Where can I find Canadian postal code geometries?

Question

Where can I find the shapefiles for Canadian postal codes?

Answer 1

Note that the Postal Code Conversion files will be freely available as of Oct 24, 2012 as per the new data freedom initiative. See here for details.

Answer 2

Canadian postal codes are not available for free download. You can either purchase the PostCode Conversion File from Statistics Canada or one of many value-added data sets from providers like DMTI Spatial.

The lack of freely available PostCode data for Canada is a huge hindrance to business.

Answer 3

A list of all Canadian postal codes (includes city, province, latitude, longitude) is available here:

http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1

Geocoder collected the postal codes by crowd-sourcing.

Answer 4

you can purchase Canadian Postal Codes and FSA Boundaries from Geografx Digital Mapping Services info@geografx.ca , www.geografx.ca or www.geografx.com

Answer 5

There are commercial available canada postal code data as well, they are usually more precise and up to date. Can refer to IGEOCODE postal code products at http://www.igeocode.com/products/capostalcodes/demo/

Answer 6

UPDATE: Stats Canada has since released the Forward Sortation Areas Boundry files (as of February 5, 2013 according to their site). I'm downloading it now to try it out, feel free to check it out yourself and use the new data.

Download Page for all Census Boundary Files

2011 Canada FSA Boundary File - Full Product Details

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Statistics Canada has a page dedicated to making available different Shape files regarding Canadian Boundaries, both Geographical and Digital.

http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/geo/bound-limit/bound-limit-eng.cfm

While they make no mention of one specific to every possible Postal Code (nor do I think you're very likely to find one), they do list one for the FSAs but it does not as of yet have a release date.

If you only need the geographic center of the postalcodes however (instead of the boundary), check out the free database at http://geocoder.ca/. You can obtain the approx center of the FSA from this as well by grouping them by the first three digits of the PostalCode and then averaging the Latitude/Longitude. SQL would help do this much easier if you import the data into a database first.

Here's a query do do what I mean.

IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM zipcodeset WHERE LEN(PostalCode) = 3)
BEGIN
    INSERT INTO zipcodeset(PostalCode, Latitude, Longitude)
    SELECT LEFT(PostalCode,3), Avg(Latitude), Avg(Longitude)
    FROM zipcodeset
    GROUP BY LEFT(PostalCode,3)
END

I'm waiting for those FSA Boundary shape files to be released as well so if you see them get published to that site please post a reply here so we can amend the answer. They are now published

Answer 7

The FSA shapefiles are up now at http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/geo/bound-limit/bound-limit-2011-eng.cfm I just downloaded them, now only if there was an LDU shapefile available...

EDIT:

Here is a picture of the LDU shapefile loaded in QGIS and zoomed into Stanley Park in Vancouver BC:

The data is available through the Platinum Postal Suite, v2008.3, 2008 which I was able to access through my university account. The LDU data is for all of Canada and is broken up into a per province structure, unfortunately you have to download all of them at the same time though which makes it larger than 1 gb...