Articles / Sending

The real cost of sending a greeting card in Australia

A card from Woolies costs about seven dollars. By the time it lands in someone's letterbox, it has usually cost a good deal more: a stamp, a trip to the post office, the best part of an hour, and a week of hoping it gets there. Here's the whole bill, added up honestly.

Sending7 minute read21 October 2026

The card: what's on the sticker

Most cards at Woolworths, Coles, the newsagent or the chemist sit between about $5 and $9, with an envelope included. Cards from gift shops and independent illustrators tend to be $7 to $10 or more. Musical, oversized and pop-up cards cost more again.

That's the number most of us think of as the cost of a card. It's the smallest part of the job, though. A card on the rack still needs words, an address, a stamp, a postbox and about a week.

The words take longer than you'd think. Writing at the kitchen bench or on the car bonnet, with whatever pen is in the glovebox, is how a card ends up saying "Happy birthday! Love, us". If you'd like to say more, our four-part formula for what to write in a card helps.

Postage: the stamp isn't always $1.85

From 1 September 2026 a regular stamp for a small letter costs $1.85, up from $1.70. Plenty of cards don't count as a small letter, though, and the shop won't tell you which is which.

• Square cards are large letters. A small letter can be at most 130 mm high, so a 150 mm square card doesn't fit. Measure the envelope, not the card.
• Badges, ribbons and pop-ups add thickness. A card with a "40 today" badge is often past 5 mm, which makes it a large letter whatever its size.
• Underpaid cards can come back. If the stamp is short, the card may be returned to you instead of going on to them, and you'll find out after the day has passed.
• You need a stamp on hand. Supermarkets sell stamps in packs, and post offices sell them one at a time, but only during opening hours.

The trip nobody counts

If you're already doing the groceries, picking up a card costs nothing extra. But a card is rarely the only errand, or the only stop. Here's what a dedicated card run usually looks like.

The drive has a price too. The ATO's cents per kilometre rate for 2026–27 is 91 cents, which is meant to cover everything a car costs to run: fuel, servicing, tyres, registration, insurance and depreciation. A 10 kilometre round trip comes to about $9.10. That's more than the card.

Then there's the card that's bought but never posted: the one that sits in the handbag or on the passenger seat until the day has gone. Most people who've bought a card have done this at least once.

The wait, with no tracking

Once it's in the postbox, the card is on its own. Australia Post says regular letters generally take three to seven business days, and letters are now delivered every second business day in most places. Regional and remote addresses can take longer. Weekends and public holidays don't count.

Regular and Priority letters have no tracking. Australia Post's performance standard asks it to deliver 94 per cent of letters on time, which means a few in every hundred can be late without anything having gone wrong. If yours is one of them, you won't know. Nor will you know if it arrived at all, unless they mention it, and you can't really ask "did you get my card?" without it sounding like you're fishing.

When it's running late

Count the business days, and if there aren't enough, you pay to catch up:

• Priority: $3.15 for a small letter, generally two to four business days, still no tracking.
• Express Post: about $9.50 for a small prepaid envelope, next business day within the Express Post network if you post it before the cut-off, and tracked.

Express Post is the only one of the three you can count on for tomorrow, and it more than doubles the bill. Our guide to sending a last-minute greeting card has the cut-offs and the traps, like Friday afternoons.

The whole bill

Here's one birthday card to a capital city address: a supermarket card in the regular post, the same card by Express Post, and a Snailgram.

Snailgram delivers the next business day to most capital city postcodes and in three business days elsewhere, so you pick any day from there.

On cash alone, the supermarket card wins, comfortably. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

The gap gets smaller once you count the 45 minutes. Say your time is worth $40 an hour: the regular post card then costs about $40 to $50 all told, and the Express Post one close to Snailgram's price, or past it. Your hour may be worth more or less than that, and an evening at the shops isn't always a chore. But it's never free.

Which one makes sense

With Snailgram you describe a cover in one sentence and pick from three made only for this card. You write your message exactly as you want it, and a pen writes it inside in real ink. We never edit your words. The envelope, stamp and tracked delivery anywhere in Australia are included, and nothing is added at checkout. Cards ordered before 2pm Sydney time on a business day are posted that day. Our delivery date calculator shows the earliest arrival for any postcode.