How to Mail a Letter to Canada From Abroad

You have two options: post it internationally from where you are, or use a service that prints it inside Canada and mails it at the domestic rate. Either way, the thing most likely to go wrong is the address format — Canadian addresses have conventions that differ from US and European ones, and Canada Post sorts on the part people most often get wrong.

The Canadian address format

JANE DOE
123 MAIN ST NW
MONTREAL QC  H3Z 2Y7
CANADA

The rules that actually matter:

• Postal code last, on the city line. Format is letter-digit-letter, space, digit-letter-digit — H3Z 2Y7. Canada Post sorts on this before anything else. Two spaces before it is the official convention; one is fine in practice, but a missing or wrong code is not.
• Province as a two-letter code.QC, ON, BC, AB, NS. Write out “Quebec” and you are relying on a human to intervene.
• Country on its own final line, in capitals, only when mailing from outside Canada.
• Apartment or unit goes first on the street line — write 4-123 Main St, not 123 Main St Apt 4.
• No punctuationand no commas between city and province. Canada Post's preferred style is uppercase throughout, though mixed case is accepted.

What international postage costs

Inbound international mail is priced by the sending country's postal service, not Canada Post, so there is no single figure. It is generally several times the Canadian domestic rate, and transit adds a week or more on top of the three to seven business days a letter takes once it is inside the Canadian system.

Printing inside Canada instead

If the letter is a document rather than a physical object — a signed form, a notice, a cover letter — you do not need to physically move paper across a border at all. Sending the file to a service that prints in Canada means it enters the mail stream as domestic mail: cheaper postage, and no international transit leg.

This is the case where an online service is unambiguously better value rather than merely convenient. The comparison is not “$3.79 versus a $1.44 stamp”; it is “$3.79 versus international postage plus a week”. For a fuller breakdown of the domestic numbers, see what it actually costs to mail a letter in Canada.

A note on customs

Documents — plain paper correspondence — do not require a customs declaration. Anything with an object in it does, even a small one, and an undeclared item is the second most common reason inbound mail stalls. If you are sending a card with something tucked inside, that is a parcel wearing an envelope, and it needs to be declared as such.