How to Find Your Congressional District for the SF-424 Form

The “Congressional District of Applicant” field is just one tiny rectangle on the SF-424 form, but if you get it wrong, it can create complications for your application downstream.

In this field, the grant-making agency expects a code that begins with your state’s two-letter abbreviation and ends with a three-digit district number. A hyphen separates the two parts, like this, “VA-001” [State of Virginia – 1^st Congressional District].

Figuring out your state abbreviation is easy enough, but it is not unusual for applicants to scratch their head when prompted to type in their congressional district.

Getting this field right is an important part of the application because the data will be used by the government to map applications and awards to specific regions of the country.

If you’re at a loss about what to type after your state abbreviation, try the following:

1) Go to House.gov and enter your organization’s zip code under the Find Your Representative heading in the top-right corner of the website.

2) The name of your representative, along with his or her district number, will appear in the results. If a district is described as “at large”, then the congressional district number should be entered “001” on the SF-424 form.

3) In some cases, the results will return two representatives and two congressional districts. This happens when “the information you provided [your zip code] overlaps multiple congressional districts”. You will then be asked to provide your street address, city and state, and then to click the Find Your Rep By Address This additional search will return a single name and a single congressional district.

4) Let’s say your organization is based in Virginia’s 11^th congressional district. When you fill in the required field on the SF-424, you will type “VA-011”.

Note: If you are outside the United States, you should enter “00-000”.