mylocationis.com

What Is My Location? Your Position, County, City, State and ZIP

One tap shows where you are: county, city or town, state and ZIP on one screen, with the accuracy radius. It runs in your browser.

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For US locations, including DC, Puerto Rico and the US island areas.

Your browser asks permission first. The lookup runs in your browser. Your exact coordinates stay there; boundary-file requests reveal an approximate area to our host. Covers US states, DC, Puerto Rico and the US island areas. Privacy details.

Data: US Census Bureau boundariesHow it worksSourcesPrivacy

Location blocked? Type a ZIP code or coordinates

Looks up the centre of the Census ZIP area, not your current position.

A ZIP here is an approximate Census area (ZCTA), not a verified mailing ZIP. Or latitude and longitude. If you fill in both, the coordinates are used and the ZIP code is ignored.

-90 to 90

-180 to 180

Enter the radius reported with these coordinates, if known. Without it, proximity to boundaries cannot be checked. The location button fills it in.

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What the accuracy radius means

Your browser reports a position together with an accuracy value. MDN defines it as a radius in metres at 95% confidence: you are probably inside a circle of that radius around the position, and there is about a one in twenty chance you are not. The card shows it in metres and in feet, converted at 0.3048 metres to the foot. A small radius means the browser had a good fix. A radius of kilometres usually means it guessed from the network, which is common on laptops. Why your location may be wrong explains the causes and what to try.

The county, city and state lines are tested against that radius. If another area's edge falls inside it, the page tells you rather than hiding it.

Privacy in short

The lookups run in your browser. Your position is not sent to our servers and is not stored. The boundary data comes from the US Census Bureau, and the page downloads only the small files for the one-degree square around you, so the request shows our host roughly which square you are in. The map link opens OpenStreetMap with your coordinates in the address, only if you click it. Read the full privacy page.

How this is calculated

  1. Pressing the button asks your browser for permission. It answers with a latitude, longitude and accuracy, or an error if you decline.
  2. The page loads the Census county, state and place boundary files for your square and runs a point-in-polygon test on each. A point on open water or outside the US states, DC, Puerto Rico and the island areas returns an error.
  3. The ZIP shown is the nearest ZIP Code Tabulation Area centre, preferring areas that overlap your county. It is a Census approximation, not a mailing ZIP, and the ZIP page explains why.
  4. Coordinates are shown to 5 decimal places and the accuracy is rounded to the nearest metre.

The typed ZIP fallback uses the centre point of that ZIP area, and the result says so. If the button gives an error, you can type a latitude and longitude from a map instead.

How a phone or computer finds where you are

The W3C Geolocation specification, which browsers follow, says common sources of location information include GPS and positions inferred from network signals such as IP address, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth identifiers and cell IDs. The page that asks cannot choose among them. It receives only the position and the accuracy the browser decides to report, and the browser needs your permission first. That is why a phone outdoors and a desktop on a home network can give very different answers for the same spot.

An IP address on its own is a coarser clue than the position a browser reports after you allow it. IP address vs GPS location covers what each one can and cannot reveal.

Where the figures come from