Why Locate.ng exists
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the seventh-most populous on Earth — over 220 million people spread across 923,768 square kilometres, organised into 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, 774 Local Government Areas, and tens of thousands of distinct neighbourhoods, streets, markets, motor parks, schools, hospitals, places of worship, and businesses. For something so vast and so layered, the digital infrastructure for finding places, services, and information has historically been fragmented, paid-only, or simply non-existent. Locate.ng was built to change that.
We're a structured discovery engine for Nigeria — a single, organised, fast, searchable platform that catalogues the country at every level of granularity. Whether you want to know the postal code for Ikoyi, the nearest hospital in Surulere, the cost of a bus from Lagos to Abuja, which universities are in Enugu, or how NYSC orientation works in Kano, you can find it here in seconds — without ads, paywalls, or the noise of generic search engines.
The Nigerian geography we organise
Nigeria's administrative hierarchy is structured, deep, and full of nuance. Locate.ng mirrors it precisely. At the highest level, the country is divided into six geopolitical zones — North Central, North East, North West, South East, South South, and South West. These zones aren't constitutional units; they're political and developmental groupings used for resource allocation and federal character balancing. Each zone contains 5–7 states.
Below the zones sit the states themselves. Lagos has its own page, as does Abuja (FCT), Rivers, Kano, Oyo, Kaduna, Enugu, Anambra, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Delta, Edo, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Ekiti, Imo, Abia, Ebonyi, Bayelsa, Niger, Plateau, Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Jigawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Adamawa, Yobe, and Taraba. Every state has a comprehensive profile on Locate.ng — its governor, motto, demographics, economy, climate, major industries, postal-code prefix, transport infrastructure, universities, NYSC camps, and a list of every Local Government Area it contains. Start your exploration with the Lagos state page, the Abuja FCT page, or any other on the zones index.
Each state contains LGAs — Local Government Areas, the constitutionally recognised third tier of government. Nigeria has 774 LGAs, ranging from highly urbanised ones like Eti-Osa (which contains Victoria Island, Ikoyi, and Lekki) and Ikeja (the Lagos State capital LGA) to predominantly rural ones in the far north. Inside each LGA sit the areas — neighbourhoods, districts, towns, suburbs. Below areas sit area points — individual streets, estates, bus stops, malls, monuments, bridges, junctions, parks, mosques, and churches. The URL pattern is intuitive: /{state}/{lga}/{area}/{point}. So Saka Tinubu Street in Victoria Island, Lagos lives at /lagos/eti-osa/victoria-island/saka-tinubu-street. The Charly Boy bus stop in Lekki Phase 1 lives at /lagos/eti-osa/lekki-phase-1/charly-boy-bus-stop. This is how Nigerians think about places, and this is how we organise them.
What you can do on Locate.ng
The platform is organised by what people actually try to do in Nigeria.
Find places & businesses
Need a restaurant? Browse restaurants nationwide or filter by state. Looking for a hospital? Our hospitals directory covers public and private facilities. Schools? Every school we know, from nursery to secondary. Banks, churches, mosques, gyms, hotels, cinemas, pharmacies, supermarkets, fuel stations — every category has a dedicated landing page filterable by state, LGA, or area. Markets get their own treatment because Nigerian markets are economies unto themselves: see the markets directory for sections, trading days, and product specialisations from Onitsha Main Market to Balogun in Lagos to Wuse in Abuja.
Look up postal & zip codes
NIPOST issues 6-digit postal codes across Nigeria, but the official directory has been historically hard to navigate. Our postal codes section lets you search by 6-digit code, state, area name, or street name. We document the regional prefixes (Lagos = 100, FCT = 900, Rivers = 500, Oyo = 200, Kano = 700, and so on), with state-by-state code tables and per-code detail pages showing the streets, landmarks, and NIPOST office serving each code. The same routes also accept the alias /zip-codes because Nigerians use both terms interchangeably.
Plan transport
Whether you're flying domestic, taking a bus interstate, or finding a danfo stop on the next street, our transport section has you covered. Compare Nigerian airlines — Air Peace, Arik Air, Ibom Air, Dana, Green Africa, Max Air, United Nigeria, Overland, ValueJet, Aero Contractors, and more — by fleet, safety rating, route network, and booking links. Browse flight routes across Nigeria's airports including Lagos (LOS), Abuja (ABV), Port Harcourt (PHC), Kano (KAN), Enugu (ENU), and Calabar (CBQ). For road travel, our motor parks directory lists terminals, operating companies, and typical fares for popular routes like Lagos to Abuja, Lagos to Ibadan, Lagos to Benin, and Abuja to Kaduna.
Hire a service provider
Nigeria's informal services economy is enormous — and finding a verified, trusted provider is harder than it should be. Our services section indexes plumbers, electricians, mechanics, event planners, cleaning companies, photographers, interior designers, solar installers, and dozens more — all filterable by state and area.
Research education
Picking a university is one of the most consequential decisions a young Nigerian will make. Our universities section catalogues federal, state, and private universities — UNILAG, UI, OAU, ABU, UNN, UNIBEN, FUTA, NDU, BUK, and many more — with admission requirements, JAMB cut-offs, tuition ranges, student population, vice-chancellor, accreditation status, and notable alumni. We also document polytechnics, colleges of education, and specialised institutes.
