Los Angeles ZIP Codes: The Full List, and Why Venice, Van Nuys, and San Pedro Aren't On It

All 94 ZIP codes with "Los Angeles" as the primary USPS place name

USPS lists 94 ZIP codes with "Los Angeles, CA" as the primary place name, and every one of them sits in Los Angeles County, with no cross-county split, the same pattern this site found in Chicago. Most of the range runs 90001 through 90099, with a handful of higher, non-sequential codes (90134, 90189) mixed in for high-volume recipients rather than delivery areas.

One of those higher codes has a specific, well-documented story: 90095 belongs to UCLA. The university shared Westwood's 90024 ZIP code until USPS carved out a dedicated campus code on January 1, 1995, along with a new addressing format built around department names and box numbers instead of street addresses, the same system UCLA mail still uses today. That same city-name-versus-ZIP-name mismatch, just playing out for entire well-known neighborhoods instead of one university, is exactly the pattern this site's broader look at why a ZIP code shows the wrong city traces back to how USPS assigns a preferred place name in the first place.

Why Van Nuys, Woodland Hills, and a dozen other LA neighborhoods don't carry the city's name

Fourteen San Fernando Valley neighborhoods that are legally part of the City of Los Angeles keep their own ZIP place names instead of "Los Angeles": Van Nuys (13 ZIP codes), North Hollywood (11), Northridge (6), Woodland Hills (4), Sherman Oaks (4), Encino (4), Canoga Park (4), Reseda (2), Tarzana (2), Chatsworth (2), Granada Hills (2), Sylmar (2), Sunland (2), and Tujunga (2): 60 ZIP codes in all, inside a single city, none of them labeled "Los Angeles."

That split traces back to a single election. On March 29, 1915, voters approved annexing roughly 170 square miles of the San Fernando Valley into Los Angeles by a lopsided 681-25 margin, more than doubling the city's land area overnight. The motive was water, not space: the Los Angeles Aqueduct had opened in 1913, and Valley communities wanted the fixed water rates that came with joining the city that owned the aqueduct. Not every Valley town joined on the same vote, either: Lankershim (renamed North Hollywood in 1927) and Owensmouth (renamed Canoga Park) sat out the 1915 election and were annexed separately, in 1923 and 1917.

One Valley town never joined at all. San Fernando sat on its own reliable groundwater in the Sylmar Basin rather than a river it had to import, and residents voted to incorporate as an independent city on August 31, 1911, by a margin of just eight votes. It remains independent today, a legal island inside the Valley that the table above doesn't cover because it isn't Los Angeles. Burbank (1911) and Glendale (1906) made the same choice around the same period, for similar reasons of local control over water and utilities, and both remain independent cities bordering the Valley today.

The harbor and the Westside: two more annexation waves, two more sets of borrowed names

San Pedro (4 ZIP codes) and Wilmington (2) tell a similar story from a different direction. In 1906, Los Angeles annexed a strip of land less than a mile wide and 16 miles long (nicknamed the "Shoestring Strip") purely to create a contiguous land bridge to the coast, because California law only allowed a city to annex land touching its existing border. The strip reached San Pedro and Wilmington, both harbor towns, which voted to consolidate into Los Angeles three years later, on August 28, 1909. The annexation gave Los Angeles, a city with no natural harbor of its own, a working port 20 miles from downtown; the Shoestring Strip itself was renamed Harbor Gateway in 1985.

Venice (2 ZIP codes) joined LA for a plainer reason two decades later. Developer Abbot Kinney built Venice as a canal-laced seaside resort starting in 1905, but after his death in 1920 the town's roads, water lines, and sewers fell into disrepair faster than its small government could fund fixes. Voters approved annexation to Los Angeles in November 1925 by a margin of 3,130 to 2,215, and the merger took effect in 1926. Los Angeles subsequently paved over most of the original canals (only a handful survive today) in a project that took three years and a court battle from canal-front residents to resolve.

Two more Westside pockets follow the same pattern on a smaller scale: Pacific Palisades (1 ZIP code) and Playa Vista (1), both legally part of Los Angeles, both carrying their own name at the post office instead of the city's.

The cities that were never annexed, and correctly aren't on this list

Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Culver City, and Santa Monica sit entirely inside the outline of Los Angeles on a map, surrounded on most or all sides by LA neighborhoods. But none of them were ever annexed. Each incorporated as its own independent city, with its own government, its own police department (West Hollywood contracts with the LA County Sheriff instead of LAPD), and, correctly, its own ZIP codes: 90209-90213 for Beverly Hills, 90069 for West Hollywood, 90230-90233 for Culver City, and 90401-90411 for Santa Monica. None of those appear in the "Los Angeles" table above, and that's not a postal quirk. It's the accurate answer.

That makes Los Angeles close to a mirror image of Dallas. In Dallas, a legally independent town (Highland Park) has its ZIP codes filed under "Dallas, TX" anyway, because USPS's place-name database doesn't always track legal boundaries. In Los Angeles, the opposite happens far more often: neighborhoods that did join the city, sometimes over a century ago, kept a name at the post office that isn't the city's. Both are the same underlying fact, read from different directions: a USPS ZIP-code place name is a mail-routing label, not a legal determination of what city a resident lives in.