Factsheet
What’s the current postal code range in Canada?
Canada has over 800 000 unique codes; FSAs begin with letters A–Y (not D, F, I, O, Q, U, W, Z).
What is the length of postal codes in Canada?
Each postal code is exactly 6 characters long (3 letters and 3 numbers, with a space in the middle).
How are Canadian postal codes structured?
FSA (first 3): First letter indicates province/territory or major region; second is numeric (1–9 for urban, 0 for rural); third letter narrows locale.
LDU (last 3): Identifies specific delivery unit, such as a city block, a building, or rural route.
Videos
Let’s talk Canadian postal codes
TIL that Canada reserves the postal code "H0H 0H0" for letters addressed to Santa.
Any Other Canadians use 90210 as their ZIP code
First, a small vent. I think it’s ridiculous that postal code datasets are proprietary. This should be open data, like every other administrative boundary in the country. Canada Post trying to turn a profit is gross. It straddles a strange line between a crown corporation and a private organization…
Secondly, I’m curious how y’all get your postal code datasets? I work for a small municipality. We currently have a pretty convoluted workflow that takes a land ownership table, cross-references the owner’s full address with the parcel address to extract the postal code to the parcel, remove outliers like owners who don’t live in their house, dissolve the parcel boundaries together where the code matches…There must be a better way?
As I understand it, the postal code lookup website also has functions to block you from simply running a script to scrape their data en masse, so I know that’s not an option…