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NCES SABS — the only authoritative US school attendance map
When you ask 'what school will my kid attend if I move here?' the answer is geography-dependent in a way zip codes don't capture. The federal answer is NCES SABS.
Published 2026-04-25 · Last reviewed 2026-05-13 · methodology
What SABS is
School Attendance Boundary Survey is NCES's effort to collect every public-school attendance boundary in the US, normalized to a common GIS schema.
Started in 2010, expanded each cycle. Current SABS coverage spans approximately 70% of US K-12 districts (the rest are choice districts, charter networks, or non-participants).
Released as shapefiles + GeoJSON via NCES + Census TIGER/Line, refreshed every 2 years.
What it captures
Default attendance boundary per grade level (elementary, middle, high) for participating districts.
Standardized district + school IDs cross-referencing NCES Common Core of Data.
Every public school's bounded service area, point-in-polygon queryable.
What SABS does NOT capture
Choice / lottery / open-enrollment programs — students in many districts can apply to schools outside their default attendance zone.
Magnet + charter schools that recruit district-wide.
Year-by-year boundary redistricting that hasn't been re-submitted to NCES.
School quality, ratings, performance — those come from state report cards (or proprietary aggregators).
What zipradar shows
For each ZIP, we map the dominant district (by area-overlap centroid analysis), feeder schools at each grade level, and student-teacher ratios from NCES CCD.
Where SABS coverage is incomplete, we fall back to district-area boundaries (NCES SDB shapefile) which are universal but coarser.
Always link to the district homepage for choice-program enrollment timelines.
Related zipradar topics
Glossary terms used here
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