the last year.
This is how it works in Denmark. A letter costs 23DKK ($3.44) within this small country. A fast letter is 36DKK ($5.39).
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
but the confounding fact is that the US mail is largely paid for by "bulk" mailers, they pre-sort and give to the post office in order saving the post office a lot of work at volume. If they didn't send lots of mail and pay for it, the system would be in a deep red ink crisis.
>The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
That’s not actually value if it’s just enabling waste.
Think of all the junk mail, bills that could be emails, etc. In your very example, why mail a check? You could do ACH or another type of EFT.
The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.
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.
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.
> 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.
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
There's still the overhead cost of collecting this data and the operational cost of delivering it. Many government functions charge money because it's unsustainable if they don't.
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
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.
I'm bummed by this, because I live in a weird corner case and wanted to see where we fall on this map. Our legal address is in West Fairlee, VT 05083, but our mail is routed through the post office in Fairlee, 05045, and must be addressed to that town and ZIP code or it doesn't arrive. Just to make life more interesting, Another part of town delivers out of Thetford and does use 05083. All this in a town of about 600 people.
As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.
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.
A government entity charging for address information, whether county or USPS, is wild to me. It's one of the building blocks for everything else. However, on the county & municipal side, I also see them using ArcGIS at some crazy subscription prices when a PostGIS server would do, for a tiny fraction of the price.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadWe use https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON - it's from 2010, but open it in Claude and use the free-to-download data source to regen from the most recent census.
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.
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
The ATMs never got mail.
I believe the demand for this was to visualize attributes on a map by coloring polygons, and the dataset was addresses that already had zip codes.
(Please stop coloring polygons by attribute: it gives false impressions because areas are unequal. Instead, use a scale of dot density. Or marker size, which has its own perceptual issues.)
However misguided, coloring zip code polygons gives you things like maps of customer data. But you could just as well geocode each address and assign it to a county or other boundary. (news flash: the geocoding database is derived from the same line data as the ZIP code project.)
I don't think this will stop the bleed, but maybe it'll help that they are charging??
The fact that you think the Postal Service loses money delivering junk mail shows that you don't have any idea what's going on.
Junk mail is a massive revenue source for the USPS. According to the congressmen I've spoken with (Yes, I actually have done that), junk mail is hugely revenue positive, which is why it's allowed to continue.
USPS' financial problems largely have to do with pensions and other non-delivery issues.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/us-postal-service-losing-money-what...
For far too long, private shipping/logistics firms like UPS & FedEx unfairly take advantage of the requirement by the USPS to deliver mail six days a week to over 160 million addresses at uniform, affordable rates. UPS/FedEx will receive the package and do the long haul. But then instead of driving the package to a final residential doorstep themselves (incurring high residential and fuel surcharges), they drop it off at a local USPS branch or regional hub. USPS letter carriers complete the final-mile delivery to the recipient's home or P.O. Box. It's literally part of their business model. UPS calls it 'UPS Ground Saver' and FedEx calls it 'FedEx Ground Economy'.
These hybrid services typically cost 20% to 40% less than standard UPS Ground or FedEx Ground. It takes longer to ship but UPS/FedEx bypass the steep residential delivery fees (often $6.45–$6.50+ per package) that private carriers charge for dropping off at houses rather than businesses. Also, it's the only way to deliver to PO Boxes because standard UPS and FedEx ground services don't do directly.
This is classic example of capitalism where private companies 'keep profits and socialize losses'. The 5% annual dividend paid by FedEx every year to shareholders is paid for by American tax-payers funding the last-mile delivery of packages at dirt cheap rates.
FWIW if you're willing to deal with some 'fuzziness' and the occasional missing zip code that's commercial only, the ZCTA shapefiles are free and are close enough for many purposes: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
what next paying for knowing street names or house numbers??!??
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.
What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some "government should be run like a business" (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?
All governments provide some services for "free" and charge for others. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it really is BS.
Through folding: ounces flat in a 9x12 is $1.98; folded in a #10 it's $1.11. Square envelopes pay $0.49 extra.
Print package labels online: a 12 oz package coast to coast is $13.65 at the counter, $8.95 through USPS's free Click-N-Ship.
Keep boxes at or under 12x12x12. Since July, anything bigger is billed at volume ÷ 139 pounds if that exceeds its weight.
I've been building an (unofficial) searchable reference to USPS's rules and prices. The presort page is here: https://postalref.com/guides/presort
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.
Census tracts are, but those don't align to addresses in any meaningful way.
