USPS API Pricing 2026 — What It Actually Costs

For years the answer to “what does the USPS API cost” was “nothing,” and that answer is now out of date.

Effective August 1, 2026, USPS moved the Addresses API onto a consumption-tier pricing model, and access now requires a signed license agreement. If you are budgeting an integration in 2026, the free-API assumption is the first thing to throw out.

What USPS charges now

Straight off the published USPS Tech Sheet, updated 2026-08-13:

Three details in that table do most of the damage if you miss them.

The tier is not graduated. Your whole month bills at one tier — the one your total consumption lands in. USPS puts it plainly: “Based on monthly consumption, customer will be charged at a single tier level.”

Partial thousands round up. Tiers 2 through 4 bill “per 1,000 transaction fee or fraction thereof,” so 2,001 lookups bills three units, not two.

There is no monthly minimum and no setup fee — but there is also no free allowance. The first tier is a $10 flat fee, which means one lookup a month and 2,000 lookups a month cost the same.

Run the curve at four volumes and the shape shows up:

Per-lookup, USPS is cheap. That is not where the cost is.

The license is the real gate

The fee curve is the easy part. The condition attached to it is the hard part: “Access to the Addresses API and webhooks requires a signed license agreement.”

That is not a checkbox in a developer portal. The sequence USPS publishes runs: create or log into a Business Portal (COP) account, create and fund an Enterprise Payment Account, accept updated terms, request an Addresses API license, sign an order form and license agreement through DocuSign, wait for USPS to countersign, then link your API credentials and refresh your claims and your OAuth token.

Signatures move at legal-department speed on both ends. Budget weeks, not an afternoon, and budget them before your launch date rather than after. Charges land as an “Addresses Usage Fee” debited from your EPA, assessed at the start of each month for the prior month’s usage. The EPA has to be funded before your first call, which is earlier than most teams plan for.

We ran this process ourselves. The CRID and MID enrollment guide documents each step with the errors we hit.

The rate limit still bites

Pricing changed. Throughput did not. USPS enforces 60 requests per hour per application on address validation by default.

The limit is not per-endpoint — it is shared across your entire app. Address validation, tracking, labels, rates all compete for the same window. You can request an increase, which is another support ticket with another response time. The rate limit guide covers the architecture patterns that survive it.

What the third-party shipping platforms charge

These platforms price on labels, not address lookups, so read the numbers as a different unit than the USPS table above. Address validation is bundled into their label pricing.

EasyPost

• Free Access plan: $0/month, first 3,000 labels free, then $0.08/label
• BYOCA plan: $20/month + $0.08/label
• Address validation: included
• Tracking: $0.02/tracker (free with purchased label)

At 10,000 labels/month: $560/month

Shippo

• Starter: free for up to 30 labels/month
• Pro: from $19/month
• Per-label fee: $0.05 (waived on Shippo carrier accounts)
• Address validation: included

At 10,000 labels/month: ~$500/month

ShipEngine

• Free tier: pay-as-you-go
• 1,000 labels/mo: $75/month + $0.075/overage label
• 5,000 labels/mo: $325/month + $0.065/overage
• 10,000 labels/mo: $600/month + $0.060/overage

At 10,000 labels/month: $600/month

What RevAddress charges

Flat monthly, priced on API calls rather than labels:

Enterprise runs $499/month for custom throughput, dedicated rate limits, and a signed SLA.

The three honest routes

There is no single right answer here, and the differences are worth understanding before you pick.

Free Census-based validation — $0, no USPS license. Standardization, geocoding, and address extract run against the US Census Bureau’s public address inventory. No USPS credentials, no license agreement, no per-lookup fee. It gets an address into correct postal form and returns street-level coordinates. It does not return DPV, ZIP+4, or any USPS-verified deliverability flag, because those are USPS data and USPS data now requires a license. For list hygiene and geocoding it is the whole job. For “does mail actually arrive here,” it is not.

BYOK on your own license. You sign the USPS agreement, you pay the USPS fee curve above, and you point RevAddress at your credentials. We manage the OAuth lifecycle, the rate-limit budgeting, the caching, and the retries; the USPS relationship stays yours. Every plan supports it, and it is the route to take if you need your own reporting, your own compliance posture, or your own direct line to USPS.

Hosted USPS verification. Verified DPV on RevAddress’s own executed USPS Addresses API license: nothing for you to sign, no EPA to fund, no USPS relationship to manage.

We do not create labels on our credentials for you. Label creation runs on your own USPS license and your own EPA, because postage has to be paid by the entity that owes it.

curl "https://api.revaddress.com/api/address/validate\
?streetAddress=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave+NW\
&city=Washington&state=DC&ZIPCode=20500" \
-H "X-API-Key: rv_live_your_key_here"

The decision framework

• Under 2,000 lookups a month: sign the USPS license and pay the $10 flat fee. Build the rate-limit handling yourself.
• Standardizing and geocoding a list, no deliverability check needed: free Census-based validation. No license, no fee.
• Under 3,000 labels/month and multi-carrier: EasyPost Free Access is hard to beat.
• 3,000–50,000 labels/month, USPS-primary: RevAddress. Flat pricing saves thousands a year against per-label fees.
• 50,000+ labels/month, multi-carrier: talk to ShipEngine or EasyPost sales for custom terms.

If you don’t actually need an API

Most people who land on this page are not building an integration. They have a spreadsheet — a donor list, a member roster, a customer export — and they want it cleaned once before the next mailing. An API key is the wrong tool for that; a one-time file job is the right one.

• List Clean — upload a CSV, get it back standardized to postal format, deduplicated, geocoded, and enriched with neighborhood income and vacancy. $19 up to 500 rows, $47 up to 2,500, $97 up to 10,000. Free diagnosis of your file before you pay. Standardization runs against the Census Bureau’s national address inventory — no USPS license involved, which is exactly why it costs $19 and not $500.
• Address File Audit — the $497 version for lists up to 25,000 rows, with the full quality report: duplicate clusters, county concentration, income and vacancy profile, and what your bad rows cost per year.
• Shipping internationally? The free HS code lookup finds the tariff code USPS asks for on the customs form — the whole US schedule, no signup, no daily cap. Whole catalog to classify? That’s one file, $47.

Sources

USPS fee figures and billing terms on this page come from the USPS Addresses API Tech Sheet, updated 2026-08-13. Third-party platform pricing was current as of March 2026 and is published by each vendor; check their pricing pages before you budget against it.

Start today

• Clean a list once — from $19 · Free HS code lookup
• Get your free API key — no credit card required
• Full pricing breakdown
• API reference — request/response examples and live try-it
• Shipping API comparison — EasyPost vs Shippo vs ShipEngine vs RevAddress