UK Countries and Territories by Postcode Area

by Rob Locher

I send a lot of air mail packages to the United Kingdom.  My mailing software gives me a warning if the country line of the address is "United Kingdom".  Perhaps the US Postal Service prefers the packages be addressed to specific countries so that the packages can be more efficiently routed.  (I haven't been able to find any such guidance in the International Mail Manual, but the US Postal Service do accept mail addressed to individual UK countries and territories.)  The UK is made up of four member countries, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  In addition, the Royal Mail delivers to several other political entities, such as the Channel Islands (roughly Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark), the Isle of Man, the Falkland Islands, and several other British Overseas Territories scattered around the globe.

The Royal Mail has an excellent address finder tool (click on "Find an address") that gives the complete address, other than the country, from the postcode and the house name or number.  I made this page so I can quickly find the country or territory from the postcode.  Unfortunately in some cases a postcode area stretches over the border between two of the member countries of the United Kingdom.  In that case, the recommended procedure is to find the address in Google Maps, and look to see which side of the border the address is (or just wing it, ha ha).

The table below was mostly borrowed from Wikipedia's list of postcode areas in the UK, with the postcodes for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man manually added by me.  Wikipedia has an article about postcodes in the UK that also explains the overseas territories.

The "postcode area" is the first one or two letters of the postcode.