CMS ZIP-to-locality crosswalk: July 2026 release
The official CMS data behind Q3 2026 on this site—in effect July 1 – September 30, 2026. The quarterly crosswalk mapping every 5-digit ZIP code to the Medicare payment locality whose GPCIs price claims from that ZIP.
Get the file from CMS Copy link
Direct download: zip-code-carrier-locality-file-updated-05-13-2026.zip
SHA-256 of the file we ingested: 793b7cdbd3af27529bc54b61106eba3ee1861a95906a3f5179a0a2e8c548710b
Direct CMS links rot when cms.gov reorganizes—the stable fallback is the official CMS ZIP-to-locality crosswalk page.
Files inside this release Copy link
The member files we parsed, exactly as recorded at ingest—row counts and checksums let anyone verify our copy against CMS's. Where the name is a link, it downloads the exact bytes we parsed, straight out of the CMS zip—except the relative value file, marked scrubbed below, where we remove the AMA-copyrighted DESCRIPTION column before publishing and leave everything else untouched.
| File | What it is | Rows |
|---|---|---|
|
ZIP5_JUL2026.txt
3.4 MB
SHA-256 6395ccc441c7…
|
ZIP5—the ZIP-to-locality crosswalk | 42,956 |
What the columns mean Copy link
CMS ships these files with minimal documentation, and both the column names and their order drift between releases—which is why we parse by header name, never by position. Any column position shown here is the one we recorded when parsing this release.
ZIP5—the ZIP-to-locality crosswalk
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One row per 5-digit ZIP code, mapping it to the MAC and payment locality whose GPCIs price claims from that ZIP. This is the file that turns "what does Medicare pay here?" into a specific locality's rates.
Open ZIP5_JUL2026.txt (3.4 MB)| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
| State | Two-letter state or territory. |
| ZIP code | The 5-digit ZIP being mapped. |
| Carrier | The MAC that processes claims for this ZIP. |
| Locality | The payment locality code the ZIP prices under. |
| Rural indicator | Blank for urban, R for rural, B for super-rural—used by the ambulance fee schedule's rural bonuses. |
| Plus-4 flag | 1 when the ZIP spans more than one locality, meaning the full ZIP+4 is needed to price precisely. |
What this release backs on this site Copy link
This crosswalk powers the ZIP-code lookups on our locality pages and the per-ZIP estimates on code pages. Ingested Jul 10, 2026. See the full pipeline in our methodology.