Find an Australian postcode,
suburb or distance

What a postcode actually is

An Australian postcode is a four-digit number that Australia Post assigns to a mail delivery area, not to a suburb. That one distinction explains almost every surprise people run into: a postcode can cover dozens of localities, a locality name can appear in six different states, and a handful of postcodes ignore state borders altogether.

The first digit usually tells you the state or territory - 2 for New South Wales and the ACT, 3 for Victoria, 4 for Queensland, 5 for South Australia, 6 for Western Australia, 7 for Tasmania and 0 for the Northern Territory. Treat it as a strong hint rather than a rule: the ACT also uses a small 02xx range, border towns sometimes take their neighbour's digit, and codes starting 1, 8 and 9 are PO Box and bulk-mail ranges for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane rather than places anyone lives.

Not every postcode is a place

Our database holds 3,310 distinct postcodes across 16,721 entries, and they are not all the same kind of thing. 2,642 postcodes covering 15,930 localities are ordinary delivery areas - the suburbs and towns. The remainder are administrative: 247 PO Box ranges, and 421 large-volume receiver codes, issued to single organisations that receive enough mail to justify a postcode of their own.

So the answer to "how many suburbs are there in Australia?" depends on which of those you count. 15,930 is the figure to use for localities; 16,721 is the figure including the PO Box and bulk-mail entries. Comparisons between postcode datasets usually disagree for exactly this reason rather than because one of them is wrong.

One postcode, many suburbs - and occasionally many states

Most postcodes cover more than one locality: 2,015 of the 2,642 delivery-area postcodes do, and only 627 map cleanly to a single place. The widest is 4871 in far north Queensland, which covers 103 localities on its own.

Fourteen postcodes appear in more than one state or territory, and 0872 is the only one that appears in three - 81 remote localities split across the Northern Territory (64), South Australia (8) and Western Australia (9). If you are deriving a state from a postcode - in a form, a report or a shipping rule - those fourteen are where it silently produces the wrong answer, and 0872 is where it produces it most often.

Why the state matters more than you would expect

917 locality names in our database appear in more than one state or territory. There is a Springfield and a Waterloo in six of the eight. A suburb name on its own is not a unique identifier anywhere in Australia, which is why every result here shows the state alongside it, and why an address without one is genuinely ambiguous rather than merely untidy.