How are we to improve our Zones if the Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) Code is not readily available?
this in itself is quite unusual/seem kinda not clever
because now you are exposing a "implementation detail" about how you deliver the mail now to people in a way which is hard to change (or at least high friction for the people living there). But you should be able to change your postal routs ad-hoc whenever needed.
At the same time you lose many of the "dual-use" benefits many other countries get from it.
Like often (outside of the US) "zip" codes:
- are used for mail disambiguation (in combination with city/region and street names)
- cover (very very very roughly) a similar amount of people
- hence can be used for polls, statistics etc. etc.
- and due to not being to narrow scoped disclosing your zip code doesn't feel like major privacy invasion, so you actually get data for polls where e.g. your customers are from by asking at the checkout if they are willing to tell you their zip code
- are often also used for all kinds of administrative area scoping (not all, e.g. not voting areas or zoning laws)
so the us using a collection of postal routs which kinda somewhat but not maps to boundary lines seem like a major lost opportunity
The differences aren't too bad, I diffed [1] the USPS Puerto Rico sample with Census ZTCA 2026 [2]. I think I'll just stick Census, simpler model too for data analysis too, if I assume boundaries never change. :) Interestingly, I also learned ZIP Code™ is also trademarked.
[1] https://geojson.tools/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubusercont...
[2] https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2026/ZCTA520/
https://maps.huge.info/zip.htm
"A full postcode identifies a group of addresses (typically around ten) or a major delivery point."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
The United States can be more granular, as a "full postcode" equivalent in the United States is ZIP+4, which can resolve down to an individual building, mailbox, or person, depending on the characteristics of the location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4
https://docs.os.uk/osngd/data-structure/administrative-and-s...
Not sure under what basis you think they are "supposed" to be a certain way but postal codes originated as a signifiers of areas, even in the UK.
US postal codes absolutely have overlap in area, because they do not divide land, they direct delivery routing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030119031055/http://users.rcn....
My point is that postal codes aren't "supposed" to work any particular way. They work in what ever way they are specified to work at any particular point in time in any particular place.
It'd find it difficult to believe that when the system was originally created, mail delivered by a Nevada post office to a physical location in California had a zip code starting with a 9 rather than an 8.
Also postcode data is licensed by the Royal Mail, not free.
When I had to work with addresses in other countries, I found out that is not that normal.
Can someone with expertise in govt data rights explain? Do any other US govt agencies sell data to the private sector?
One of the features I would try to add at employers was address correction. The addresses API used to be free (became a paid service in August 2026). If you've ever seen a popup at on an order/address form which says something like "you entered X, but the Post Office recommends Y" (or similar words), then you've seen the results of the address API [1].
Notes:
0 - 2022 changes to the 2006 law let them stop prefunding 75 years ahead of time.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/what-did-po...
> To qualify for regular retirement, employees must have at least 30 years of service and be 55 or older; or 20 years of service and be age 60 or older; or 5 years of service and be age 62 or older.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...
1 - https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3
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.
The USPS itself is a quasi-government corporation, so it probably functions under a different set of laws. I know that they will sell you a list of all the addresses in the US for a price. I've never thought about doing a FOIA request. You can try?
Cut them some slack. They are supposed to be budget neutral. It is difficult to do when A) they have to compete with the private sector while adhering to public sector rules and B) being sabotaged by Trump's postmaster general appointee.
Are they?
Canada is one of the only major countries where the postal/zip code boundary data is not available as an open data set. Canada Post has a monopoly on that dataset. As a Canadian GIS person it drives me nuts as many other Candian government GIS programs have been active in the open data/open-source world for decades. Even crazier is that Statistics Canada has an open database of all addresses in the country here https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/lode/databases/oda that has a postal code column, but it's empty for all addresses.
Anyone who has tried to create their own dataset of polygons has usually ended up being chased down by Canada post. There is a company called Geocoder.ca who made a geocoder and when you passed in a street address with a postal code in it, it would keep track of that, and geocode based on the street address. Over time they built up a database of coordinates and postal codes and were able to generate their own approximate boundaries that where pretty accurate. Canada Post went after them: https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 Their data is still free for non-profits, and relatively cheap for commercial purposes: https://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 The only other open data related postal codes you will find easily available is Forward Sortation Code boundaries (FSA) which is the area that represents the first three characters of a Canadian Postal code. For example, postal code "N0R 1K0" would have an FSA of "N0R". For demo's and some analysis scenarios that can often be enough.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1655227/...
I suppose though, as long as you let the polygons map has uncontained areas, where no routes currently exist, it's a doable task to draw polygons around the limits of every route network, as long as you don't mind that they may have lots of weird ragged edges.
