Skip to content
All posts

USPS API Pricing 2026 — What It Actually Costs

Updated 8 min read By RevAddress

Topics: Pricing, USPS license, Rate limits

For years the answer to “what does the USPS API cost” was “nothing,” and that answer is now out of date.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

Monthly volumeUSPS fee
1 - 2,000$10 (flat fee)
2,001 - 10,000$4.50 per 1,000 events
10,001 - 50,000$4.25 per 1,000 events
Over 50,000$4.00 per 1,000 events

Three details in that table set the bill.

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:

Monthly lookupsUSPS feeEffective cost per lookup
1,000$10$0.0100
5,000$22.50$0.0045
25,000$106.25$0.0043
100,000$400$0.0040

Per lookup, USPS is cheap; the cost sits in the license.

$10 $100 $1,000 $2,000 1001,00010,000100,000500,000

At 5,000 lookups a month USPS bills $22.50, in the 2,001 to 10,000 tier: $0.0045 a lookup.

The tech sheet on billing: “Based on monthly consumption, customer will be charged at a single tier level. Tiers 2-4 is charged a per 1,000 transaction fee or fraction thereof.” On access: “Access to the Addresses API and webhooks requires a signed license agreement.” There is no monthly minimum and no setup fee. Source: USPS Addresses API Tech Sheet, updated August 13, 2026. Fee curve effective August 1, 2026.

Who pays it

A RevAddress key
Platform verification requires a paid plan and 10 purchased credits ($0.01) per address, additional to the software allowance. We pay the provider on our license. See plans and funding.
Your own license
You pay USPS the figure above and keep your CRID, MID and EPA. We run the OAuth lifecycle, caching and retries around it. Read the enrollment guide.
A file we run for you
Send the list; we run the verification as a service and return the file with a report. See services.

The Addresses API license and its signing sequence

The fee curve comes with a condition: “Access to the Addresses API and webhooks requires a signed license agreement.”

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, so start the agreement weeks before your launch date. 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.

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

The 60-requests-per-hour rate limit

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

Daily volume Requests needed Default capacity Works?
10/day ~10 1,440/day (60/hr × 24) Yes
100/day ~100 1,440/day Yes
500/day ~500 1,440/day Marginal
1,000/day ~1,000 1,440/day Breaks during peak hours
5,000/day ~5,000 1,440/day No

The limit is shared across your entire app, not set per endpoint. Address validation, tracking, labels and rates all compete for the same window. You can request an increase through a USPS support ticket. The rate limit guide covers the architecture patterns that work within it.

Free API key

Start where it costs nothing

Standardization, geocoding, and address extract run against Census Bureau data: 1,000 requests a month, with no USPS license and no credit card. USPS verification and shipping tools need paid RevAddress access; supported paid accounts can connect their own USPS app.

Accept the service terms and complete the bot check to create your key.

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:

PlanMonthlyAnnualIncluded
FreeFree—1,000 requests/mo
Starter$29$2795,000 requests/mo
Growth$79$75825,000 requests/mo
Pro$199$1,910100,000 requests/mo

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

Census validation, BYOK or hosted USPS verification

Free Census-based validation: $0, no USPS license. Standardization, geocoding, and address extract run against the Census Bureau’s public address inventory, with no USPS credentials, no license agreement and 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.

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.

Label creation runs on your own USPS license and your own EPA, with access by request, because postage is paid by the entity that owes it.

Address validation in one call Bash 
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"

Route by monthly volume

  • 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.

Cleaning a list without an API

A spreadsheet that needs cleaning once before the next mailing (a donor list, a member roster or a customer export) is a one-time file job, and these run without an API key.

  • List Clean: upload a CSV and 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 address inventory with no USPS license involved, which is why it costs $19 and not $500.
  • 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, across the whole US schedule, with no signup and 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

Read next