Spain postal code lookup

How Spanish postal codes work

Spain’s postal code, the código postal, is a five-digit number like a US ZIP code. The first two digits are the province, numbered in the alphabetical order of their old Spanish names: 01 Álava, 02 Albacete, 03 Alicante, and so on up to 50 Zaragoza, followed by 51 Ceuta and 52 Melilla. A 0 in third place usually means the provincial capital, and the last two digits mark the delivery district or route.

Those first two digits are also the province code used by Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), so 28 means Madrid and 08 Barcelona whether you’re reading a postal code or an official municipality code.

Street doors looked up in CartoCiudad on October 31, 2026.

Where the code comes from

From CartoCiudad, the official address database of Spain’s National Geographic Institute (IGN), which lists every street door (portal) in the country with its postal code. Search for an address and you get that door’s code. Tap the map or use your location and you get the code of the nearest door, as long as it’s within 300 meters (about 1,000 feet) and in the same municipality as you. Out in the countryside, with no building nearby, we’d rather give you no code than a wrong one.

Correos, the Spanish postal service, doesn’t publish postal code boundaries as open data, so we can’t draw them. The outline on the map is the municipality, the area run by one town hall.

One square, three postal codes

The example on the map is right next to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, the square at the center of the city. It shows why you should always search with the house number:

Looked up in CartoCiudad on October 31, 2026.

The buildings around Puerta del Sol use three different codes. On Calle de Alcalá, odd numbers in the 500s use 28027 and most even ones 28037, so numbers 501 and 502, across the street from each other and 76 meters (250 feet) apart, have different postal codes.

When the code doesn’t match the map

A Spanish postal code almost always stays within one province, but it doesn’t line up with municipalities:

• Many villages, one code: 42180 serves at least seven small municipalities in the province of Soria.
• One code, two municipalities: the resort of La Manga del Mar Menor uses 30380 in both the Cartagena and the San Javier parts.
• Another province’s code: Bajauri, a village in the Condado de Treviño (province of Burgos), uses 01118, which starts with Álava’s 01 because Álava surrounds the enclave.

So the postal code won’t tell you which town hall an address belongs to. For that, use “Spanish municipality from an address”.

Shipping to the Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla

Postal codes starting with 35 and 38 are in the Canary Islands, and 51 and 52 are Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish cities on the North African coast. All three are outside the European Union’s VAT area: the Canaries have their own sales tax (IGIC) and Ceuta and Melilla another (IPSI). Parcels sent there from mainland Spain or the rest of the EU may need a customs declaration, and many online shops charge extra or don’t ship there at all, so check the code before you order.