I once built an interactive map for some areas in Switzerland with postcodes rendered on it. I had to use a lot of tricks to keep it down to a few hundred KB for just about 5% of Switzerland's area. If I tried to add more areas, I'd have to abandon the approach of rendering polygons directly with Leaflet and move to static, pre-rendered images. Now, if you add 10 or 100 times more points, you would barely be able to render it fast enough on the CPU anymore.
So, nice idea, but the polygons become hard to work with then.
Here is an example using Mapbox GL - https://demos.mapbox.com/boundaries-explorer/?country=US&lay...
Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back then.
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.
Yup, lots of weird edge cases. For that one, you could also represent it with a multipoly.
But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.
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.
(My standard example used to be the World Trade Center, which had two - not one for each tower, but one for the state government offices and one for everything else.)
I had mine changed from a new zip getting added as the area's population grew (after it had been removed decades earlier).
Its funded with the expectation of hypercapitalist efficiency.
Somehow they actually run a profit off delivering junk mail annually, but they also have amortized expenses such as pensions etc which are sinking them. Again as per above, as a hyper regulated universal service they can't declare bankruptcy, while at the same time they're hypercapitalist and somehow have to make due as the financials sink lower and lower.
Some say this is an intentional plan to destroy the postal system. You can't run on a political platform of destroying the office, it would be very unpopular to propose everyone pay more for for-profit mail delivery and did I mention who one of my corporate campaign donors is? but you can intentionally sabotage the USPS by always making the worst choice at every decision intentionally, and then "unavoidably we have to shut the service down for no known clear reason it just doesn't work". My guess is the intentional destruction will continue unabated until closure is announced.
Its currently illegal for private carriers to deliver normal non-urgent letters because the USPS is a monopoly. You can put a document in an envelope or small box and UPS it, but its technically quite illegal at the federal level. My guess is eventually UPS or Amazon or fedex will purchase a law to be able to sell normal ground service physical first class mail delivery. I'm betting on Amazon winning a contract for this.
My bills are all emails lost in my spam folder and I "just know" to visit my car insurance website and electric company website every month or so.
Its worth considering that junk mail delivery is hyper profitable for the USPS, so thats probably not going away when mail delivery gets privatized. What is going away is the 82 cent postage stamp. UPS ground saver is a couple bucks. It'll be cheaper to take a picture of a letter then order prints of the picture at Walgreens nearby my mother than to mail her a greeting card LOL. Walgreens charges 39 cents for a post card sized digital print and their letter size prints are a ripoff at $4.50, better off sending multiple post card sized prints.
> they can't declare bankruptcy
According to Amendment 14, section 4:
> The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
According to that clause, especially the bit with the comma, Congress & courts have held that government bodies cannot discharge debts in bankruptcy. They go through Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code. Every other chapter in BK allows for some debts to be wiped away.
The +4 bit of the zip code narrows the location down to a block or street. In the case of apartment/condo buildings, each bank of mailboxes (for each lock that the mail carrier uses) gets their very own +4.
Sample picture: https://postalsupply.net/2023/03/maintenance-and-upkeep-tips...
The original tiger/line or ZCTA data is probably good enough for everyone. Those are available "around." I think the census provides them. I believe the census has the zip+4, but it's been years and I might have gotten them from somewhere else.
The interesting thing in the data is the ESRI feature classes. I wonder what the heck those are.
Because, well, ZIP codes aren't a spatial thing. I guess I have to update that?
And the fact that this isn't free is... a decision.
The "Zip+4" was the attempt to solve this- the 9 digit code narrows down the zipcode to a single block. But no one in the US cares enough to use these. It also doesn't solve the canonical problems the industry has with mapping data - people want to be able to put a pin in a random place on the map and pull up a clean zip code for data processing reasons.
It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.
Health benefits, not pensions. And in 2022 this requirement was eliminated by a reform bill.
I missed the announcement where they were opening the subsidized parcel delivery to all businesses, not just ones owned by people with the last name of Bezos that start with an A and end with an N.
If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).
This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.
At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.
It doesn't make financial sense because Congress has capped how much the garbage manufacturers have to pay.
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.
Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
(Or start a gofundme for it.)
>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?
>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may be available at law, in equity, or otherwise
Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.
https://postalpro.usps.com/ZCB_License
You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code_Tabulation_Area
makes sense as its really enterprise level activity -- polling/marketing, government, banking, insurance, etc -- who live or die by zip code data
the rest of us should be good with US Department of Commerce's free (last time I looked anyway) geo services. Google em down
:lightbulb: :huggingface:
I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
When will you learn? Taxes are not “the bane” of the EU, taxes are why It’s a nice place to live and America isn’t.
