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USPS PLANET

The USPS PLANET (Postal Alpha Numeric Encoding Technique) symbology was developed by the United States Postal Service to identify, sort, and track pieces of mail automatically.

The postal barcode may represent a five-digit zip code, a nine-digit Zip + 4 code, or an eleven-digit delivery point barcode. Of these three, you will realize the most significant savings on your postage if you use the eleven-digit delivery point barcode. This code, often called the DPBC barcode for short, was developed by the postal service to uniquely identify each of 115 million delivery points in the United States. It forms the system foundation for virtually eliminating the time used by carriers to sort letter mail prior to delivery.

You can use this application when producing camera-ready artwork of a single address that will be printed many times (for example, on business reply envelopes) to print the barcode. It can also easily be integrated with your ODBC database software when performing bulk mailings to a variety of different addresses, in order to perform the barcode translations for each different zip code "on the fly."

ClosedThe Character Set

This symbology supports the numeric characters 0 through 9.

ClosedThe Symbology Structure

Unlike the other barcode symbologies, which vary the width of the bars and spaces to encode the data, the USPS PLANET symbology encodes data by varying the height of the bars in the barcode. All of the bars are the same width, and all of the spaces are the same width. In addition, the bars and spaces are fairly close in size to each other.

Each character contained in a USPS PLANET symbol contains 5 bars. For each of these five bars, three are tall and two are short.

There are two formats of the USPS PLANET code, which differ in their structure, as described below.

Destination Confirm Service Symbology Structure

Origin Confirm Service Symbology Structure