UN/LOCODE Port Code Lookup

United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations. It is maintained by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and is published as a public dataset covering well over 100,000 locations worldwide, revised twice a year.

Five characters with no separator in electronic data, though it is often printed with a space: two letters for the country from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, then three characters identifying the location. The location part uses letters A–Z and digits 2–9 only — 0 and 1 are excluded because they are too easily confused with O and I.

Check the current UNECE directory and the code required by the carrier or filing system. The current list contains CNSGH for Shanghai with a port function and CNSHG for Shanghai Port; CNSHA is Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport. Never derive or silently substitute a code from the city name alone.

Not always. Carriers, port-community systems and customs authorities sometimes maintain their own location identifiers, and a few national systems use codes that resemble UN/LOCODEs without matching them. The UN/LOCODE is the interoperable standard and the one you should carry between systems, but confirm which reference a specific filing actually requires.

No. It identifies a location — a port, city or transport node. Individual terminals, berths and depots within that location have no separate UN/LOCODE. Terminal identification comes from the carrier's booking confirmation, the arrival notice or the local port-community system.

A location has one code, but a metropolitan area can contain several separately coded locations — Dubai and Jebel Ali, or Mumbai and Nhava Sheva, are the classic examples. Conversely a single code can carry several transport functions at once, which is what the eight-position function classifier records.

UNECE publishes revisions twice a year. Additions are common; retirements and renames are rarer but do happen. Because carrier systems, customer master data and printed forms lag behind, expect to encounter valid-looking codes that a current dataset does not contain.

Treat it as a question, not an error. Search for the port by name to see whether a different code is now current, check whether the location was renamed, and confirm with the carrier or the document issuer. Do not overwrite a code on an issued transport document — if it is genuinely wrong, it needs an authorised amendment from the party that issued the document.

No. Airports use three-letter IATA codes and four-letter ICAO codes; ports use five-character UN/LOCODEs. The coincidence that USLAX contains LAX is exactly that — a coincidence. Many UN/LOCODEs do not match the local airport code at all, and using an IATA code where a UN/LOCODE is required will fail validation in most customs systems.

The name is enough for a conversation and insufficient for a system. Place names are duplicated across and within countries, transliterated inconsistently, and printed with and without diacritics. Recording the code alongside the name removes that ambiguity permanently and is what makes automated matching between documents possible.

Yes. When a Bill of Lading, sea waybill, booking confirmation or arrival notice is extracted, the routing points are matched against the bundled UN/LOCODE dataset. A recognised code is confirmed, an unrecognised one raises a warning for review, and a code whose country prefix disagrees with the named port is highlighted as a likely error.

The bundled dataset is derived from the UNECE UN/LOCODE publication, which is the authoritative public source. It is a point-in-time snapshot rather than a live query, so for a filing that turns on a very recently assigned code, confirm against the current UNECE publication.