BS postcode district map, Bristol

Where the BS districts sit

14 districts are plotted without a label where labels would overlap; every one is in the table below.

Where BS sits

It is administratively fragmented, reaching into City of Bristol, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset and 1 other authority.

Water supply across BS

All 39 BS districts are supplied by Bristol Water, which is notable at this size: an area with this many districts usually crosses at least one supply boundary, and this one does not.

Bristol Water has a hosepipe ban in force, covering the whole of BS.

The shape of the BS area

The districts are wildly uneven: BS16 holds 2,037 postcodes around Filton and BS98 holds 1, a ratio of about 2037 to one. They divide into 166 sectors.

The numbering is not continuous. BS runs up to 99 but has only 39 districts, so 60 numbers are unused:.

Several districts share a settlement, which is a common source of confusion when a form rejects an address: BS1, BS2, BS3, BS4, BS5, BS6, BS8, BS9, BS13, BS41, BS98 and BS99 all point at Bristol, BS25, BS26, BS27, BS28 and BS29 all point at Axbridge and BS7, BS10, BS16 and BS34 all point at Filton.

What borders BS

BS sits next to BA (Bath) to the south east, NP (Pontypool) to the north west, TA (Taunton) to the south west, CF (Cardiff) to the west and SN (Swindon) to the east.

Its neighbours run in 5 different directions, so BS is landlocked by other postcode areas on most sides.

BS districts, settlements and water supply

Principal settlement is the town or city each district sits in or nearest to, derived from OS Open Names. It is not the Royal Mail post town, which is licensed data and not published openly. Status is resolved live from each company’s own notice.

Water hardness in BS

Figures are in milligrams per litre as calcium carbonate, the unit UK water companies report in. 1 of 39 districts has a published figure.

Descriptions such as very soft, soft, moderately hard, hard, very hard are the water industry scale: very soft below 75, soft 75–125, moderately hard 125–250, hard 250–375, very hard above 375 mg/l. Your supplier may use a different scale for the same number.

Contains Wessex Water drinking water quality data, via Stream, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Edition 2022-2025, published 1 January 2025.

Hardness is published per census area, not per postcode, so these figures characterise a district rather than measuring one address. They are a scale and taste matter, not a safety one. Hardness data version wessex-water@2022-2025+yorkshire-water@2026.

Download the BS data

No signup, no email wall. GeoJSON carries the district points, the supplier and the live status, so it can be dropped straight into a map.

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District positions are averaged postcode centroids from OS Code-Point Open. They show roughly where a district sits, not where its boundary runs, and are not legal boundaries.

Frequently asked questions