EDDM Postcard Printing: Sizes, Stock, and 2026 Costs

EDDM postcard printing produces oversized postcards built to qualify for the USPS Every Door Direct Mail program, then bundles and drops them so they reach every address on the carrier routes you pick. Printing runs $0.08 to $0.28 per piece depending on size, stock, and quantity. USPS postage adds $0.260 per piece at the EDDM Retail rate, effective July 12, 2026 per USPS Notice 123. Most campaigns land between $0.34 and $0.54 per piece all in.

Mail Processing Associates prints, bundles, and mails EDDM postcards from one production facility in Lakeland, Florida. One purchase order covers press time, cutting, bundling into the stacks USPS requires, facing slips, postal paperwork, and the drop itself. Most jobs are produced in 3 to 5 business days from approved artwork.

Get pricing for your routes. Call 863-687-6945 or request a quote on EDDM mailing services.

What EDDM Postcard Printing Actually Includes

A finished EDDM job is five separate operations. The quote you compare between vendors should cover all five, because a price that covers only press time looks cheaper and is not.

Press. EDDM postcards print 4-color on both sides on a Xerox Iridesse or Xerox Versant production press. Both run sheets up to 13 x 19 inches, which is what lets a 9 x 12 postcard print with full bleed on a single sheet instead of being tiled and matched.

Cutting and finishing. Postcards are cut to final trim after printing. EDDM sizes are non-standard and trim tolerance matters more here than on a business card. A 6.25 inch height that drifts to 6.10 inches stops qualifying as a flat, and that gets caught at the acceptance window rather than on your desk.

Bundling. USPS requires EDDM pieces banded into stacks with a facing slip on top of each bundle identifying the carrier route. This is manual work, it scales linearly with piece count, and it is where most self-serve EDDM attempts stall.

Paperwork. Every drop needs PS Form 3587 for EDDM Retail, or the equivalent electronic documentation for commercial entry. Route selection, piece count, and postage payment all have to reconcile before a clerk accepts the mailing.

The drop. Bundles go to the post office that serves the routes you selected. A campaign covering eleven routes across four ZIP codes can mean four separate destinations on the same day.

MPA runs all five as one job under one job number. There is no handoff between a printer and a separate mail shop, which is the seam where EDDM campaigns usually lose a week.

EDDM Postcard Sizes That Qualify

EDDM pieces have to be flats, not letters. A piece qualifies as a flat when it exceeds at least one of three thresholds: taller than 6.125 inches, longer than 11.5 inches, or thicker than 0.25 inches. Height is the one that matters for postcards. It also has to stay inside 15 inches long, 12 inches high, 0.75 inches thick, and 3.3 ounces.

That is why a 4 x 6 or 5 x 7 card cannot go EDDM. Neither one is a flat. A 4 x 6 falls inside the USPS postcard maximum of 4.25 x 6 inches and mails at First-Class postcard rates; a 5 x 7 exceeds that maximum, so USPS treats it as a letter and it mails at First-Class letter rates. Either way you are mailing against a purchased list, which is a different product with a different cost structure.

Four sizes cover most of what runs through the plant.

Print costs assume 14pt coated stock at 5,000 pieces and up. Postage is identical across all four sizes, so size only moves the printing half of your cost.

Default to the 6.25 x 9. It carries an offer, a map, and a call to action without crowding, and it is the cheapest qualifying size to both print and handle. Our EDDM postcard size guide covers every USPS-approved dimension, including the ones that fail and why.

Choosing Paper Stock and Finish

Two stocks cover nearly every EDDM job.

14pt coated cover is the standard. It is stiff enough to survive banding, bundling, and a carrier satchel without curling, and it holds ink density well on a digital press. The pricing above assumes it.

16pt coated cover adds noticeable rigidity in the hand. It runs roughly $0.01 to $0.03 more per piece and earns that when the postcard is doing premium positioning work for a dental practice, a med spa, or a custom builder.

