Announcing zipcodeR: A new R package for ZIP code analysis

I’m excited to announce the release of zipcodeR, a new R package designed to simplify working with ZIP code-level data for researchers, analysts, and data scientists.

The Problem

ZIP codes are incredibly useful geographic units for analysis, but working with them in R has traditionally been challenging:

No standardized way to get ZIP code boundaries
Difficult to link demographic and geographic data
Hard to calculate distances between ZIP codes
Limited tools for ZIP code validation and lookup

The Solution

zipcodeR provides a comprehensive toolkit for ZIP code analysis with these key features:

1. Instant ZIP Code Lookups

library(zipcodeR)

# Get detailed info about a ZIP code
zip_code_db %>% filter(zipcode == "08742")

# Search by city
search_city("Trenton", "NJ")

2. Calculate Distances

# Distance between two ZIP codes
zip_distance("08742", "08618")

# Find all ZIP codes within radius
search_radius("08742", radius = 10)

3. Demographics Data

Access population, income, and housing data:

# Get demographic statistics
reverse_zipcode("08742")

4. Spatial Analysis

Built-in support for mapping and GIS work:

# Get ZIP code boundaries
get_zcta_boundary("08742")

Real-World Applications

I’ve used zipcodeR in several projects:

Public health analysis - Identifying healthcare deserts
Market research - Analyzing service area demographics
Government transparency - Mapping OPRA requests by location
Electoral analysis - Understanding voter demographics

Performance

The package is optimized for speed:

Lookups execute in milliseconds
Built-in caching for repeated operations
Efficient data structures for large-scale analysis

Installation

# From CRAN
install.packages("zipcodeR")

# Development version from GitHub
devtools::install_github("gavinrozzi/zipcodeR")

Open Source

zipcodeR is fully open source under the GPL-3 license. Contributions welcome!

What’s Next

Future releases will include:

Historical ZIP code changes tracking
Enhanced demographic variables
Integration with census microdata
Additional distance calculation methods

Academic Publication

This work has been peer-reviewed and published in Software Impacts. Read the full paper: DOI: 10.1016/j.simpa.2021.100147

Get Involved

I’d love to hear how you’re using zipcodeR! Open issues on GitHub with feature requests, bug reports, or just to share your use cases.

The package has already been downloaded over 100,000 times, and I’m excited to see how the community continues to build with it.