Random Postal Code Canada

This tool makes between one and fifteen fake Canadian postal codes in the standard A1A 1A1 shape and shows each one on a card with a made-up city, a real province name and a copy button. The codes are assembled from random letters and digits, not pulled from Canada Post's database, so they are safe to drop into a checkout form, a test database or a design mockup without pointing at anyone's real address.

What you can set

One field: the number of postal codes, from 1 to 15. Press Generate Postal Code and the cards appear below the form. There is no province filter. The first letter of each code is chosen from the eighteen letters Canada actually uses to start a postal code, but the remaining letters and the province on the card are picked independently, so a code that begins with V (British Columbia) can sit above the word Manitoba. If your test needs the two to agree, edit the first letter using the table below.

What each card shows

The big line is the postal code itself, written with the space Canadians put after the third character. Under it is a city name, a province and the word Canada. The city is invented by the generator (you will see things like "North Marcelle"); the province is one of the real ten provinces and three territories. The copy button copies only the six-character code, which is usually what you want to paste.

Typical uses

• Form validation. Canadian checkout and signup forms usually check for the letter-digit-letter space digit-letter-digit pattern. Fifteen random codes exercise that rule quickly.
• Test fixtures. Seeding a customer table for a Canadian storefront with plausible codes instead of the same K1A 0B1 repeated a hundred times.
• Placeholder data in mockups. A shipping label or address card for a Toronto or Vancouver client reads better with a Canadian postal code than a five-digit US ZIP.
• Sites that demand a postal code you do not want to give. A random one satisfies the field without revealing where you live, though it will not pass a real address check.

How Canadian postal codes are built

A Canadian postal code has six characters in two groups of three. The first group is the forward sortation area (FSA) and identifies a region; the second is the local delivery unit (LDU) and narrows it to a block, a building or a rural route. The first letter tells you the province or territory. The second character is a digit: 0 means a rural area, 1 through 9 an urban one. Canada Post never uses the letters D, F, I, O, Q or U (they look too much like digits or each other), and W and Z never appear in the first position.

Two codes are famous: K1A 0B1 is Canada Post's own headquarters in Ottawa, and H0H 0H0 is reserved for letters to Santa Claus. Because the generator picks the middle and final letters at random, it can produce one of the never-used letters such as O or D; if a validator rejects a code for that reason, generate another or swap the letter.

For other countries, the US ZIP code generator and the UK postcode generator follow their own formats, and the London postcode generator narrows the UK down to one city. The random zip code generator lets you pick from a list of countries, and you can browse all address and postal code generators together.