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Asked: 2026-05-12T18:31:29+00:00

I am writing a web application, that is US specific, so the format that

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I am writing a web application, that is US specific, so the format that other countries use for postal codes are not important. I have a list of us zip codes that i am trying to load into a database table that includes the

  • 5 digit us zip code
  • latitude
  • longitude
  • usps classification code
  • state code
  • city

the zip code is the primary key as it is what i will be querying against. i started using a medium int 5 but that truncates the zip codes that have leading zeros.

i considered using a char5 but am concerned about the performance hit of indexing against a char variable.

so my question is what is the best mysql datatype to store zip codes as?

Note: i have seen it in several other questions related to zip codes. I am only interested in US 5 digit zip codes. So there is no need to take other countries postal code formats into consideration.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    char(5) is the correct way to go. String indexing is quite fast, particularly when it is such a small data set.

    You are correct in that you should never use an integer for a zip code, since it isn’t truly numeric data.

    Edit to add:
    Check out this for good reasons why you don’t use numbers for non-numerically important data:
    Is it a good idea to use an integer column for storing US ZIP codes in a database?

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