What It Actually Costs to Send 250 Business Holiday Cards in 2026

Three numbers, up front. 250 business holiday cards, ordered this week:

• Plain, mailed by you — $675.73, or $2.70 a card
• The usual upgrades, still mailed by you — $1,165.82, or $4.66 a card
• Handed over entirely, addressed and mailed from here — $1,745.83, or $6.98 a card

Everything below is how those numbers get built, line by line, with nothing left off the bottom.

Almost nobody in this trade publishes this, and I understand why. Every line item you put in a public table is a line item a customer can argue with. But the alternative is what the category does now, which is quote a per-card price that covers the card and not the mailing, and let you find the rest at checkout.

The card itself

Three tiers, 250 cards, envelopes included:

Envelopes are in that price. So is printing your name and your message inside — the imprint is free, and anyone charging you for it is charging you for typing.

The 25% is the early-order tier and it runs through October 15. After that it is 20% to November 16, then 10% to December 11. The discount comes off the cards. Add-ons and shipping are at list, so the savings do not compound the way people sometimes assume.

The add-ons, at the quantity you are actually ordering

This is where a published per-card price stops telling the truth. Three of these are priced per 100, which means they scale with your order. Quoted as a flat fee, they understate your bill by a multiple.

Read the addressing line twice. $75 per 100 is $187.50 at 250, not $75. Mailing at 250 is $875, not $350. I have seen both quoted as flat fees, and I do not think it is always deliberate, but the customer pays for the mistake either way.

The logo is two separate setups, card and envelope, at $30 each. Most people put it on the card and leave the envelope alone, which is why the columns further down are built that way. We published it as a single $30 for a while and that was wrong, so I am not going to pretend the trade is immune to its own bad habits.

Postage, and the 49 cents nobody sees coming

A First-Class stamp is $0.82 for a one-ounce letter — USPS Notice 123, effective July 12, 2026. A business holiday card in its envelope comes in under an ounce, so one stamp does it. At 250 that is $205.00.

Then there is the surcharge, and this is the one I would most like you to take away from this page. USPS adds $0.49 per piece to a nonmachinable letter. The rule that catches card mailers is the first one on the list: a letter with an aspect ratio — length divided by height — of less than 1.3 or more than 2.5 is nonmachinable, under Domestic Mail Manual 101.1.2.

A square envelope has an aspect ratio of 1.0.

So the square card you fell in love with is $205.00 of stamps plus $122.50 of surcharge. $327.50. That is a 60% postage decision made at the design stage, by somebody who was thinking about the artwork.

Rigidity is on that list too, and so is any envelope whose outside surface is not paper. Send the square one if you want it — it is a good look and it stands out in the stack. Just put the real postage in the budget before you commit to it, rather than after.

The two all-in numbers, and the third option

Square envelope, add $122.50 to the postage line in either column.

Then there is the third option, which is handing the whole thing over. Start from the right-hand column above and swap four lines:

The self-seal envelopes come off because the only reason to buy them at $24 per 100 is that somebody is sealing 250 envelopes by hand, and in this version it is not going to be you. The shipping comes off because the cards never travel to your desk — they go straight into the mail from here.

Which makes the hand-off a cleaner decision than it looks. Addressing sits on both sides, so ignore it and compare the rest. Mailing service: $875.00, postage inside. Doing it yourself: $205.00 of stamps plus $29.99 to get the box to your desk, so $234.99. The gap is $640.01.

That is the real price of not touching the job again. Some years it is obviously worth it. Most years it is not, and the reason it is not is the next section.

The line item that is not on any quote

Signing 250 cards by hand is an evening and part of another one. I have watched people underestimate that every year for 40 years, and it is the single most common reason a card mailing goes out late.

It is also the only line on this page you cannot delete without deleting the reason you are sending. A printed signature on a card to your own client book is worse than no card, because it tells the person they were on a list. Not that they were thought about. On a list.

Which is the honest catch in that $640.01. We can address them, seal them, stamp them and mail them. What we cannot do is sign them, and the signature is the part that works. Hand off the logistics, keep the pen.

So budget the evening the way you budget the postage. First week of November, cards already on your desk, and it stops being a problem.

What it comes to

$2.70 a card at the plain end. $6.98 with the whole job handed over. Most people land in the middle, around $4.66.

A card on its own does not retain a client. It is one touchpoint in a program, and it is the cheapest line in that program by a wide margin. Hold it against the other number — replacing a client you lost, with advertising, time and conversion, starts at a few hundred dollars in every professional service I have ever printed for. Even at the expensive end of this page the floor of that ratio is 50 to 1, and your real ratio is better than the floor.

That is the whole case for the mailing, and it does not need a better number than the true one.

One last thing, since it is the question behind the question. Nobody sends 250 cards because cards are cheap. They send them because a card stays up on the wall, above the desk, in the room where somebody decides who to call next year.

The $675.73 buys the paper. The evening in November buys the rest.