UK Post Towns Directory and Postcode Coverage

Post towns are a fundamental component of the UK postcode system and play a critical role in postal routing. Defined by Royal Mail, a post town represents a named postal locality—typically a major town or city—used to direct mail efficiently to the correct delivery office. Every UK postcode unit is assigned to one post town, even when that town name does not reflect local government boundaries or commonly used place names.

Unlike postcode areas, districts, or units, post towns are operational designations rather than geographic or administrative areas. A single post town can cover multiple postcode districts and local authority districts, while some postcode districts may be associated with more than one post town. This page focuses on post towns as routing hubs within the UK postcode system and explains how they relate to postcode outcodes, local authorities, and overall postcode coverage.

This page presents a comprehensive, data-driven directory of all post towns in the UK, currently numbering around 1,500. For each post town, we list its associated postcode outcodes, summarise how many postcode units fall under those outcodes, and analyse the extent of local authority district (LAD) coverage. This allows users to understand not only which postcode districts belong to a post town, but also how widely that post town’s postal footprint extends across administrative boundaries.

The data is particularly useful for postcode research, address validation, geographic analysis, and understanding how postal routing relates to local government areas. It complements our existing pages on UK postcode areas, postcode districts, and postcode unit lookups by approaching the postcode system from a post-town-centric perspective.

The table below is fully searchable and interactive. You can type a post town name, postcode outcode, or local authority district into the search box to quickly narrow down results. In addition, a postcode area filter allows you to display only post towns associated with a selected postcode area. You can also sort the results by PC# (number of postcode units), LAD# (number of LADs), and OC# (number of postcode outcodes).

Tip: You can combine the table search with your browser’s find function (Ctrl + F or Cmd + F) to highlight specific text within the results.

Select a postcode area : to filter the data table below.

Table: UK Post Towns, Their Postcode Outcodes, and Local Authority Coverage
Post Town Outcodes OC# Local Authority Districts LAD# PC# Area
Post Town Outcodes OC# Local Authority Districts LAD# PC# Area

This page focuses on post towns. Depending on your needs, you may also find these related resources useful:

  • A page dedicated to postcode areas, where 124 postcode areas are the main subject and their distributions are explored.
  • A page dedicated to postcode districts (around 3,000), with detailed geographic coverage
  • A comprehensive postcode lookup page listing all individual postcode units, mapped to their ward, district, county, and country.

Together, these pages allow you to explore the UK postcode system at area, district, and unit level, depending on the depth of analysis you require.

Disclaimer: the information about post towns and their mapping to postcode districts is derived from a downloadable dataset provided by Geoapify. The counting and distributions of postcode units were based on OS Postcodes Data (Version Date: November 2025). The program that generated this web page was last updated on . The total numbers of postcodes in each postcode district are snapshot based on the dataset processed at the time of generation. Postcode counts may change over time due to new postcode creation, withdrawal, or boundary adjustments, and should be used for comparative and reference purposes only.