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Home > Guides > Mailing to military APO addresses
Mail your letter exactly like domestic US mail. Use the service member's full name, their unit and box number, then "APO," "FPO," or "DPO" with the two-letter region code (AE, AP, or AA) and the ZIP code, and never write the host country's name anywhere on the envelope. A first-class stamp covers it; letters need no customs forms.
APO (Army/Air Force Post Office), FPO (Fleet Post Office, for Navy/Marines), and DPO (Diplomatic Post Office) addresses follow one fixed pattern. The last line is always the same shape: the designator, the region code, and a US ZIP code. The region code tells the military postal system which part of the world the mail is headed to: AE for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Canada; AP for the Pacific; AA for the Americas.
| Line | Example |
|---|---|
| Full name (rank optional) | SGT Jane Smith |
| Unit and box number | Unit 45013, Box 2324 |
| Designator + region + ZIP | APO AE 09128 |
Get the address from the service member themselves: unit designations change when people move, and a wrong unit number is the most common reason military mail goes astray. Copy it character for character.
This is the rule people break most often, usually trying to be helpful. Writing "Germany" or "Japan" on the envelope pulls the letter out of the military mail stream and into the foreign country's postal system, where the APO address means nothing and delivery stalls or fails. The whole point of the APO system is that the military handles the overseas leg itself after USPS hands the mail over stateside. Leave the country off and the system works as designed.
Yes: that's the part that surprises people. You pay ordinary domestic US postage, not international rates. A single first-class stamp sends a standard letter to a base in Germany or a ship in the Pacific for the same postage as a letter across town. Drop it in any mailbox or hand it to any post office; no special counter, no international forms. Letters are the simple case here: customs declarations are a packages thing, so plain correspondence sails through with none of that paperwork.
One caveat on timing. The domestic leg is fast, but the military leg (transport to the overseas post office and onward to the unit) adds time, and how much depends on where the recipient is and what's happening there. During deployments or in remote postings, delivery can take noticeably longer than stateside mail. There are no guaranteed timeframes, so send anything time-sensitive early.
Canada runs a parallel system for its deployed forces through Canada Post, with its own addressing conventions: if you're writing to a Canadian Forces member, get the exact address format from them or from the Canadian Armed Forces' published guidance, since it differs from the US APO pattern above. The same principle applies: use the military addressing system as given, and don't improvise with the host country's postal format.
Yes. Because APO/FPO/DPO mail is domestic US mail, it's handled like any US destination: give your assistant the recipient's full name, unit and box number, and the APO/FPO/DPO + region + ZIP line exactly as the service member provided it. Note the no-country-name rule applies to what you dictate too: don't add "Germany" to the address out of habit.
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