US Ports of Entry Directory: The Official Crossing List, Delivered as Rows

It is the federal government's own answer to a question every cross-border workflow eventually asks: where, exactly, can a person or a shipment legally enter the United States? The CBP Ports of Entry – Official U.S. Port Directory is that roster as structured data — 328 ports of entry across land crossings, airports and seaports, organized under 56 state and territory index pages covering all 50 states plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Two properties make it worth keeping rather than skimming. First, it is wall-to-wall: a drayage dispatcher crossing Laredo and a freight forwarder booking Newark resolve to records in the same seven-field shape, so one lookup table serves truck, air and marine lanes alike. Second, it is operationally specific in a way most port lists are not — each row names the staffing reality of one crossing, down to which days it opens and who answers the phone.

Within Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets averaging 7.81 on our quality rubric, this record scores 8/10, carried by unmatched directory completeness and discounted honestly for what it does not carry: no cargo volumes, no vessel counts, no coordinates.

Seven flat fields, one row per crossing — the kind of shape that drops into a routing table, a CRM import or a TMS without a parsing step. A verified record from the pull:

# One record per port of entry -- detail-page fields shown
Port Name              Addison Airport, Texas - 5584
Port Code              5584
Location Address       4545 Jimmy Doolittle Dr., Suite 100, Addison, TX 75001
Mailing Address        Same as location address
Phone                  +1 469-737-6913
Office Hours           Monday-Friday 10:00 am-7:00 pm CST; Saturday-Sunday Closed
Field Operation Office Houston

# Two more ports off the same state index
Brownsville, Texas - 2301
Corpus Christi, Texas - 5312

Read the Addison row and notice how much a single record settles: which crossing serves the Dallas general-aviation corridor (5584), when its lanes are actually staffed (weekdays 10:00 am–7:00 pm Central, weekends closed) and which CBP field office owns it (Houston). Every row ships with the full field dictionary attached, definitions verified against live pages during research, so the name-plus-code convention is documented once instead of reverse-engineered quarterly.

Three blocks, seven fields, and each earns its place in a join somewhere downstream.

Identity places the crossing: Port Name carries the official name with the five-digit code inline (Brownsville, Texas - 2301) while Port Code repeats that code as its own clean key — the value that joins directory rows onto geometry layers, tonnage ledgers and vessel feeds without depending on name spelling. Location holds the physical street address plus the mailing address where it differs, resolved to suite and ZIP. Operations carries the contact layer brokers actually dial by: the main phone line, the day-by-day office-hours schedule with its time zone, and the supervising field operation office.

Detail context travels too. Fax number, port director and driving directions ride along as supplementary context on request rather than core columns — useful for outreach lists and compliance binders, kept out of the flat seven so the core schema never moves.

One absence deserves bold type before anyone models around it: there are no coordinates. The record locates each crossing by street address, not point geometry. Geocode the address strings, or take a coordinate-bearing companion alongside — the pairing below handles it directly.

Geography is the whole border, not a sample of it: 328 ports of entry across land, air and sea in all 50 states, DC and five territories. The spread is uneven in a useful way — Texas carries 32 ports, Florida 24, California 19 against Alabama's 3 in the counts taken during research, an unevenness that mirrors where cross-border truck, vessel and air traffic actually concentrates.

Temporal currency works per record rather than per release: these are living reference pages, and each port record stamps its own last-modified date, observed values running 2024–2025. Pin any hours-or-staffing claim to the stamp on the exact record cited and it survives a methods review; claim a directory-wide date and it does not.

Granularity is one record per port of entry, resolved to street level. That is deliberately the ceiling: the directory describes where the booth stands and when it opens, never what crossed it — which is why the records that measure flows pair with it so cleanly.

A contact sheet answers who do I call. Three named companions answer everything else, and all three join onto the directory's keys without name-matching gymnastics.

