About

About Ozipedia

Ozipedia is a free reference work about American ZIP codes.

There are roughly 33,800 ZIP Code Tabulation Areas in the United States. Each one has a population, a housing market, a climate, a set of natural hazards, a school system, an air quality record, and a tax burden — all of it documented in public federal datasets, and almost none of it assembled in one place a person can actually read.

That is the entire idea. One page per ZIP code, built from the primary sources, written to be read rather than skimmed for keywords.

What Ozipedia is not

It is not a real estate listing service, a lead-generation site, or a rankings product. Nothing on Ozipedia is for sale, no page is sponsored, and no ZIP code can pay to be described differently.

It also does not tell you where to live. Ozipedia reports what the data says about a place. Whether that makes a place right for you is a question the data cannot answer, and we are careful not to pretend otherwise.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on a ZIP page traces to a named public dataset. The main ones:

The public datasets Ozipedia is built from.

Domain	Source
Population, income, housing tenure, commuting, education	U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey
Home values and rents	Zillow Research — ZHVI and ZORI
Chronic disease prevalence	CDC — PLACES
Air quality	U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Climate normals	NOAA — 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals
Natural hazard risk	FEMA — National Risk Index
Reported crime	FBI — Crime Data Explorer
Boundaries and geography	U.S. Census Bureau — TIGER/Line
Streets, transit and points of interest	© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
Public schools and enrolment	NCES — Common Core of Data 2024
Private schools and enrolment	NCES — Private School Universe Survey 2022
Tax rates	Tax Foundation
Federal and state representation	Congress.gov and OpenStates

Each page lists the specific sources it used, with the vintage of the data. Where a dataset does not cover a ZIP code, the corresponding section does not appear. We would rather publish a short page than a padded one.

How each of those sources is turned into a page — and how our own composite scores are calculated — is set out on the methodology page.

A few things we deliberately don’t do

• No third-party proprietary ratings. No school ratings, no walkability scores licensed from anyone else. Where Ozipedia shows a composite score, it is one we compute ourselves and document.
• No letter grades presented as verdicts. Where a score appears, it is labelled as ours and linked to how it is calculated. A number about a neighbourhood should always come with its method attached.
• No invented detail. If the data for a section does not exist, the section is absent. It is never filled in from general knowledge about the region.

Who publishes it

Ozipedia is published by OurZip, an independent company based in California. OurZip also operates ourzip.com, a live local-information service covering the same ZIP codes — current weather, emergency alerts, local events, and community updates.

The two are deliberately separate. Ozipedia is the record; OurZip is what is happening right now. Ozipedia pages link across to OurZip where live data is genuinely more useful than a stored figure, and that is the only commercial relationship between them. It does not change what any page says.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we will say so publicly when we fix it. See Corrections or write to corrections@ozipedia.com.

Reuse

Ozipedia’s underlying sources are public data, most of it in the public domain. Our compilation, narrative text, and computed scores are ours. Quote us, cite us, and link back — that is what it is for. For bulk or commercial reuse, get in touch.