The map above shows the 0872 postcode in Australia which is the largest in the country and by extension the world.
As the map author states:
Is this the largest postcode (zip code) in the world?
I think it’s probably Australia 0872. Unlike most Aussie postcodes, it spans three states and territories and makes up 15% of the whole country by area. It has 89 separate delivery locations but only about 14,000 people. Wonder how they schedule the postal vans as the roads aren’t too flash out there…
It is bigger than the states of Victoria and New South Wales combined.
It’s almost twice the size of Texas and if it were a country it would rank 25th – slightly smaller that South Africa and slightly larger than Colombia.
Does Canada or Russia perhaps have a larger postcode? USA doesn’t – largest ZIP code is in Alaska at a tiny 55K square km compared to 1.16m square km of 0872
Reddit user hedekar noted that:
Russia wins with the Sakha Republic’s 677-678 postal code encompassing 3.084m km². https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Russia#/media/File%3AMap_of_Russian_postal_codes.svg
Although given it’s clearly two numbers I don’t really think it counts.
What do you think? Can you find a postcode that’s bigger?
Quentin Brown says
Definitely not in Canada. Our Postal Codes basically drills down to the side of the street that you live on. And each Post Office (where people would have postal boxes if they don’t have door to door delivery) would have their own as well.
Our format is A1A 1A1, though each province has it’s own starting letter (BC is V, Alberta is T, and so on). Ontario has a couple, and so does Quebec. So in reality we could have 26 x 26 x 26 x 1000 = over 17 million postal codes in our country, if they ever needed to do that.
Actually, reading the Wikipedia page has informed me that we only have about 7 million possibilities, as some letters and numbers are not used, and some things are reserved. But considering only about 83,000 are actually currently in use, lots of expansion is possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada