Card Stock, Printing, and Postage: What a Postcard Actually Costs

This is the third post in our series on the physical postcard. We have covered layout and word count and pens and legibility. This week is the money: what the card has to be, what it costs to print, what it costs to mail, and a worksheet you can fill in for your own program.

Most budget surprises in postcard programs come from two places. Someone ordered a card that does not qualify for the postcard rate, or someone budgeted for stamps and cards and forgot everything else. Both are easy to avoid in July and painful to discover in October.

What USPS calls a postcard

The postcard price applies only to cards that meet the rules in the Domestic Mail Manual. A card must be at least 3.5 by 5 inches and no more than 4.25 by 6 inches. It must be between 0.007 and 0.016 inch thick. It must be rectangular.

Thickness matters more than people expect. Too thin and the card jams in the sorter. Too thick and it is a letter. Printers usually express thickness in “points,” and 14-point stock is a common choice that lands inside the range. If you are buying from a paper supplier rather than a printer, ask for the caliper in inches and check it yourself.

Anything bigger than 4.25 by 6 is charged at the letter rate. That includes the 5x7 card that looks so nice in the proof. Stick with 4x6.

What a stamp costs

As of July 12, 2026, a First-Class postcard stamp is $0.65 and a one-ounce letter stamp is $0.82, per the USPS announcement. That was the sixth increase in five years, so confirm the figure on USPS’s price page right before you buy. Postcard stamps are sold without a printed value and stay valid at the current postcard rate, so stamps you buy in July are fine in October.

Every cycle someone asks whether we can use the cheaper presort or Marketing Mail rates. No. Those rates require a mailing permit, a minimum volume, uniform pieces, addresses sorted and barcoded by ZIP code, and drop-off at a business mail entry unit. A pile of handwritten cards, each with its own stamp, written by 150 volunteers in three cities, does not qualify and cannot be made to. The full postcard rate is the price of the handwriting. Budget for it.

Three ways to get cards

Print-on-demand. Online printers will print a custom front and a blank or templated back and ship them in about a week. The unit price drops quickly with volume. Pick 14-point stock with an uncoated back so the ink from last week’s pens dries properly. Get two or three quotes; the spread between vendors is wide.

A local print shop. Often a little more per card at small volumes, often cheaper at large ones, and you can hold a sample before you commit to 5,000. A good shop will also tell you whether your stock is inside the USPS thickness range.

Blank stock. Plain white or kraft 4x6 cards, no printing. Cheapest option, and as we argued in the first post, a plain card with a handwritten message reads as more personal, not less. You give up the printed layout guide on the message side. Hand volunteers a sample card to copy instead.

Whichever you choose, order 10 percent more than your target. Cards get ruined, volunteers make mistakes, and a reorder in October takes too long.

The per-piece worksheet

Four lines. Fill them in with your own quotes.

1. Card. Printed or blank, per piece, including shipping to you.
2. Stamp. $0.65 today. Check the price.
3. Supplies and distribution. Pens, rubber bands, the envelopes or boxes you use to ship packets of cards and stamps to remote volunteers, and the postage on those packets. Divide the total by the number of cards.
4. List. Whatever you pay for voter data, divided by the number of cards. Some programs get their list free through a coalition partner or state party. If so, this line is zero, but write it down anyway so you remember it was a gift.

Add the four lines. That is your cost per postcard. Multiply by your target, then add the 10 percent overage on the card line.

Here is a worked example for a 5,000-card program with 100 volunteers, 40 of them remote. These are planning numbers, not quotes. Get your own.

Line	Per piece	5,000 cards
Card (printed, 14 pt, 5,500 ordered)	$0.13	$715
Stamp	$0.65	$3,250
Supplies and distribution	$0.12	$600
List	$0.05	$250
Total	$0.95	$4,815

Notice where the money is. The stamp is two-thirds of the cost, and it is the one line you cannot negotiate. The card is the line everyone argues about, and it is less than a sixth. Three cents more per card for nicer stock is a $150 decision. Switching to a 5x7 and paying the letter rate is an $850 decision. Forgetting the distribution line is a $600 surprise in September.

That distribution line is the one most programs miss. If 40 remote volunteers each get a packet of 50 cards, 50 stamps, and a pen, you are shipping 40 padded envelopes with real postage on each. Put it in the budget now.

What to do this week

Get two printer quotes and one local shop quote on a 4x6, 14-point, uncoated-back card. Check the postcard price on USPS’s site. Count your remote volunteers and price one packet. Fill in the worksheet. Under a dollar per piece is the normal range. Well over it, and the card line is almost certainly the problem.

Next week, the last post in the series: when to mail so the card lands when it should.