Zone-Based Pricing Explained with Real Rate Tables

Every shipping label you buy is priced based on a zone number that you probably never look at. The zone — a number from 1 to 9 — represents the distance between where your package starts and where it is going, and it is one of the biggest factors in your shipping cost. A two-pound package shipped to zone 2 might cost five dollars. The same package to zone 8 might cost twelve dollars. Same weight, same box, same service — the only difference is how far it travels.

Despite this, most small shippers never look at a zone chart. They enter the destination, see the price, and click buy. Understanding zones gives you the ability to predict costs, optimize your pricing strategy, and sometimes save money by changing where you ship from.

What Zones Actually Represent

Zones are distance brackets measured from your origin ZIP code to the destination ZIP code. Each carrier — USPS, UPS, and FedEx — uses zone-based pricing, though their zone maps differ slightly in how they draw the boundaries.

Zone 1 means the package stays within the same local postal distribution area. In New York City, that might mean a package going from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Zone 2 covers roughly zero to 150 miles — think New York to Philadelphia. Zone 3 is 150 to 300 miles, like New York to Washington DC. The zones continue scaling up: zone 4 covers 300 to 600 miles, zone 5 reaches 600 to 1,000 miles, zone 6 extends to about 1,400 miles, zone 7 to 1,800 miles, and zone 8 covers everything beyond that in the continental US. Zone 9 is reserved for non-contiguous destinations like Hawaii, Alaska, and US territories.

USPS determines zones using the first three digits of the ZIP code, which correspond to Sectional Center Facilities. UPS and FedEx have their own proprietary zone charts that generally align with USPS but can differ by a zone in border areas.

The practical implication is that a business located in Kansas City pays lower average shipping costs than a business on the East or West Coast, because more of the US population falls within their closer zones. Geography is destiny when it comes to zone-based pricing.

How Zones Affect Your Actual Shipping Costs

The cost increase per zone is not linear — it accelerates as you move to higher zones. The jump from zone 2 to zone 3 might add a dollar to your shipping cost, while the jump from zone 7 to zone 8 might add three dollars. This acceleration means that cross-country shipments are disproportionately expensive compared to regional ones.

For USPS Ground Advantage in 2026, a one-pound package costs roughly 4.50 dollars to zone 2, 5.00 dollars to zone 4, 5.80 dollars to zone 6, and 7.20 dollars to zone 8. That is a 60 percent increase from the nearest to the farthest zone. For heavier packages, the spread widens further — a five-pound package might cost 7.50 dollars to zone 2 and 14.00 dollars to zone 8, nearly doubling in price.

UPS Ground and FedEx Ground follow similar patterns. A two-pound package via UPS Ground runs about 9.50 dollars to zone 2 and 15.00 dollars to zone 8. FedEx Ground prices are within a dollar of UPS for most weight and zone combinations, though the exact rates depend on your negotiated discounts.

Priority Mail pricing also follows zone-based tiers, though USPS flat-rate boxes are the notable exception — a flat-rate medium box costs the same whether it goes to zone 2 or zone 8. This makes flat-rate an excellent option for heavy items going long distances, and a poor value for light items going short distances.

Looking Up Your Zones

Every carrier provides a zone lookup tool. For USPS, the zone chart tool on the USPS website lets you enter your origin ZIP code and see which zones apply to every destination ZIP prefix. The tool is free and takes about ten seconds to use.

UPS and FedEx provide zone charts through their respective online tools and within their shipping software. If you use a multi-carrier shipping platform like atoship, the zone is calculated automatically for every shipment, so you see the zone-adjusted rate without having to look anything up manually.

The most useful exercise for any e-commerce business is to map your historical orders by zone. Pull a month of shipping data, categorize each shipment by zone, and calculate what percentage of your volume falls into each zone bracket. This distribution tells you where your shipping dollars are going and where optimization will have the most impact.

Using Zone Knowledge to Save Money

Once you understand your zone distribution, several optimization strategies become available.

If your business ships from a single location and a large percentage of your orders go to distant zones, relocating your shipping origin to a more central location can reduce your average zone and save money on every shipment. A business moving from Los Angeles to Dallas might shift their average zone from 5.5 to 3.8, which could reduce per-package costs by two to four dollars on average.

If relocation is not practical, using a fulfillment center in a central location achieves the same effect. You ship your products in bulk to the fulfillment center (which is cheap per unit because of consolidated freight), and the fulfillment center ships individual orders to customers from a geographically advantageous position.

For businesses with enough volume, splitting fulfillment across two locations — one on each coast or one coastal and one central — can reduce average zones even further. Each order ships from whichever facility is closest to the customer.

Zone-based pricing also affects how you should think about free shipping thresholds. If your average zone-8 shipment costs twelve dollars but your average zone-3 shipment costs six dollars, a flat free-shipping threshold needs to account for the worst case. Some businesses offer free shipping only to customers within certain zones, or set different free-shipping thresholds based on the destination.

Flat-rate shipping options from USPS bypass zone-based pricing entirely for packages that fit in flat-rate boxes. A Priority Mail flat-rate medium box costs about 16 dollars with commercial pricing regardless of destination. If your average zone-8 weight-based rate for the same package would be 20 dollars, flat-rate saves you four dollars per package on cross-country shipments. Conversely, if the weight-based rate to zone 3 is only 9 dollars, flat-rate would cost you seven dollars extra. The optimal strategy is to use flat-rate for distant shipments and weight-based pricing for nearby ones.

Shipping platforms that automatically compare flat-rate and weight-based options for each shipment ensure you always get the cheaper rate without having to check manually.