Apply to jobs, find employers
The jobs board aggregates open roles filterable by state, category, work mode (remote/onsite/hybrid), employment type, and experience level. Our employers directory profiles top Nigerian employers — what they do, where they're headquartered, who they hire, and how to apply.
Navigate NYSC
The National Youth Service Corps section documents every orientation camp, every state secretariat, current and upcoming batches, posting timelines, allowances, and corper guides. For first-time corps members, this is invaluable.
Browse property & agents
Our real estate section aggregates rentals, shortlets, and sales across Nigerian cities. The property agents directory lets you find verified agents with reviews and contact information.
Discover government institutions
From immigration offices to passport offices, ministries to LGA secretariats, our institutions directory documents Nigerian government services — addresses, opening hours, services offered, requirements, fees, and processing times. Critical for anyone navigating bureaucratic Nigeria.
Read editorial guides
Our guides section publishes long-form local intelligence — area deep-dives, cost-of-living analyses, neighbourhood comparisons, transport hacks, and Nigerian life how-tos written by people who actually live in the country.
How the data is organised
Underneath the user interface, Locate.ng is built on a structured entity model. We treat each state, LGA, area, area point, business, institution, market, transport node, transport route, transport company, airline, flight route, university, property, property agent, employer, job posting, NYSC camp, NYSC secretariat, NYSC batch, postal code, guide, event, and zone as a first-class entity with its own schema, its own admin tooling, and its own page template. Cross-cutting subsystems — internal-link generation, sitemap publishing, Schema.org JSON-LD output, on-site search indexing, and quality scoring — read from a central entity registry so adding a new domain type takes a single config entry, not a refactor.
This matters because it means our data quality compounds. The same Lagos LGA that anchors a state page also rolls up to a zone page. The same postal code that appears on a street page also appears in the area's quick facts. The same airline that operates a Lagos-Abuja route also surfaces on both city pages. Information lives in one place and propagates everywhere it's relevant. Nigerians searching for "postal code Lekki Phase 1" land on the same canonical answer whether they came from a Google result, an internal link from the Lagos page, or our top-of-page search bar.
SEO & the long tail of Nigerian queries
One of Locate.ng's central design goals is to serve the long tail — the millions of niche, specific, every-day-life queries that Nigerians type into Google and never quite get a satisfying answer for. "Postal code for Allen Avenue Ikeja", "fastest route from Yaba to VI", "best teaching hospital in Calabar", "how to apply for NIN in Asaba", "current Lagos minimum wage 2026", "list of NYSC camps in Borno", "fuel stations along Lagos-Ibadan Expressway", "embassies in Wuse 2 Abuja". Each query deserves a page that answers it directly, with structured data, clear context, and links that let the reader go deeper.
We invest in this by treating SEO as a feature, not an afterthought. Every entity page emits proper meta tags, Open Graph data, Schema.org JSON-LD (with the right @type — Hospital, Mosque, Restaurant, ShoppingCenter, BusStop, Place, AdministrativeArea, depending on what's being described), canonical URLs, and structured breadcrumbs. Every page links to its peers (other areas in the same LGA, other states in the same zone, other branches of the same chain) so search-engine crawlers find their way to deep pages naturally. And every entity has long-form editorial copy — like the 1,000+ word state articles you'll find on every state page — that gives Google something rich to index.
Who Locate.ng is for
The platform serves several audiences simultaneously. Nigerians at home use it for daily life — finding hospitals, comparing schools, planning transport, looking up postal codes for delivery addresses. The diaspora uses it for re-rooting — searching for properties before relocating, briefing themselves on a state before a family visit, navigating NYSC for younger relatives. Businesses use it as a discovery surface — claiming verified listings, reaching customers in specific areas, understanding the competitive landscape. Researchers, journalists, and students use it as a structured reference — every state's economy, demographics, and government in one place. Travellers and visitors use it as a guide — knowing the airport codes, the major hotels, the safety considerations, the cost of living in any neighbourhood.
What's coming next
This is day-one infrastructure. The roadmap from here is deep, not wide. We're expanding the catalogue of area points — every named street, junction, mall, monument, and bus stop across Nigeria's major cities — so granular search ("Sanusi Fafunwa Street", "Maryland Mall", "Ikeja Under Bridge") returns instant, definitive answers. We're growing the business directory with verified, claimable listings backed by a moderation workflow. We're building richer NYSC tooling for corps members, deeper real-estate coverage with map-based search, and a transport-comparison engine that lets you compare bus companies on price, comfort, and safety for any intercity route. The platform's API is being designed for partners — government agencies, civic-tech projects, fintech address-validators, e-commerce checkout flows — to plug into the same canonical Nigerian geography we've already structured.
Get involved
Locate.ng is built for and with Nigerians. If you spot incorrect data, please flag it. If your business isn't listed or your listing needs updating, claim it. If you have local intelligence on a neighbourhood, area, market, or institution that we don't yet cover well — please share it. The directory grows in quality through community contribution, expert curation, and continuous verification.
Start exploring now. Pick a state from the zones index, search for a specific place or postal code in the bar at the top of every page, or browse one of our domain landing pages — restaurants, markets, institutions, airlines, universities, jobs, NYSC, postal codes, guides — and let the platform take you wherever you need to go. Welcome to Locate.ng. Welcome to Nigeria, structured.