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. USPS postage is $0.260 per piece at the EDDM Retail rate, effective July 12, 2026 per USPS Notice 123. A typical 5,000-piece 6.25 x 9 campaign runs about $0.49 per piece all-in (postage, printing, and mail prep), and most campaigns land between $0.45 and $0.57 per piece all-in.

Mail Processing Associates prints, bundles, and mails EDDM postcards from one production facility in Lakeland, Florida, and 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 oversized sheets, 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; the larger sizes and folded formats are quoted per job. Every job is priced in an itemized written quote that separates printing, data, mail services and postage. Postage is identical across all four sizes, so size only moves the printing side 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 costs a little 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. 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 postage, printing, and mail prep.

Postage

Both rates are effective July 12, 2026 per USPS Notice 123. EDDM Retail needs no permit: any business can drop at the post office counter with a free USPS Business account. EDDM BMEU entry requires a mailing permit and is what a mail service provider uses. MPA enters EDDM at the BMEU on its own permit, so you do not need one.

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

A typical 5,000-piece 6.25 x 9 campaign runs about $0.49 per piece all-in (postage, printing, and mail prep), or about $2,425 to $2,625 total. Most campaigns land between $0.45 and $0.57 per piece all-in. Every job is priced in an itemized written quote that separates printing, data, mail services and postage. Request one through EDDM mailing services with the routes you have in mind.

Three things move the printing line, and with it where a job lands in that range: quantity, stock, and proof rounds. Quantity is the dominant lever.

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 it is usually 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.

The Minimum for EDDM Postcard Printing

The floor is one full carrier route (or 200 pieces). EDDM is sold by the route, so the smallest real order is whichever single route you pick. The pricing above assumes 5,000 pieces and up because that is where most saturation campaigns land, but a single-route mailer is not priced out of EDDM postcard printing. It prices differently.

Postage does not move with quantity. EDDM Retail postage is $0.260 per piece at any quantity. What changes on a short run is the print side: setup, proofing, and cutting are fixed costs spread across fewer pieces, so per-piece print cost rises as the run shrinks while the postage line stays flat.

That is why the useful question is rarely "what is the minimum" and almost always "what does my route actually cost." A route with 420 addresses and a route with 780 addresses are both one route and both valid orders, but they are different invoices. Because you buy whole routes, your quantity is settled before your price is.

If you only need printed cards and plan to hand them out rather than mail them, print-only starts at 250 pieces and skips the postal side entirely. For EDDM postcard printing, ask for a quote on the specific routes you want rather than on a quantity you guessed at.

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: 3 to 14 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 two to four weeks from final file to mailbox. Seasonal windows compress nothing on the USPS side, so plan a holiday drop on the four-week end of that range.

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. EDDM Retail needs no permit, but a drop larger than the retail daily cap has to enter through the BMEU on a mailing permit. MPA holds one and enters your mailing on it, so you do not need to open your own and the campaign 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. 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.