A Forward Sortation Area, or FSA, is the first three characters of a Canadian postal code — for example, the “M5V” in “M5V 2T6”. The first letter denotes a province or region, the digit distinguishes urban from rural, and the second letter narrows to a specific area.
FSAs are widely used as the geographic unit for reporting census demographics, because they balance precision with privacy. In the Neighbourly API, demographic data is keyed by FSA, so any address or postal code can be resolved to a demographic profile of its area.
Related terms
Forward Sortation Area (FSA) is part of the Neighbourly data platform. Explore the API or browse the data layers.