Other divisions · Infrastructure
Phone codes and postcodes
Telephone area codes starting with 03 still trace the former GDR: they cover 99.9% of the East and Berlin, and 99.6% of the 03 area lies there. Postcodes do not: codes starting with 0 cover only 34% of the East, and with those starting with 1 still only 78%; 23 of the 76 eastern districts mainly use 2, 3 and 9, as the West does.
| Zone | Districts | People | Share | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 03 area code, postcode 0 or 1 Mainly 03 area codes and mainly postcodes starting with 0 or 1 | 53 | 13.4 m | 16% | 82,886 km² |
| 03 area code, other postcode Mainly 03 area codes, but mainly postcodes starting with 2, 3 or 9 | 23 | 2.7 m | 3.2% | 26,073 km² |
| Neither Mainly 02, 04–09 area codes and postcodes starting with 2–9 | 325 | 67.4 m | 80.8% | 248,630 km² |
Germany's 5,200 local telephone areas have codes from 02 to 09. All 76 eastern districts, Berlin included, lie mainly in the 03 zone, and no western district does. East and West Berlin share one code, 030.
The only sizeable 03 area in the West is around Neuhaus east of the Elbe in Lüneburg district (241 km², codes 038841, 038845 and 038844). It belonged to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern until a state treaty signed in 1993 moved it to Lower Saxony, and it kept its eastern codes. Elsewhere along the old border, 03 and western codes cross it only in slivers: 179 km² of 03 area in the rest of the West, 161 km² of other codes in the East.
Five-digit postcodes are split differently. Codes starting with 0 cover 34% of the East (31 districts, in Saxony, southern Brandenburg, southern Saxony-Anhalt and eastern Thuringia), codes starting with 1 the North-East and Berlin (22 districts). Both are almost purely eastern: only 295 km² of 0 and 1 postcodes lie in the West, again mostly around Neuhaus.
The other 22% of the East shares its first digit with the West. 14 of Thuringia's 22 districts use postcodes starting with 9 (regions 96, 98 and 99), the Magdeburg region and the Altmark 3 (39), the Harz 3 (38), Eichsfeld 3 (37) and western Mecklenburg 2 (23). 7 two-digit postal regions (19, 23, 29, 36, 37, 38 and 96) have at least 50 km² on each side of the old border.
Does the line still show?
Today's figures on each side, as population-weighted averages of the district values (our calculation from the live themes on this site).
| Indicator | 03 area code, postcode 0 or 1 | 03 area code, other postcode | Neither |
|---|---|---|---|
| AfD vote 2025 | 30.0% | 37.1% | 18.0% |
| Green vote 2025 | 9.1% | 4.3% | 12.7% |
| Unemployment 2025 | 8.0% | 6.8% | 6.0% |
| Gross monthly salary € 31.12.2025 | 3,807 | 3,513 | 4,268 |
| Young people 31.12.2025 | 12.1% | 10.8% | 13.4% |
| Childcare 1 March 2025 | 54.9% | 58.2% | 34.7% |
| Foreign population 31.12.2025 | 13.9% | 8.7% | 17.8% |
How we drew the line
Area codes: the Bundesnetzagentur's boundaries of all 5,200 local telephone areas (Ortsnetzbereiche, as of 10 August 2026; 5,201 polygons) were reprojected from Gauss-Krüger zone 3 to WGS 84 and intersected with the 401 districts in a Lambert equal-area projection (mapshaper). Each district counts as "03" if codes starting with 03 cover the largest share of its area; the tooltip shows that share. Postcodes: OpenStreetMap postcode boundaries (boundary=postal_code, 8,172 polygons inside Germany, planet file of 21 September 2026, queried via QLever) were intersected the same way and each district classified by the leading digit covering most of its area. East/West totals use whole districts, with Berlin counted with the East; pieces under 20 km² along the old border are treated as edge effects of the generalised district map.
- Telephone areas and postcodes are drawn for districts as a whole; a district can contain small areas of another code. Lüneburg district is shown as western although Neuhaus, east of the Elbe, uses 03 codes and postcodes starting with 1.
- Postcode boundaries are not published as open data by Deutsche Post. The OpenStreetMap boundaries are mapped by volunteers and approximate the delivery areas; they cover 99.7% of Germany's district area (5 postcode relations without a closed polygon were skipped).
- The district map (BKG VG2500) is generalised to 1:2.5 million, so area codes and postcodes overlap the inner-German border in small slivers of a few km² that do not exist on the ground.
- The Bundesnetzagentur geodata are published under CC BY-ND 3.0 DE; this page shows only the district classification derived from them, not the boundaries themselves.