Finish is a functional decision, not a cosmetic one.

• Gloss makes photography pop. It is the right call for food, real estate exteriors, and before-and-after imagery.
• Matte kills glare and is easier to read when the piece carries a lot of copy. It also takes pen ink, which matters if you want someone writing an appointment time on it.
• Uncoated reads as civic or handwritten and can lift response for local service businesses, but photographs go flat on it.

The Iridesse runs specialty dry inks including white, metallic gold, metallic silver, and clear. On a saturation mailing where every household on the route receives the same piece, a metallic accent is one of the few ways to break out of the stack without moving up a size and paying for it in print cost.

Not sure which stock fits your offer? Ask for a free sample kit and compare 14pt gloss, 16pt matte, and uncoated side by side before you commit a run to it.

EDDM Formats Beyond the Flat Postcard

The EDDM program accepts any piece that mails as a flat, which makes the postcard the most common choice rather than the only one. The same route selection, bundling, and drop process covers several other formats.

Folded self-mailers. A sheet folded down to a qualifying flat size gives you four or six panels instead of two. Restaurants use them for menus, home service companies for seasonal checklists, and clinics for service lists that will not fit on a postcard back. The piece needs a tab or wafer seal to stay closed in the mail stream.

Brochures. A tri-fold or half-fold brochure that finishes above 6.125 inches in height qualifies exactly the way a postcard does. The constraint is the one that governs every EDDM piece: it has to finish as a flat, not a letter.

Booklets and menus. Multi-page pieces qualify as long as they stay inside 0.75 inches thick and 3.3 ounces. Weight is the practical ceiling. A saddle-stitched booklet on heavy stock crosses 3.3 ounces faster than most people expect, and a piece over that weight no longer mails at the EDDM Retail flat rate.

Door hangers do not qualify. EDDM moves through the postal stream on carrier routes, so a piece designed to hang on a doorknob is not a mailing at all and cannot ride the EDDM program.

Folded and bound formats add a bindery pass after press, so they are quoted per job rather than off a size chart. Postage does not change: every qualifying flat mails at the same EDDM rate regardless of format, which makes format selection a printing decision rather than a postage one.

What EDDM Postcard Printing Costs in 2026

Total cost is printing plus postage.

Postage

Both rates are effective July 12, 2026 per USPS Notice 123. EDDM Retail is the counter-drop option any business can use with a free USPS Business account. EDDM BMEU requires a permit and is what a mail service provider uses. MPA presorts in-house and inducts its own mail on our permit.

The tenth-of-a-cent spread is not the reason to use commercial entry. The reason is the cap. A 22,000-piece drop concentrated in three ZIP codes cannot clear retail in one day, and splitting it across days fractures the in-home window that makes a saturation offer work.

All-in per piece

These totals use the raw USPS postage rate of $0.260 per piece. If you would rather budget postage and drop logistics as a single line, plan $0.26 to $0.31 per piece instead.

Tighten these numbers once routes and quantities are locked.

Three things move the printing number inside those ranges: quantity, stock, and proof rounds. Quantity is the dominant lever. Setup cost is the same on 2,500 pieces as on 25,000, so per-piece cost falls steeply through about 10,000 pieces and then flattens out.

Design is priced separately. Print-ready artwork carries no design charge. A piece that needs to be built is a one-time cost that does not repeat on reprints, which matters if you plan to run the same offer quarterly.

For the full postage picture, including nonprofit authorization and what changed in July 2026, see our EDDM postage rates guide.

Picking Routes Before You Pick a Quantity

Quantity is an output of route selection, not an input. Carrier routes come in whatever size USPS drew them, typically 300 to 800 deliverable addresses, and you buy whole routes. You cannot mail half of one.

That has two practical consequences. First, your quantity will be a strange number like 4,730 rather than a round 5,000, and any vendor quoting you a flat "5,000 piece package" is either rounding up and charging you for pieces that go in a recycling bin, or rounding down and leaving households uncovered.

