How Much Is a Stamp in 2026? 82 Cents and Rising

A stamp costs 82 cents. That's the First-Class Forever stamp rate as of July 12, 2026 — four cents more than the 78 cents it had been since July 2025. Here's every other rate that moved, and the weight thresholds where a single stamp quietly stops being enough.

Every USPS Rate That Changed on July 12, 2026

USPS skipped a January increase for the second year running, then raised prices about 4.8% across mailing services in the middle of July. Five consumer-facing rates moved:

That last row matters more than it looks. Because the additional-ounce rate held steady, every letter — one ounce or three — went up by the same four cents. A three-ounce letter rose from $1.36 to $1.40, not from $1.36 to something worse. USPS has now left the additional-ounce price alone through two consecutive rate changes.

The metered rate is the one most people never notice. Print postage at home through Click-N-Ship or a service like Stamps.com and you pay $0.78 instead of $0.82 — a four-cent discount that works out to $4 per hundred pieces. If you mail invoices or statements in any volume, that's the cheapest optimization available and it requires nothing but a printer.

What It Actually Costs to Mail a Letter

Rates are per ounce, rounded up to the whole ounce. The first ounce is the Forever stamp; every ounce after adds $0.29. Here's the full picture, including what you overpay if Forever stamps are all you've got in the drawer:

Look down that right-hand column. The Forever-only penalty runs from 17 cents to 77 cents per piece, and it exists purely because most households only stock one kind of stamp. A book of additional-ounce stamps costs the same per stamp as its face value and eliminates the problem entirely. Our postage stamp cost calculator will tell you the exact combination for any weight, and shows the Forever-only fallback side by side so you can see what the shortcut costs.

The 3.5-Ounce Cliff Nobody Warns You About

Letters top out at 3.5 ounces. Cross that line by a tenth of an ounce and USPS stops pricing your mail as a letter and starts pricing it as a large envelope, or "flat." The first ounce jumps from $0.82 to $1.69 — an 87-cent penalty for one extra sheet of paper.

Three things trigger the reclassification, and only one of them is weight:

• Weight over 3.5 oz. Roughly 16 sheets of standard 20 lb paper plus a #10 envelope. Wedding invitation suites blow past this constantly.
• Longer than 11.5 inches or taller than 6.125 inches. A 9×12 or 10×13 envelope is a flat by definition, no matter how light. Even an empty one.
• Thicker than a quarter inch, or rigid. Slide a pen, a key, or a stack of photos into a letter envelope and it stops being a letter.

The 6×9 envelope sits right on the boundary and it's where most of the confusion lives. A thin, bendable 6×9 under 3.5 ounces mails as an ordinary letter for one Forever stamp. Stuff it until it's rigid and the same envelope costs $1.69. We built a dedicated 6x9 envelope postage calculator for exactly this call, because the difference between the two answers is more than double.

Flats have their own ceiling at 13 ounces. Past that, USPS reprices your envelope as a package and stamps stop being practical — you want a printed label, Ground Advantage or Priority Mail, and a tracking number. Our USPS shipping calculator covers that side of the line, and the USPS delivery time calculator tells you whether the cheaper class actually arrives in time.

Why Your Square Wedding Invitation Costs $1.31

USPS sorting machines want a rectangle, flexible, uniformly thick, between 3.5 and 6.125 inches tall. Anything else gets pulled out and handled by a person, and USPS charges $0.49 for the privilege. That's the non-machinable surcharge, and it turns an 82-cent card into a $1.31 card.

What sets it off, in rough order of how often it catches people:

• Square envelopes. The classic wedding and baby-shower shape. Machines can't determine orientation on a square, so every single one gets surcharged.
• Clasps, buttons, string ties, or wax seals. Anything that makes the envelope lumpy or won't survive a roller.
• Rigid contents. Gift cards, USB drives, keys, hard plastic.
• Envelopes taller than 6.125 inches that are still short enough to count as a letter.

Run the arithmetic on a wedding. A hundred square invitations at $1.31 is $131 in postage. The same suite in a rectangular A7 envelope, kept under an ounce, is $82. That's $49 for choosing a shape — and if the suite also tips past one ounce, add another $29 for the second-ounce stamps. Couples routinely discover this at the counter after the invitations are already addressed.

One more trap: the surcharge applies per piece, and it applies to reply envelopes too. If you tuck a square RSVP card into a square return envelope with a stamp on it, you owe the surcharge twice.

Stamp Prices Since 2019: Up 49% in Seven Years

The 82-cent stamp is easier to judge with some history behind it. USPS moved to a schedule of twice-yearly reviews in 2021 and has raised the First-Class rate nine times since 2019:

Is Stockpiling Stamps Before an Increase Actually Worth It?

This gets repeated every rate cycle as if it were a clever trade, so let's put a number on it. Forever stamps genuinely do hold their value — a stamp bought at any price covers the current one-ounce rate forever. So the arbitrage is real. It's just small.

A roll of 100 bought at $0.78 on July 11 is worth $82 today. You made $4.00, or 5.1%, by spending $78 about a day early. Two rolls, $8. Ten rolls — 1,000 stamps, which is more than most households use in a decade — gets you $40 on a $780 outlay.

Two things temper it. First, the gain only exists if you were going to mail those letters anyway; otherwise you've converted spendable cash into a voucher redeemable at one merchant. Second, USPS announces changes roughly 45 days ahead through the Postal Regulatory Commission, so there's no information advantage to gain — everyone gets the same warning.

Our honest read: buy a roll if you mail steadily and you happen to see the announcement. Don't reorganize your finances around it, and don't buy stamps you won't use. At 5% per cycle, stamps are a decent hedge against postal inflation and a poor substitute for a savings account.

Mailing Abroad: One Stamp, Any Country

The Global Forever stamp costs $1.75 and covers a one-ounce letter to any country on earth — same price to Canada as to Japan. It works the same way as a domestic Forever stamp: buy it now, use it after the next increase, no topping up.

If you only have domestic Forever stamps, you need three ($2.46) to clear the $1.75 rate, overpaying $0.71 — about 41%. Two won't do it. For a single letter that's a nuisance; for a stack of holiday cards going overseas it's real money, and Global Forever stamps are sold in books of ten at every post office.

Past one ounce, international pricing stops being simple. Rates move to country groups and weight bands, and the spread between destinations gets wide. USPS publishes the live figures at postcalc.usps.com, which is the right tool for anything heavier than a letter.

When Stamps Stop Making Sense

Somewhere between a letter and a parcel, sticking stamps on things becomes the expensive option. Stamps buy you postage and nothing else — no tracking, no insurance, no delivery confirmation. Once your mail is heavy enough to need a label, Priority Mail Flat Rate is usually the comparison to run:

Note the jump from a 13-ounce flat at $5-ish to a Flat Rate Envelope at $12.90. That gap is why the 13-ounce threshold matters so much: a 12-ounce large envelope and a 14-ounce one can differ by seven dollars. And Flat Rate containers rose far more sharply than letter postage this cycle, so the old rules of thumb about when Flat Rate wins have shifted — the break-evens now sit several pounds higher than they did in 2025. Our USPS Flat Rate calculator works out whether the box beats weight-based pricing for your exact package and destination zone.

For everything at letter and flat weight, the USPS postage calculator handles the whole decision — weight, shape, class, and how many stamps of each type to buy. It runs on the July 2026 rates in this article.

Full official pricing lives in USPS Notice 123, and the rate change itself was announced in the April 2026 USPS newsroom release.