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The ZIP code database contains 43191 ZIP codes for the continetal United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa. The database is in mysql database dump format, with columns for ZIP code, city, state, latitude, longitude, timezone (offset from GMT), and daylight savings time flag (1 if DST is observed in this ZIP code and 0 if not).

This database was composed using ZIP code gazetteers from the US Census Bureau from 1999 and 2000, augmented with additional ZIP code information from the Census Bureau's TIGER/Line 2003 data set. Timezone information was added using cartographic data sets from nationalatlas.gov. The database is garunteed to exclusively contain information gathered from sources in the public domain, and thus be legal to redistribute.

The database is believed to contain over 98% of the ZIP Codes in current use in the United States. The remaining ZIP Codes absent from this database are entirely PO Box or Firm ZIP codes added in the last five years, which are no longer published by the Census Bureau, but in any event serve a very small minority of the population (probably on the order of .1% or less). Although every attempt has been made to filter them out, this data set may contain up to .5% false positives, that is, ZIP codes that do not exist or are no longer in use but are included due to erroneous data sources. The latitude and longitude given for each ZIP code is typically (though not always) the geographic centroid of the ZIP code; in any event, the location given can generally be expected to lie somewhere within the ZIP code's "boundaries".

The database and this README are copyright 2004 CivicSpace Labs, Inc., and are published under a Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike license":http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ , which requires that all updates must be released under the same license. Please contact schuyler@geocoder.us if you are interested in receiving updates to this database as they become available.

"Download":http://civicspacelabs.org/developers/download the database.