UK Postcode Information

There's no real point jotting down excessive amounts of information about UK Postcodes, because there isn't a finer resource than Wikipedia for that. They pretty much cover everything in depth. However, I will quickly go over the basics...



Introduction of UK Postcodes

Postcodes were introduced to the UK between 1959 to 1974 by The post Office to help the efficiency of the mailing process. The alphanumeric values in a postcode indicates which bin to sort the letters into.


UK Postcode format

UK Postcodes are alphanumeric and between five and seven characters long. They have two parts, an Outward and Inward code, separated by a space.

The format of a UK postcode is always one of the following:

  • LN NLL
  • LLN NLL
  • LNN NLL
  • LLNN NLL
  • LLNL NLL
  • LNL NLL

L represents a letter and N a number. The 'Outward' (first) part of the postcode denotes the postal district. The 'Inward' part denotes particular parts of the town / Delivery Office area.


Find a Postcode on a map

You can use the following UK Postcode Map tool to find the location of a postcode on a map.