NCES SABS — the only authoritative US school attendance map

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.