New developments incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms. Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…
All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs proportionally to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…
(It's also not a surprise that the Congressional mandate to run the USPS as a for-profit has been used as much to make the USPS profits a slush fund of "free money" that Congress can use for non-USPS projects, including pork barrel projects. The for-profit mandate isn't just for threatening the shutdown of USPS services.)
Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.
Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.
I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.
Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.
This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.
After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?
They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.
So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.
(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)
Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
US Military costs ~$1T/year and the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in the last eight years, comparatively, but not a lot of similar complaints of that waste versus pensions for citizens operating and serving a national public service agency.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12...
Electrifying the USPS light vehicle fleet is expected to generate up to $4.3B in lifetime savings over the fleet lifecycle, similarly.
https://huffman.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/electrify...
USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates. The only difference between the two is that the US military happens to fight wars with what its logistics operation it provides itself.
The unsung role of logistics in the US military - https://news.mit.edu/2025/unsung-role-logistics-us-military-... - November 25, 2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_logistics
True, but isn't this because everyone knows that USPS is a dying business already?
I was confused by this until I realized you are missing some logical steps in your (accurate) argument.
The 2006 law took away the safety net (ie the ability to charge whatever is needed to break even).
The “you can now make a profit” rule actually made it HARDER since it came with a price cap.
It told the USPS: You can keep any profits you make, but you cannot raise prices above the rate of inflation to get them.
This forced the USPS to absorb rising costs through internal efficiency rather than passing the bill to mailers
By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.
The vast majority of first-class and bulk-rate mail is not anything can't wait a few days. For truly urgent deliveries, use a courier service or pay a higher postage that covers the expenses of that.
And that's why it (unfortunately) won't happen lol the USPS is as much of a jobs program as it is an actual mail delivery service.
As the guy above you pointed out, the postal workers union exists, and would fight this tooth and nail. Additionally, without legislation forcing it, management at USPS doesn't really have any incentive or ability to fire 1/2 to 4/5ths of their workers, those saved tax dollars don't really matter to them.
As much as I agree it could be made much more efficient, doing so would probably be very unpopular politically. For as often as people have negative experiences with the USPS, no one wants to see their friendly neighborhood post carrier (who walks around in a fun outfit dropping off letters and packages to them) get canned.
People receive tons of mail, it's just packages. The USPS handles packages, but we've allowed it to be replaced by labor-unfriendly private organizations like UPS and Amazon.
> is an recent idea
> This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006.
No, the idea that USPS should break even is a recent idea. 1970 is recent.
The idea that USPS routes should be money-losing is almost intrinsic to the institution. It's the reason that there is universal pricing for stamps when many routes are far more difficult to deliver to than others, and the difference between some routes and others was far more extreme in the past than it is now.
The USPS is an institution that is meant to flatten the distance between places in the United States, in a similar way to the Interstate Highway System.
It's also one of the reasons you have a country. If we rid ourselves of all economies of scale and commercial lubrication, there's no need for a central government.
Instead of preventing the USPS, an institution whose purpose is to deliver mail, not to make a profit or to break even, from providing services that will make it profitable, then complaining that it is not profitable, maybe we should realize that the existence of Amazon and UPS is a sign of profiteers taking advantage of government failure.
There is a union involved, a union which can be counted on to vote loyally. For this reason, the USPS will exist 900 years from now.
I would be just as happy if it were dissolved and no longer existed. It is as obsolete as the Pony Express. If your counterarguments are "but it delivers Amazon!", then you are subconsciously admitting that its purpose has already ended.
One can argue whether this approach, which is followed by no one either in the private or public sector is appropriate (I’m torn. I see the benefit of this change), but what isn’t arguable is that the way it was implemented, falling on USPS almost immediately without a gradual transition period, was ridiculous.
It forced USPS to make decisions that were harmful in the mid to long term, solely to meet an accounting change.
Requiring the post office to be profitable is like requiring the highway system to be profitable from tolls. The freeway system being free generates so much more economical value for the country than what it costs to maintain them.
I would say the post office should be free, if it were not for the insane amount of spam mail we already get.
but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Maybe you're an autodidact like many other engineers, and maybe you would have done better without schooling. Such people are a minority.
Like many, I think you're confusing "the school system is flawed" (it is) with "school bad."
If the schools in a given country were pumping out geniuses year after year then maybe you would have a point.
Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.
Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.
Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.
The unintended consequence of this is all the junk mail that makes regular mail a horrible experience to interact with.
Raise the prices , remove the spam.
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.
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.
It seems like corruption to me.
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.
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
But the cost of preparation isn't, government humans are still involved
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.
1: https://www.villageventuresdev.com
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.