Post Code Boundaries
Overview
Australia Post introduced post codes during the 1960s to assist with the distribution of mail. Since then, post codes have become an integral part of mailing addresses as well as being used for a variety of spatial aggregation and spatial analysis tasks well outside their original intent.
Until now, Australia Post did not hold or maintain a definitive set of spatial post code boundaries. Post codes were allocated to addresses on the basis of distribution arrangements rather than any spatial analysis. This meant that the post code areas were quite dynamic and had very indefinite boundaries.
Over the last 10 years or so, the states and territories have been undertaking a very systematic locality (or suburb) review and definition process. This has involved defining, naming and gazetting localities across the country. This task is now all but completed with the recent gazettal of localities for the Northern Territory. This, along with changing business requirements within Australia Post, gave rise to an opportunity to align post code boundaries with locality boundaries. PSMA Australia and Australia Post are proud to announce the release of these new boundaries.
These definitive post code boundaries have been developed under a collaborative arrangement between PSMA Australia and Australia Post.
The national dataset reflects delivery area post codes and - even in beta version - has a very high degree of alignment with localities. It has two data layers:
- post code boundaries - polygon data, and
- post code centroids - point data.
The Post Code Boundaries dataset includes approximately 2,600 postcodes and, at this stage, we plan to maintain it on a quarterly basis.
Post Code Boundaries
How to Buy
All of our resellers have access to the PSMA Post Code Boundaries dataset: