sendletterSend a letterMailing a letter to Canada
Canadian addresses have a strict shape, and almost every country's own conventions break it in a specific way — the order of the lines, where the postal code sits, whether the house number comes before or after the street. These guides show the conversion for your country, in your language.
Getting it right matters more than usual. A letter posted inside Canada with a foreign return address cannot be returnedif the Canadian address is wrong — no international return postage was ever paid, and under Canada Post's own rules the item is opened and destroyed if it has no obvious value. No notification is sent.
The Canadian address format
Every guide below converts your country's conventions into this shape:
- Postal code last, on the city line, after the province. Format is letter-digit-letter, space, digit-letter-digit. Canada Post sorts on this before anything else, so a wrong one is worse than a missing house number.
- Province as a two-letter code — QC, ON, BC, AB, NS. Never spelled out.
- Unit number first, joined to the street number with a hyphen:
4-123 Main St, not123 Main St Apt 4. - Latin script only. Canadian sorting machinery cannot read any other writing system. The letter inside can be in any language you like.
- Country on its own final line, in capitals, when posting from outside Canada.
A note on customs
Documents — plain paper correspondence — need no customs declaration. Anything with an object in it does, however small, and an undeclared item is a common reason inbound mail stalls. A card with something tucked inside is a parcel wearing an envelope. This does not apply when we print inside Canada: nothing crosses a border.
Choose your country
Don't see your country? The format above applies wherever you write from — only the conversion from your own local habits differs. We deliver to Canadian addresses only; sending addresses can be anywhere in the world.