• Where the seaport subset sits. BTS Principal Ports – National Transportation Atlas Database scores a perfect 10/10: exactly 150 principal U.S. ports as polygon features carrying USACE port codes, names, Coastal/Internal/Great Lakes typing and calendar-year 2023 tonnage split into total, domestic, foreign, import and export, with the RANK precomputed on the row. Matching directory entries against those codes flags which of the 328 crossings are ocean gateways — two different universes, and treating them as one list is the most common modeling mistake on this shelf.
• Whether the traffic justifies the route. USACE Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center – U.S. Waterborne Commerce Data supplies the volume ledger for the matched seaports: annual tonnage by commodity, movement direction, vessel class and draft band across 819 ports and 562 waterways, over data years 2002–2024.
• The world frame. Natural Earth – World Ports (1:10m Cultural Vectors) adds 1,081 generalized world-port points with feature-class typing for basemap work — cartography-first detail, no customs attributes, which is precisely what the directory supplies on top.

For the industry's own view of its berths, AAPA U.S. Port Directory & Statistics contributes member-port cargo profiles and channel depths across the Western Hemisphere — the association lens beside the official one.

The directory is reference, not telemetry — correct as maintained, stamped per record, never live. Two product families supply the clocks.

Water conditions at the berth. NOAA CO-OPS API – Tides, Currents & Water Levels covers the physical ocean alongside the operational list: 43 PORTS installations standing watch at major U.S. ports, 301 active water-level stations reporting at one- to six-minute spacing, tide predictions from 3,499 harmonic reference stations and currents resolved depth-bin by depth-bin — with sigma columns and quality flags traveling on every row.

Hulls in motion. AISHub Open AIS Data Sharing Network pools position fixes for roughly 100,000 distinct vessels in a rolling day from more than 1,600 volunteer shore stations across 83 countries, while VT Explorer AIS Data API tracks 300,000+ vessels daily worldwide with voyage declarations, expected arrivals and port-call events. Either converts a directory of crossings into a watchlist: when a hull declares one of your ports as destination, the directory already knows who to call.

For benchmarking beyond the border, World Bank – Container Port Traffic (TEU) sizes whole economies — UNCTAD-compiled container moves across 207 economies, 2005–2024 — the country-grain companion to a port-grain operational stack.

Ranked by how directly a crossing directory answers their day job:

• Customs brokers and freight forwarders keep it as the routing spine: which crossing, whose desk, which hours — resolved before a lane is quoted (sales & growth teams use cases).
• Journalists, academics and students cite the official source for border-infrastructure work, with per-record stamps that survive peer review (journalists & academics use cases).
• Developers and builders get seven flat columns with stable five-digit keys — the lookup table behind a TMS, a logistics directory or a border-wait product (builders' use cases).
• Market researchers and consultants size cross-border trade and compliance markets against the official footprint instead of a hand-built crossing inventory (market researchers use cases).
• E-commerce operators plan lanes against real staffed hours so a shipment never arrives at a closed booth (e-commerce use cases).
• Competitive-intelligence teams read changes in hours, directors and field-office assignments as signals of where border staffing and capacity are moving (competitive intel use cases).
• Data scientists and investors geocode the addresses into a border-crossing feature layer, then let the tonnage and AIS companions say how much moves through each one (investors & quants use cases).

Because the directory was never hard to describe and always tedious to keep. 56 index pages resolving into 328 records, currency declared record-by-record instead of per release, supplementary fields that appear and vanish page by page, and three companion layers — geometry, tonnage, live feeds — keyed differently but meant to be joined. Assembling that by hand is a project; receiving it is a query.

Datadory normalizes before delivery: the five-digit code typed as its own column, addresses split from hours, hours parsed into machine-readable weekday windows with their time zone carried explicitly, and per-record stamps preserved so vintage is queryable rather than folklore. Extensions are specified rather than guessed — geocoded points, port-director and fax details, or a precomputed match against the 150 principal-port polygons fold in on request, confirmed against live records at sample preparation.

Start with the marine-ports-services data hub, which browses every pooled record in this industry, and the best marine-ports-services datasets scorecard that ranks them side by side. The directory's own product page — full field dictionary, verified sample rows and coverage chips — is the CBP Ports of Entry – Official U.S. Port Directory.

Neighboring threads extend this page directly: where to get US port tonnage data by commodity pairs the crossing list with the cargo ledger behind it, NOAA tide data for port operations covers the water half of the berth decision, and the Principal Ports versus Waterborne Commerce comparison settles ranked polygons against the fine-grain register. For definitions, see customs data and customs district and port breakdowns.

Or skip the assembly step: request a sample cut to the crossings you care about, and the production feed follows the same shape — delivered daily, weekly, or hourly, your call.