What's Wrong with the USPS Data?

All ZIP Code data products are not created equal!

For ZIP Code with Latitude / Longitude data, the U.S. Postal Service uses our data, not the data that they sell to our competitors! The data file they sell has been modified by many people over time and is inconsistent and incomplete. Our competitors have to sell the USPS data AS IS, even when there are known errors. We have sold to most of the Fortune 100, yet our products are reasonably priced.

We've been refining our data for years. Following are some of the main differences between us and our competition which sells the USPS data AS IS:

Our city names are clean, standardized names. If you need incorrect spellings of city names (in order to validate city spellings), see our Multi-City Spellings data. The USPS data is loaded with invalid city names.
For instance, 02456 in the USPS file has had 'New Town, MA', instead of 'Newton, MA' for several months. Also, when Dade County became Miami-Dade, we changed it immediately. It took many months before this was finally fixed in the USPS data.

Our latitude and longitude is the best you'll find! We have about 97% unique points in our Pro-Zipcode Data with Lat./Long. A main competitor had about 50% (you can download GeoCount from our Download Page to prove it). Only a few of our records have the same coordinates. They are usually for Post Office boxes with more than one ZIP Code served by the same post office.

Our center points are accurate (not miles off). For example, we've heard that other data had over 450 ZIP Codes in the Los Angeles area with the same latitude and longitude.

One low-price competitor provides only a few sample records. We looked at one of their coordinates and it was off by over 650 miles! You truly would get what you pay for!

Many counties in their data are not the real primary county for that ZIP Code.
We do our best to have the most accurate spelling of a city or county name. For instance, DeKalb county, IL should not have a space in it, but in the USPS data, it's 'De Kalb'. This may seem minor to some people, but if you are trying to match up the county name with other data such as county tax tables or Census data, the name won't match, which could become a costly mistake.

We use dashes and apostrophes, because many names need them. The USPS doesn't use these and inserts a space. Some examples are Saint Mary's County, MD; Coeur d'Alene, ID; Port O'Connor, TX; Winston-Salem, NC.

We standardize spellings and capitalization of places. We use 'North', not 'N', 'Saint', not 'St'. We use common abbreviations such as 'USAF Academy' instead of the USPS' 'U S a F Academy'.

Our Deluxe file is unique! This has true multiple cities per zip code. This speeds up data entry address validation. When a ZIP Code crosses more than one city, this will list the most likely city that the zip belongs to, plus other cities which the ZIP Code crosses over.

We have other unique files that nobody else has such as our Multi-City Spellings and Multiple Area Codes per Zip. We have an accurate Multi-County ZIP Codes which shows all of the counties which a ZIP Code crosses over.

These are just a few examples of what you will encounter with government data. We hope it convinces you that ... If you want great results, you need GreatData!