School districts in Massachusetts
28% of the 534 populated ZIP Code areas in Massachusetts are served by more than one school district — 148 of them, which puts the state 41st among the fifty-two. It is organized into 211 unified districts, 64 elementary districts and 30 secondary districts, the largest being Boston at 301,702 homes. Its most divided ZIP Code area, 01096, is split between 6 districts for elementary grades alone. In 92 of them the answer for grade school is not the answer for high school. The two districts that share the most ZIP Codes here are Ralph C. Mahar and New Salem-Wendell, in 5 of them. Counted by homes rather than by ZIP Code area, 20% of the state's housing sits in a ZIP Code that more than one district serves.
How often a ZIP Code here crosses a district line
Massachusetts keeps 30 separate secondary districts — districts that pick students up partway through and run to the end of high school, over several elementary districts at once. Where one of those sits, an address has two district names and neither is wrong.
- ZIP Code areas with a district534
- Served by more than one district148 (28%)
- Grade school and high school differ92 (17%)
- No high school district named2
- Unified districts211
- Elementary districts64
- Secondary districts30
- Homes in no district at all52
The largest districts in Massachusetts
Boston dominates the state: at 301,702 homes it holds more than three times what Worcester does in second place. A district that size sets the answer for dozens of ZIP Code areas at once, and the areas it covers alone are counted on its own page rather than assumed from its size.
The most divided ZIP Code area in Massachusetts
ZIP Code area 01096 holds 1,245 homes, and 6 districts each take a meaningful share of them for elementary grades — Williamsburg first at 52%, then Chesterfield-Goshen. A lookup that names the first is describing that share of the homes and silently not the 598 homes that remain.
Each percentage here is a share of the 1,245 homes counted in ZIP Code 01096, not the chance that any one address is in that district. Enrollment follows the street: two houses on opposite sides of the same road can be in different districts, and only the district office can say which.
Every track below is 35 cells long and stands for all 1,245 homes counted in ZIP Code 01096, so one cell is 36 homes, rounded to the nearest whole cell. Cells lit solid are the homes one district holds, and the unlit cells are the homes held by the other districts in the same list.
- Williamsburg School District647 of 1,245 homes52%
- Chesterfield-Goshen School District509 of 1,245 homes41%
- Conway School District71 of 1,245 homes5.7%
- Mohawk Trail School District18 of 1,245 homes1.4%
For grade school, an answer of one district name would be wrong for 598 of the 1,245 here.
Where a single district name still works in Massachusetts
Across the 534 ZIP Code areas in Massachusetts with homes in them, an answer of one district name misses 26,446 of the 2,998,495 homes they hold. That is 0.9% of the state, and in 379 of the areas one name covers everything: this is a state where the familiar answer is usually the right one, and the areas below are where it is not.
In ZIP Code 02467 · Brookline, Massachusetts the largest district for grade school is Brookline, and naming it alone misses 3,890 of the 7,260 homes counted there. The rest are with Newton and Boston.
ZIP Code 02568 · Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts names 4 districts. Tisbury is the largest of them for grade school, and an answer of its name alone misses 2,145 of the 5,371 homes there; Martha's Vineyard, Oak Bluffs and Up-Island Regional hold the rest.
In ZIP Code 01230 · Great Barrington, Massachusetts the largest district for grade school is Berkshire Hills, and naming it alone misses 1,946 of the 5,069 homes counted there. The rest are with Southern Berkshire.
Where a ZIP Code here names more than one district
Of the 534 ZIP Code areas in Massachusetts that the federal file names a district for, 148 name more than one school district. These are the 12 with the most, starting at 6 districts in one postal area: Williamsburg, North Adams and Rowe. Each row opens the full answer for that ZIP Code, with every district named for grade school and for high school and the share of the homes each one holds.
- ZIP Code 01096 · Williamsburg, Massachusetts6 districts · 1,245 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01039 · Williamsburg, Massachusetts5 districts · 699 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01247 · North Adams, Massachusetts5 districts · 7,889 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01367 · Rowe, Massachusetts5 districts · 279 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01370 · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts5 districts · 2,041 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01201 · Pittsfield, Massachusetts4 districts · 22,631 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01002 · Amherst Town, Massachusetts4 districts · 11,314 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01008 · Blandford, Massachusetts4 districts · 614 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01355 · New Salem, Massachusetts4 districts · 412 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01731 · Hanscom AFB, Massachusetts4 districts · 446 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 01773 · Waltham, Massachusetts4 districts · 2,360 homes · two bands, two answers
- ZIP Code 02568 · Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts4 districts · 5,371 homes · two bands, two answers
What to do next
Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.
A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: 148 of the 534 ZIP Code areas in Massachusetts with a district named for them are served by more than one school district, and the line between two of them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.
This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.
If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.
What this cannot tell you
The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.
A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.
A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.
A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.
Where these numbers come from
School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.
The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.
Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.