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Home > Guides > Christmas deadlines
There is no single Christmas mailing deadline: USPS and Canada Post publish new holiday cutoff dates every fall, and they differ by service and destination. The only reliable move is checking the current year's dates on usps.com or canadapost.ca. That said, mailing early beats paying for express: anything important should go in the first week of December.
| Service tier | Typical cutoff pattern | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ground / economy | Earliest, often early to mid-December | Cheapest and slowest; the first deadline to pass |
| Priority | Mid-December | The middle ground most people use |
| Express | Closest to Christmas | Premium price; runs on a 365-day network |
| International | Much earlier, varies by country | Customs and foreign posts add unpredictable time |
| Military (APO/FPO/DPO) | Earlier than regular domestic | Published as its own separate schedule |
The calendar moves them. Christmas falls on a different weekday each year, which shifts how the cutoff dates land around weekends, and the post offices adjust for their volume forecasts. That's why last year's dates are a rough guide at best: the new schedule comes out each fall, and the current year's page is the only one that counts.
It's also worth knowing what the dates mean. A holiday mailing deadline is the last day to send something for it to arrive by Christmas under normal conditions: it's a planning target, not a guarantee. Weather, volume surges, and local disruptions can still delay mail sent before the cutoff.
The first week of December, for anything that matters. Mail sent in early December travels before the peak crush, when sorting facilities are running at normal capacity. By the second week, volume climbs steeply, and the Monday roughly ten days before Christmas is typically the single busiest mailing day of the year. Anything you send that week is competing with everyone else's.
Greeting cards have more slack than gifts or time-sensitive letters: they're light, they sort easily, and nobody's Christmas is ruined by a card arriving on the 27th. But a letter someone needs before the holiday, like travel documents or a check, should go early enough that a two-day delay doesn't matter.
Yes, and it's cheaper than the alternative. Upgrading to express in the final days costs several times the price of regular mail and still runs into the same weather and the same overloaded last-mile carriers. Early regular mail usually beats late express mail on both price and reliability.
One more practical note: if you're mailing holiday letters through a service like LetterAgent, send them earlier than you would yourself. The letter has to be printed and entered into the mailstream first, so build in that step. Early December for the letter means a relaxed Christmas; December 20th means you're gambling.
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