Business envelope design and addressing guidelines

If you're designing business envelopes – whether standard, large or image-printed – it's important to follow placement and sizing rules. This ensures your mail can be read by our automated processing systems without delays.

Use these guidelines to correctly place your logo, return address and destination address while maintaining required clear zones for machine scanning.

Envelope design guidelines

Applies to plain and image-printed envelopes.

Standard envelope guidelines

  1. Envelope size

    • Length: 140–245 mm
    • Height: 90–156 mm
    • Sender’s address zone Max height: 35 mm
    • Addressing zone Write the recipient’s address and postal code within the centre area
    • Machine coding area Keep a clear margin of at least 10 mm on both sides and at the bottom
    Envelope graphic illustrating envelope size, sender’s address zone, addressing zone and machine coding area.

    Graphic placement guidelines

    1. Envelope size

      • Length: 140–245 mm
      • Height: 90–156 mm
      • Sender’s address zone Max height: 35 mm
      • Graphic area Logos and other graphics must remain outside the addressing zone
      • Addressing zone Write the recipient’s address and postal code within the centre area
      • Machine coding area Keep a clear margin of at least 10 mm on the right side and at the bottom of the envelope
      Envelope graphic illustrating envelope size, sender’s address zone, graphic placement area, addressing zone and machine coding area.

      On a large envelope

      1. Envelope size

        • Max length: 380 mm
        • Max height: 270 mm
      2. Sender’s address zone Max height: 35 mm
      3. Addressing zone Place the recipient’s address and postal code clearly in the center area
      4. Machine coding area
        • Leave a 10 mm clear margin on both sides
        • Bottom margin: 50 mm
      Large envelope graphic illustrating envelope size, sender’s address zone, addressing zone and machine coding area.

      Addressing guidelines

      • General guidelines
        • Write in uppercase letters (block letters)
        • Don’t use the # symbol
      • Street address guidelines
      • Municipality, province and postal code guidelines
        • The municipality, province and postal code
        • Put the city, province and postal code on the same line
        • Put 1 space between the city and province and 2 spaces between the province and the postal code
        • Use abbreviations for the province
        • Separate the first and last 3 elements of the postal code with a space, don’t use hyphens in the postal code

      Addressing formats

      Find illustrated examples, detailed explanations and helpful tools for correctly formatting addresses:

      Examples of other address types

      Symbols and abbreviations

      Keep your addresses short enough to stay within machineable guidelines by using abbreviations. Find the Canada Post approved short forms for: