NYC Taxi Zones Explained: IDs, Maps and Service Zones

In short: A taxi zone is one of 263 numbered areas that the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) uses to record where every yellow taxi, green cab and Uber or Lyft trip starts and ends. The numbers run from 1 to 263 in TLC's taxi zone lookup table (checked October 12, 2026). Zones are a data tool, not a legal boundary: the lines that decide where you may pick up are written in the TLC rules, and they don't always follow zone edges.

This guide explains how the numbers work, what the "Yellow Zone", "Boro Zone" and "Airports" labels mean, which zones the MTA counts as inside the congestion pricing area, and how to find the zone you work in.

What a taxi zone is

TLC publishes the zones as a map file and a lookup table on its trip record data page. Each zone has:

• a LocationID (a number from 1 to 263),
• a name (for example 161 = Midtown Center, 76 = East New York),
• a borough, and
• a service zone label (Yellow Zone, Boro Zone, Airports or EWR).

When a trip is recorded, the pickup zone goes into a field called PULocationID and the drop-off zone into DOLocationID. That is how TLC and the public can count trips by neighborhood without publishing anyone's exact address.

How many zones each borough has

Counted from TLC's lookup table. Two oddities to know: the name Corona is used twice (zones 56 and 57), and Governor's Island/Ellis Island/Liberty Island is listed three times (103, 104 and 105).

The service zone labels: Yellow Zone, Boro Zone, Airports, EWR

The lookup table gives each zone one of four labels:

• Yellow Zone — 55 zones, all in Manhattan, from the Battery up to the Upper East and Upper West Sides.
• Boro Zone — 205 zones: every zone in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island, most of Queens, and 14 upper-Manhattan zones such as Central Harlem, East Harlem North and South, Washington Heights and Inwood.
• Airports — JFK (132) and LaGuardia (138).
• EWR — Newark Airport (1), the only zone outside New York State.

These labels are handy shorthand, but they are not the legal lines in the TLC rules. The rule that matters most is the Hail Exclusionary Zone: "Manhattan south of East 96th St. and West 110th St." plus "The New York City Airports" (TLC rules, chapter 51). Green cabs may not take street hails there. That line does not match the Yellow Zone label exactly. For example, Central Park (zone 43) is labelled Yellow Zone but stretches north to 110th Street, past the East 96th Street line. When a rule depends on the street, go by the street, not the zone label. See the Hail Exclusionary Zone entry and who can pick up where.

Airport zones and Newark

Three zones are airports: JFK (132), LaGuardia (138) and Newark (1). In the 12 months from September 2025 to August 2026 they were the busiest places for app pickups. LaGuardia had the most pickups of any zone at 6,102,397 and JFK came second at 5,817,376, counting yellow, green and app trips together (TLC Help dataset trips-top-pickup-zones).

Newark is different. It is in New Jersey, and almost all its TLC trips are drop-offs: 1,978,501 in those 12 months against only 6,404 pickups (dataset trips-zone-index). TLC rule §80-20(a)(1) says a driver must not refuse a passenger going to Newark Airport (TLC rules, chapter 80). For airport rules, see the JFK, LaGuardia and Newark pages.

Zones inside the congestion pricing area

Two different congestion charges use two different Manhattan lines:

• The MTA Congestion Relief Zone covers Manhattan south of and including 60th Street, except the FDR Drive, the West Side Highway/Route 9A and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections to West Street. Per-trip charges are $0.75 for taxis, green cabs and other FHVs and $1.50 for Uber/Lyft trips, collected from passengers (TLC Help rates file, as of October 12, 2026; TLC taxi fare page).
• The New York State congestion surcharge applies to trips that begin, end or pass through Manhattan south of 96th Street: $2.50 in a yellow taxi, $2.75 in a green cab or FHV, $0.75 for a shared ride (TLC taxi fare page; TLC Help rates file, as of October 12, 2026).

For data work, the MTA publishes a list of the taxi zones it treats as inside the Central Business District: 38 zones (data.ny.gov yfdc-w5jh). They are 4, 12, 13, 45, 48, 50, 68, 79, 87, 88, 90, 100, 107, 113, 114, 125, 137, 144, 148, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 170, 186, 209, 211, 224, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 246, 249 and 261.

There is no official zone list for the 96th Street surcharge line, and zones along 96th, 110th and 60th Streets straddle the lines. For the street-level rules, read congestion relief zone boundaries.

How to find your zone

Where you will see zone numbers

• TLC trip records. Every yellow, green and high-volume FHV trip file uses LocationIDs. TLC publishes them monthly, "typically with a two-month delay" (TLC).
• NYC Open Data. TLC's dataset c5iv-bn4s counts monthly pickups and drop-offs per zone for yellow taxis, green cabs and high-volume FHVs, back to January 2019.
• TLC Help data pages. Our zone data hub, the borough rankings such as Brooklyn taxi zones ranked and Bronx taxi zones ranked, and pages like busiest pickup zones are all built on zone IDs.

What zone numbers can and can't tell you

Zone data shows where and when trips happen. In the 12 months to August 2026, TLC records show 297,985,635 pickups in zones 1–263 by yellow taxis, green cabs and Uber/Lyft combined (our sum of dataset trips-zone-index). How those pickups spread across zones is on busiest pickup zones.

They can't tell you:

• exact streets (a zone can be dozens of blocks),
• whether a pickup was legal (rules use streets, not zones),
• trips by black cars, liveries and limos that don't go through Uber or Lyft (their files have no fare data and are not in our zone figures),
• what any driver earned in an hour (see the caveats on each data page).

Zones also don't tell you where you may wait. For that, see taxi stands by borough and the neighborhood loading zone entry. For the meaning of green cab permits, see SHL. For refusals tied to destinations, see service refusal rules.

Related terms

• LocationID — the zone number (1–263, plus 264 and 265).
• Service zone — TLC's data label (Yellow Zone, Boro Zone, Airports, EWR).
• Hail Exclusionary Zone — the legal area where green cabs can't take hails.
• Congestion Relief Zone — the MTA toll area south of and including 60th Street.

More place guides are on the places hub.