If you have ever been in a dilemma when you want to send a piece of mail to an address in the US and do not know the zip code, you are not alone. However, there is a way you can fine zip code addresses for every address in the country. There are many different sites that offer this service free. You can search by city or if you remember the first digit of the zip code you can conduct the search in this way as well.

To use one of these online services, you don't even have to know the street address of the person to whom you are sending mail. You do need it though to address the envelope. All you have to do is choose the starting letter of the city from the sidebar menu. This will bring up a list of all the cities in the US that start with that letter of the alphabet. There will be pages of city names, but for your convenience they are all arranged in alphabetical order.

To make this easier, let's work through an example. If you want the zip code for Akron, Ohio, you first choose "Cities starting with A" from the sidebar. This will bring up pages of cities all over the country. You use this list like you would a dictionary looking at the last name in the list on the first page. You will have to skip through about five pages of names until you locate Akron, Ohio. Now you see that there are eleven zip codes for this city. Each of the names is a link to further information, but you will have to delve further using the address of the person in order to know which sip code to use.

You will never realize the type of useful information you can get from using a site for finding US zip codes. Along with giving you the correct five digit number, you will also get information about the latitude and longitude of the city so that you can locate it on a map if you don't know where it is located in the US. You will also get the time zone, which is helpful if you live in a different state or country and want to make sure you don't place the call too early or too late.

The five digits of each zip code in the US have a meaning behind them. There are mail sorting facilities throughout the country and each of these has a three-digit number. Each sectional center facility is responsible for a group of states and the first number refers to that group. The New England states, for example, have zip codes starting with 0. The next two digits identify the center and the last two digits identify the state or the city within a state. The zip codes for California all start with 9.

If you don't have the zip code to accompany the address, it is very likely that the mail will not get delivered to the right person.