Royal Mail Redirection When You Move House

Every move generates a long tail of post that keeps arriving at the old address long after you’ve stopped living there — a DVLA reminder you hadn’t dealt with yet, an HMRC letter, a replacement bank card, a hospital appointment. You can update your address with every organisation you can think of and still miss one. A Royal Mail redirection is the backstop for everything on that list you haven’t gotten to yet: it catches what falls through, for as long as the redirection runs, at either your old or new address. It isn’t a substitute for actually updating your address with the organisations that matter — it’s what stands between the gap and a stranger’s recycling bin while you work through the rest of the list.

Royal Mail offers personal redirection in three fixed lengths — 3, 6 or 12 months — priced per person, with the per-month cost falling the longer you commit to. For a single adult, standard pricing is £45.00 for 3 months, £66.50 for 6 months, and £95.00 for 12 months. Add a second adult at the same address and the 12-month price rises to £108.50 rather than simply doubling — children under 16 are added to a parent’s redirection at no extra cost.

That concessionary rate applies to anyone receiving Universal Credit or Pension Credit (which also covers people transitioning from Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, income-based JSA, income-related ESA, Income Support or Working Tax Credit), on production of proof of that benefit dated within the last six months. It has to be applied for directly with Royal Mail rather than through a Post Office branch.

If you’re moving a company, not just a household, personal redirection isn’t the right product — and the prices above don’t apply. Business redirection is a separate Royal Mail service, priced and administered differently, and it covers mail addressed to the company as well as to individuals at it. It’s also considerably more expensive: third-party resellers who republish Royal Mail’s own business price list put a 3-month business redirection at roughly £299, rising to around £440 for 6 months and £708 for 12 — worth confirming directly with Royal Mail at the time of booking, since these figures come from a reseller rather than Royal Mail’s own published table.

You can apply for a redirection up to six months before your move date, and Royal Mail is specific about the other end of that window too: it needs at least five working days’ notice before the start date to arrange it. In practice that means the moment you have a confirmed moving date is the right time to apply — not moving week, when five working days can suddenly feel tight against everything else that needs doing.

1. 1

   Apply

   Any time from up to six months before your move date, once you know it.

2. 2

   Minimum notice

   Royal Mail needs at least five working days between your application and the start date.

3. 3

   Redirection starts

   Mail addressed to you at the old address begins arriving at the new one from your chosen start date.

4. 4

   Renewal reminder

   Royal Mail invites you to renew before the period ends — redirections can run for a combined maximum of four years.

Setting up a redirection isn’t as simple as typing in two addresses. Royal Mail requires two documents: proof of your identity (a passport, driving licence, birth certificate for under-16s, or similar), and separate proof of the old address — a utility bill, bank or credit card statement, council tax bill or mortgage statement — dated within the last six months.

That’s not bureaucratic friction for its own sake. A redirection application is, structurally, a request to have someone else’s mail sent somewhere new — which is exactly the kind of process an identity thief would want to exploit if it were left unchecked. Royal Mail is direct about why the extra checks exist:

A redirection only covers mail addressed to you and to anyone else you’ve named on the same application — typically other adults at your old address who are moving with you. It doesn’t sweep up everything that happens to be addressed to that address. Two exclusions catch people out often enough to be worth stating plainly.

On the first point, Royal Mail is explicit about what redirection won’t cover:

So if you move into a property and mail keeps arriving for whoever lived there before you, your redirection was never going to catch it; you can only mark it “not known at this address” and repost it, or the sender needs updating directly. The same logic runs the other way at your old address: someone else’s post that ends up there after you leave isn’t yours to redirect either.

On the second, redirection is a Royal Mail and Parcelforce product — it has no reach into any other courier’s network:

In practice that means Evri, DPD, Amazon Logistics, UPS, Hermes and every other delivery company sit entirely outside a Royal Mail redirection. However many parcels you get through those networks, each retailer and courier account still needs its own address update — a redirection running in the background doesn’t reduce that list, it just covers the part of it you haven’t gotten to yet.

Redirection sits at the centre of two distinct, well-documented identity-fraud risks — one from not having it, one from someone else abusing it.

Not redirecting at all leaves financial and official mail sitting at an address you no longer control. Action Fraud, citing Cifas identity-fraud data, has reported that a meaningful share of people who do eventually set up a redirection find it was overdue: in the underlying survey, 26% of redirection customers had received up to five items of mail intended for a previous occupant within their first month at a new address, 15% had received more than twenty, and 52% of that misdirected mail included sensitive financial documents — bank statements, insurance letters, anything an identity thief could use. That data is dated (it traces to a Cifas Q1 2015 dataset, not a current-year figure), but the underlying pattern — financial mail piling up at an address its rightful recipient no longer checks — hasn’t stopped being true just because the survey is old.

Someone else redirecting your mail without your knowledge is the rarer but more direct risk, and it’s exactly what the ID checks in the previous section exist to prevent: a fraudster who has enough of your details to file a redirection application in your name could, if unchecked, have your bank statements, tax correspondence and other financial mail sent straight to an address they control. If you ever notice named post to you drying up unexpectedly, or receive a Royal Mail confirmation for a redirection you didn’t set up, treat it as a live incident rather than an admin question — contact Royal Mail directly to query or cancel it, check your bank and credit accounts for anything unfamiliar, and report it to Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime.

Royal Mail contacts you before a redirection is due to end, inviting you to renew at the standard rate for another period. You can keep renewing up to a combined total of four years from the original start date. What matters is what happens if you don’t: this isn’t a service that holds your post indefinitely once it expires.

In other words, once your redirection lapses, mail addressed to you doesn’t come back to you or get returned to sender by default — it simply resumes being delivered to your old address, to whoever’s living there now. If you’re still expecting occasional post at an old address a year or more after moving, that’s a sign it’s worth renewing rather than letting it quietly lapse.

Pulling the above into what to actually do: