What EDDM Costs a Contractor in 2026, Postage and Printing Included

EDDM Retail postage costs $0.26 per piece in the United States, a rate in effect since July 12, 2026. A 5,000-home drop costs $1,300 in postage. Printing is extra. One online printer quoted $567.17 for 5,000 cards on November 10, 2026, which puts the all-in cost near 37 cents per home.

Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is the US Postal Service program that puts your postcard in every mailbox on the carrier routes you pick. You don’t need a mailing list or a permit. Home service companies use it to reach a whole neighborhood in one go. The postage is a single published price. The rest of the bill is printing and your own time. Then comes the real question: will the calls that come back be worth more than the cards cost? This guide prices a drop for 2026, covers the Canada Post version, and works out how many jobs a mailer has to bring in. The prices come from USPS and Canada Post price lists read on November 10, 2026.

How Much Does EDDM Cost Per Piece in 2026?

EDDM Retail postage is $0.26 per piece. USPS raised it from $0.247 on July 12, 2026, an increase of about 5.3%, and the price list that took effect on October 4, 2026 shows the same rate.

The rate is flat. USPS’s price list, Notice 123, gives one price for EDDM Retail flats up to 3.3 ounces, so a small card and a large one pay the same postage. The EDDM page on usps.com puts it as “currently $0.26 per piece”. Here is what the July change did to a typical order.

Two things shape that bill. First, EDDM Retail has no permit and no yearly fee. The USPS mailing rules say so directly: “There are no annual presort or mailing fees to mail pieces as EDDM-Retail.” Second, you pay for every address on the route, including the homes that will never hire you. USPS says “your mail will be delivered to every address on your selected routes”.

What Does a 5,000-Home EDDM Drop Cost With Printing?

About $1,867, or roughly 37 cents per home, if you print 5,000 cards at an online printer and carry them to the Post Office yourself. Postage is $1,300 of that.

Printing is the part of the bill that moves. As one real example, the public price calculator of an online printer, PrintRunner, showed the prices below on November 10, 2026. They are for a 9 by 6.5 inch card on 14 pt. glossy stock, printed in color on both sides, print only, before shipping and tax. We have no relationship with that printer, and one quote isn’t a market price. Get two or three of your own.

The cost per home drops as the order grows, because the print price per card falls while postage stays at 26 cents. At 1,000 pieces, printing is almost half the bill. At 5,000 it is under a third.

That total leaves out four things:

• Design. USPS offers a free design tool on its EDDM page. A designer costs extra.
• Shipping and tax on the print order.
• Your time. USPS wants the cards in bundles of 50 to 100 with a facing slip on every bundle. For 5,000 cards that is 50 to 100 bundles, plus a trip to the Post Office that serves those routes.
• Full service. Some printers, including the one above, will print, bundle and deliver the mailing for one all-in price. Ask for that price per piece with postage included, so you can compare it with the table.

Is EDDM BMEU Cheaper Than EDDM Retail?

Barely. The lowest commercial EDDM price is $0.259 per piece, one tenth of a cent under Retail, and commercial mailing comes with a yearly fee.

BMEU stands for Business Mail Entry Unit, the bulk mail counter that large mailers use. USPS describes that route as having no volume limit, and says you “Pay with a bulk mailing permit”. Its price list shows three commercial EDDM prices for flats of 4 ounces or less: $0.309 with no entry discount, $0.268 at the entry level it labels DSCF, and $0.259 at the level it labels DDU. The same list shows an annual mailing fee of $390 for USPS Marketing Mail. The mailing rules require that fee at each Post Office where commercial mail is entered, with an exemption for mailers who meet a standard USPS calls full-service.

Do the math on the best case. A tenth of a cent saved on 5,000 pieces is $5. It would take 390,000 pieces in a year to earn back a $390 fee. And with no entry discount, the commercial price is 4.9 cents a piece higher than Retail. For a contractor mailing a few routes at a time, Retail is the cheaper path. BMEU is for mailers who need more than 5,000 pieces in one ZIP Code in a day. Ask your local BMEU which fees would apply to you before you plan around it.

What Size and Quantity Rules Does an EDDM Mailer Have to Meet?

An EDDM Retail piece has to be larger than a normal postcard, weigh no more than 3.3 ounces, and go out 200 to 5,000 pieces per day per ZIP Code.

The USPS mailing rules for EDDM Retail set the size test. A piece qualifies if it is longer than 10-1/2 inches, or taller than 6-1/8 inches, or thicker than 1/4 inch. It only has to pass one of the three. The general rule for flats caps a piece at 15 inches long, 12 inches high and 3/4 inch thick.

• 6.5 by 9 inches: qualifies, because it is taller than 6-1/8 inches. USPS lists it among its most popular EDDM sizes.
• 6 by 11 inches: qualifies, because it is longer than 10-1/2 inches.
• 8.5 by 11 inches: qualifies on both counts.
• 6 by 9 or 4 by 6 inches: does not qualify. Neither side is big enough.

Quantity has a floor and a ceiling. The rules say: “Each mailing must consist of 200 or more pieces or 50 or more pounds of mail up to a maximum of 5000 pieces per day per 5-digit ZIP Code.” The cap is per day, so a larger mailing can go in over several days.

Three more rules catch people out:

• No delivery date. The rules say: “The USPS does not guarantee the delivery of USPS Marketing Mail within a specified time.” Don’t print an offer that expires a week after you drop the cards off.
• No personal touches. An EDDM piece can’t carry personal information or handwritten matter, so skip the handwritten notes.
• No returns. There is no forwarding or return service, so you won’t learn which addresses were vacant.

What Does the Same Mailing Cost in Canada?

Canada Post’s version is called Neighbourhood Mail. It starts at 18.7 cents per piece for a standard-size item up to 50 grams, before tax, on a price sheet that took effect March 23, 2026.

Size works differently in Canada. A Standard piece can be up to 12 inches long and 6 inches wide. Anything wider, up to 12 by 11 inches, is Oversize and costs 2 cents more at the lightest weight. So the 6.5 by 9 inch card that is popular for EDDM is an Oversize piece in Canada. A 6 by 11 inch card qualifies for EDDM in the US and for the Standard price in Canada.

At 5,000 standard pieces the postage is $935 in Canadian dollars, before tax and options. Items over 50 grams need Canada Post’s approval before you drop them off. Canada Post also runs a program called Consumers’ Choice for households that don’t want unaddressed mail, so not every door on a route gets your card.

Two cautions for Canadian contractors. First, an older Canada Post price sheet is still online and still turns up in search. It is dated January 11, 2021 and shows 17.0 cents. Check the effective date on any sheet you find. The current price sheet says March 23, 2026.

Second, flyer delivery stopped during the 2025 labor dispute. In September 2025 Canada Post said customers’ flyers were trapped in its facilities under a union flyer ban, and that it “will not be accepting new Neighbourhood Mail items until it can provide greater certainty”. That risk has eased. On June 1, 2026 Canada Post announced that members of the postal workers’ union had voted to accept new agreements, “which will remain in place until January 31, 2029”. Canada Post usually changes these prices in early January. In 2026 it waited until March 23, pointing to “prolonged labour uncertainty and service disruptions”.

How Many Jobs Does a Mailer Need to Pay for Itself?

Divide the cost of the drop by the profit you keep on one job. At $500 of profit per job, the $1,867 example needs 4 jobs to break even. At $5,000 per job it needs one.

Profit here means what is left after materials and labor, not the invoice total. The last column is the useful one. A contractor who keeps $5,000 on a job needs one sale from 5,000 homes. One who keeps $500 needs four new customers from the same cards.

This guide does not quote a response rate for unaddressed mail, because we did not read a primary source for one. The break-even is the number you can check yourself.

A second test is to compare the spend with search ads. LocaliQ, a marketing company, reported an average cost per lead of $90.92 for home services search ads, based on “over 3,200 search ad campaigns from LocaliQ customers that ran from April 2024 to March 2025”. Roofing and gutters averaged $228.15 a lead. Plumbing averaged $129.02. Those are one vendor’s figures from its own customers, and they are more than a year old, so treat them as a rough yardstick.

At $90.92 a lead, $1,867 would buy between 20 and 21 leads from search ads. So a 5,000-home drop has to bring in about 21 calls or form fills, from roughly 0.4% of the homes, to match that average. At the roofing figure it needs about 8. If your own cost per lead is lower than those, hold the mailer to your number instead.

How Do You Price Your Own EDDM Drop?

Start with the route count, because the route decides the quantity and the quantity decides everything else. Five steps cover it.

1. Count the homes. Open the EDDM Online Tool on usps.com, search your ZIP Code and pick the carrier routes you want. The table shows the address count and the postage for each route.
2. Price the postage. Multiply the address count by $0.26.
3. Get print quotes at that exact quantity. Ask two or three printers, and ask each for the price with and without bundling.
4. Work out your break-even. Add postage and printing, then divide by the profit you keep on one job.
5. Decide how replies will be counted before you print. The phone number and offer code go on the card, so they can’t be added later.

How Do You Tell What a Mailer Brought In?

Give the mailer its own way to respond, so its calls can’t be mixed up with calls from Google or from referrals. Three low-cost ways to do that:

• A phone number used only on the card. A call tracking number forwards to your main line and counts the calls. Our guide to call tracking and SEO covers the setup.
• A QR code and a short web address that open a page made for the mailer. Visits to that page are visits the card caused.
• An offer code printed only on the card. Ask for it when you book the job.

Then count calls, quotes and booked jobs for the next two months and put them beside your break-even. Some people will keep the card and search your business name later instead of using the number on it, so treat the tracked count as a floor.

If the math doesn’t work for mail, the same budget can go toward showing up when a homeowner searches for your trade, which is what our local SEO service works on. Mail also sits beside other offline spending. See what a truck wrap costs and what Nextdoor charges for before you split the budget.

About These Numbers

The US prices come from three editions of USPS’s Notice 123 price list, effective January 18, July 12 and October 4, 2026, plus the EDDM page on usps.com and the Domestic Mail Manual, all read on November 10, 2026. The Canadian prices come from Canada Post’s Neighbourhood Mail price sheet and its Smartmail Marketing customer guide, both effective March 23, 2026. Its small business price guide, updated September 7, 2026, repeats the same prices. The print prices are one printer’s public calculator on one day. Other printers were not priced. Most show prices only inside an order calculator, and one site refused the automated request, so it was left alone. USPS prices are in US dollars and Canada Post prices are in Canadian dollars, with no conversion. Nothing here is a quote. Confirm the postage with your Post Office and the print price with your printer before you order. No company named in this guide paid to be mentioned.

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