What a UN/LOCODE actually is
A UN/LOCODE is the five-character code the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) assigns to a place that matters to trade. The first two characters are the ISO 3166-1 country code; the last three identify the location inside that country. USLAX is Los Angeles in the United States, INNSA is Jawaharlal Nehru (Nhava Sheva) in India, NLRTM is Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The code list is not a list of seaports. It covers airports, rail terminals, road terminals, inland container depots and border crossings too, which is why every entry carries a function classifier saying what the place actually is. This tool shows only the entries flagged as a seaport (classifier 1) or an airport (classifier 4) — around 24,800 places worldwide — because those are the ones that appear on a bill of lading or an air waybill.
A UN/LOCODE is descriptive, not operational: it names a place, not a terminal. A large port with several container terminals usually has one code for the city and separate codes for individual terminals — Shenzhen is CNSNZ, while Yantian, Shekou and Chiwan each carry their own code. Take the code your carrier files under, not the one that merely looks right.
Where port codes show up in your paperwork
On a booking confirmation and a bill of lading, the port of loading and port of discharge are normally printed as UN/LOCODEs. Carriers use them in schedule and tracking feeds, so a code mismatch between your PO and the carrier booking is one of the quieter causes of a container showing up in the wrong tracking result.
For a US import, a second, unrelated code system applies at the border. CBP identifies the port of entry with a four-digit Schedule D code — 2704 for Los Angeles, 4601 for the New York/Newark area — and that is the number that belongs in the port field of CBP Form 7501, not the UN/LOCODE. Where we have been able to read a code out of CBP’s own published Schedule D, the port page shows it alongside the UN/LOCODE with a link to the source.
Air freight adds a third: the three-letter IATA airport code. UN/LOCODE carries an IATA column for some airport entries, and where the UNECE list supplies one we show it. Where it does not, we leave the field out rather than guess — the location half of a UN/LOCODE often matches the IATA code but is not required to, and inferring it would put a wrong code on your air waybill.
How to use this tool
Type at least two characters. The search matches both the code and the place name, and it ranks an exact code first, then a code prefix, then a name. Searching USL surfaces USLAX before anything merely containing those letters; searching Rotterdam finds NLRTM. Filter by country when a name is common — there are Portlands in Oregon, Maine, Texas and Michigan, and only one of them is on your booking.
Results show the classifiers on each entry, so you can tell a deep-water container port from an inland road terminal that happens to share a name. The busiest container ports and the US ports of entry — listed in full further down this page — each have their own page with coordinates, a map link, the CBP Schedule D code where CBP publishes one, and the Airlift lane guides that serve that country.
Where the data comes from
Location codes, names, subdivisions, function classifiers, IATA codes and coordinates are taken from the UNECE UN/LOCODE Code List, edition 2024-2. UN/LOCODE is public data maintained by the UNECE Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). We reproduce it here unchanged apart from filtering to seaport and airport entries and converting coordinates to decimal degrees.
US Schedule D port codes are read from the CBP publication ACE M1 Import Manifest, Appendix E — Schedule D, U.S. CBP Port Codes, revised 3 February 2026, and cross-checked against the Census Foreign Trade Division Schedule D list. Codes are shown only for ports where we could read them out of that publication; no code is inferred. UN/LOCODE is republished on a roughly six-monthly cycle and Schedule D changes periodically, so check the edition dates on a port page before relying on a code for a filing.