What a UN/LOCODE is
A UN/LOCODE is a five-character code that the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) assigns to a place used in trade. The first two letters are the ISO 3166-1 country code; the last three identify the place inside that country. USLAX is Los Angeles, INNSA is Jawaharlal Nehru (Nhava Sheva) in India, and NLRTM is Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The list covers more than seaports. It also includes airports, rail and road terminals, inland container depots and border crossings, so every entry carries a function classifier that says what kind of place it is. This tool searches the seaport entries (classifier 1), which are the codes printed on a bill of lading. UN/LOCODE airport entries (classifier 4) are under the Type filter. For the IATA and ICAO codes that go on an air waybill, use the airport code finder instead.
A UN/LOCODE names a place, not a terminal. A large port often has one code for the city and separate codes for individual terminals: Shenzhen is CNSNZ, while Yantian, Shekou and Chiwan each have their own. Use the code your carrier books under, not the one that looks closest to the port name.
Which code goes on which document
Bookings and bills of lading: the port of loading and port of discharge are normally printed as UN/LOCODEs, and carriers use the same codes in their schedule and tracking feeds. When the code on your purchase order doesn’t match the carrier booking, a container can quietly turn up under the wrong tracking result.
US customs entry: CBP identifies each port of entry with a separate four-digit Schedule D code, such as 2704 for Los Angeles and 4601 for the New York/Newark area. That code, not the UN/LOCODE, goes in the port field of CBP Form 7501. Where we could read a code from CBP’s own published Schedule D, the port page shows it next to the UN/LOCODE, with a link to the source.
Air waybills: air freight uses the three-letter IATA and four-letter ICAO airport codes. The last three letters of a UN/LOCODE often match the IATA code but don’t have to, so airports have their own tool. The airport code finder covers around 3,250 airports with scheduled service and shows the CBP port-of-entry code for US airports.
How to search
Type at least two characters. The search matches both codes and place names, and ranks an exact code first, then codes that start with what you typed, then names. Searching USL brings up USLAX before anything that merely contains 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. Each result also shows its classifiers, so you can tell a deep-water container port from a river terminal that happens to share its name.
The busiest container ports and the US ports of entry, listed further down this page, each have a full page with coordinates, a map link, the CBP Schedule D code where CBP publishes one, and the Airlift lane guides for that country.
Sources and edition dates
Location codes, names, subdivisions, function classifiers, IATA codes and coordinates come 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 unchanged, except that we keep only seaport and airport entries (the airport entries sit behind the Type filter) and convert 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 February 3, 2026, and cross-checked against the Census Foreign Trade Division Schedule D list. We show a code only where we could read it from that publication; no code is inferred.
UNECE republishes UN/LOCODE about every six months and Schedule D changes periodically, so check the edition dates on a port page before relying on a code for a filing.