US Address Format: Street, City, State and ZIP Code Explained (With Examples)

A complete US address reads Street Address, City, State ZIP Code, United States. For example: 125 Maple St, Portland, OR 97205, United States. The state code and the ZIP code sit together with no comma between them — that is the convention, not a typo.

This ordering is a requirement of the delivery system rather than a stylistic habit. According to USPS Postal Facts, the network covers 170.4 million delivery points (157.8 million residential, 12.6 million business) and handled 108.7 billion pieces of mail in fiscal 2025. At that volume sorting is done by machine reading, so a field in the wrong position breaks address parsing outright. It is also why address validation components tend to be strict.

When a form splits the address into separate inputs, Street Address holds only the house number, street name and street type. City, State, ZIP Code and Country each go in their own box.

First Name and Last Name are usually stored separately, with Full Name as the combined display value. When testing a sign-up page, fill both so you are not accidentally exercising a single-name path.

State accepts one of two forms: the full name, such as California, or the two-letter code, such as CA. Most checkout and shipping forms prefer the two-letter code, and dropdowns almost always submit the code even when they display the full name.

ZIP Code has to belong to the City and State you paired it with. Put a San Diego ZIP on a New York address and most validation components will reject it, because region-consistency checks compare all three fields against each other rather than validating them independently.

Take 125 Maple St, Portland, OR 97205, United States. Split across form fields, Street Address is 125 Maple St, City is Portland, State is Oregon or OR, ZIP Code is 97205, and Country is United States.

If the form also has Address Line 2, fill it only when there is an apartment, suite, unit or floor to record — an ordinary street address leaves it empty. Name and phone number are contact fields; do not concatenate them into Street Address.

Keep at least four addresses on hand: an ordinary state, a sales-tax-free state, a large state spanning several area codes, and one with a long city name. Together they exercise field width, line wrapping and tax logic.

A full one-line address is the right shape for pasting into a notes field or a map search. Split fields suit form-automation scripts and checkout debugging, where you need to assert on each value separately.