Second, route geography beats route count. Eleven routes clustered around one intersection outperform eleven routes scattered across a county, because saturation works through repetition and local word of mouth. A customer who sees your postcard and then hears a neighbor mention the same offer arrives warmer than one who saw it alone.

Two filters are worth applying before you commit. Residential versus business counts matter if your offer only makes sense for one of them. Drive time from your location matters for any service where someone has to physically come to you, and as a rule of thumb a 12-minute drive time is a more useful boundary than a mileage radius.

The free EDDM route planner shows household counts per route so you can lock quantities before artwork is finalized.

How Long EDDM Postcard Printing Takes

Most EDDM jobs are produced in 3 to 5 business days from approved artwork. That covers press, cutting, bundling, paperwork, and the drop.

Build the calendar backward from the date you want mail in homes, not forward from the day you send a file.

1. File to proof: same day or next. We preflight the file and return a PDF proof. Running your own file through our free preflight tool first usually saves a round.
2. Proof approval: yours. This is the step that slips. A proof sitting in an inbox over a weekend costs two days that nobody planned for.
3. Production: 3 to 5 business days. Press, finishing, bundling, documentation.
4. USPS delivery: 2 to 5 business days after the drop. EDDM moves at Marketing Mail speed. Carriers work it into normal route delivery rather than treating it as priority volume.

A comfortable plan is about two weeks from final file to mailbox. Seasonal windows compress nothing on the USPS side, so a piece that has to land the week before Thanksgiving needs to be in production during the first week of November.

File Setup for EDDM Postcards

EDDM postcards carry one design constraint that ordinary postcards do not: the indicia and address area is fixed and non-negotiable.

The mailing panel. The address side needs a clear area in the upper right for the EDDM Retail indicia and the "Local Postal Customer" endorsement. Nothing else prints in that zone. On a 6.25 x 9 that is a meaningful share of the back panel, and designers new to EDDM routinely lose a headline to it on the first proof.

Bleed and trim. Build files with 0.125 inch bleed on all four sides and hold live copy 0.1875 inches inside the trim. EDDM trims are non-standard, so a file built to exact trim size with no bleed will show white slivers after cutting.

Resolution and color. 300 DPI at final size, CMYK. RGB files do convert, but conversion is where reds go muddy and corporate blues shift. Supplying CMYK means you see on the proof what comes off the press.

Format. Press-ready PDF with fonts embedded or outlined. One file per side, or a single two-page file.

Artwork that misses any of these gets flagged before it prints rather than after. The preflight report names the specific problem and the fix rather than returning a generic rejection.

Why Print EDDM Postcards With MPA

Most EDDM quotes come from one of two places: a web-to-print storefront that prints and ships a box to your door, or a local printer who prints and then hands the postal side back to you. Both leave the hardest part on your desk.

One facility, one job number. Printing, cutting, bundling, facing slips, paperwork, and the post office drop happen under one roof in Lakeland. No coordination between vendors, no gap where a job waits.

We hold the permit. MPA presorts in-house and inducts mail directly at the BMEU on our own permit. You do not need to open a permit of your own, and a campaign larger than the retail daily cap does not have to be split across days.

Bundling is included. Banding pieces into stacks with a facing slip per route is the step that turns a cheap online print order into a Saturday at a folding table.

Real proofing. Every job gets a PDF proof, and a printed sample on the actual stock on request, before the run.

35 years of doing it. MPA has produced print and mail since 1989, serving more than 700 lifetime business customers across all 50 states from a single Lakeland facility, with 5.0 stars across 100+ verified Google reviews.

EDDM postcard printing is a modest line on a marketing budget and a large one on a Saturday afternoon. Buying it as a finished service rather than a printed product is worth the difference almost entirely because of the four operations that happen after the ink dries.

Get a quote. Call 863-687-6945 or start with the EDDM route planner to see what your area costs.

Official reference: program rules and eligibility for Every Door Direct Mail are published by USPS at usps.com.