About

What this site does

Most postal code tools expect you to already know your address. That is backwards if you are filling in a delivery form in an unfamiliar town, standing outside a building you have never visited, or simply cannot remember the code for a place you have just moved to.

GetMyPostalCode starts from where you are instead. You press a button, your browser asks whether you want to share your location, and if you agree your coordinates are converted into the postal code covering that spot — along with the city and state, so you can sanity check the answer.

How the lookup works

There is no postal code database behind this site. Your device works out its own position using GPS and nearby Wi-Fi and mobile signals, and that position is converted into a postal code by a reverse geocoding service. That approach keeps results current without us maintaining a copy of any postal authority’s data.

It also sets a real limit. A reverse geocoded result describes the postal area containing a point, and postal boundaries do not always follow the lines you would expect. Close to a boundary the answer can belong to the area next door. For anything consequential, check the result against the relevant postal authority.

What this site does not do

• It does not look up a postal code from a typed address.
• It does not track where you have been or build a profile of you.
• It does not ask you to create an account.
• It does not claim to be an official or authoritative postal source.

Coverage

The site launches with the United States and will add Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia as the content for each one is written. A country only appears in the navigation once its page is genuinely ready, rather than as an empty placeholder — which is why you may see fewer countries listed than are mentioned here.

Who runs this site

GetMyPostalCode is operated independently. We are deliberately not claiming a company name, registration or address here, because publishing details we have not verified would be worse than publishing none. When the operating entity is settled it will be named on this page and in the terms.

What we can tell you is how the site is run: the guides are written and reviewed by the people who maintain it, under a published editorial policy, and corrections are made on the page rather than quietly removed.

Data sources and attribution

Postal codes are not looked up from a list we hold. They come from a reverse geocoding service, which in turn is built on open data. Both of the services this site can be configured to use are built on OpenStreetMap data, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL), along with other open datasets such as GeoNames.

Crediting OpenStreetMap and its contributors is a condition of that licence, not a courtesy. The credit appears in the footer of every page and beside every result the tool returns. The specific provider in use is named in our privacy policy, because it is also the third party your coordinates are sent to.