USPS Change of Address & Mail Forwarding

USPS offers exactly three official ways to file a Change of Address, and it’s worth knowing all three exist rather than defaulting to whichever one you stumble on first. Online, at usps.com/move, is fastest and available any time, but carries the small identity-verification fee covered below. In person, at any Post Office, is free — you’ll need a government-issued photo ID, which does the identity verification the online fee otherwise pays for. By mail, you can complete PS Form 3575, the official paper Change-of-Address order (included in the Mover’s Guide packet many Post Offices hand out), and drop it in the mail yourself. Whichever method you use, only the official usps.com domain and your local Post Office are the real thing — a theme that matters a lot more once you get to the fraud section further down this page.

A common point of confusion: why does a government service charge anything online when the exact same request is free in person? The answer is that the charge isn’t really a processing fee at all — it’s the mechanism USPS uses to confirm the person filing the request is who they claim to be. The card is billed to a name and a billing address, and USPS checks that those line up with the request itself, functioning as a stand-in for the photo ID you’d show in person. Skip the fee and there’s no card-holder identity to check against.

Treat that exact figure as a snapshot rather than a permanent number — this fee has changed more than once over the years, and it’s worth confirming the current amount directly at usps.com/move before you file rather than relying on any single article, including this one. What matters more than the exact cents is the principle: a website offering to “change your address” for a much larger fee — some reported sites have charged up to $40 — is not USPS, and is either an overpriced reseller or an outright scam.

Forwarding doesn’t start the moment you submit the form. USPS says it may begin within about 3 business days, but advises allowing up to 2 weeks before assuming something’s gone wrong — worth building into your timeline rather than assuming instant coverage the day you move. Once active, standard forwarding for First-Class Mail and Periodicals (newsletters and magazines) runs free for 12 months from your start date. After that, you can purchase Extended Mail Forwarding in additional 6, 12, or 18-month blocks — 18 months is the maximum single extension — though that purchase is explicitly non-cancellable and non-refundable once made, so it’s worth being sure before you pay for it.

Forwarding is a genuine safety net, but it isn’t a universal one, and treating it as a substitute for actually updating your address everywhere is a common, costly mistake. Beyond the USPS Marketing Mail exclusion above, a forwarding order simply has no reach over anything that doesn’t travel through USPS in the first place — UPS and FedEx run entirely separate systems with their own address records, so a package shipped through either of them still goes to whatever address the sender has on file, forwarding order or not. And some senders — banks, the DMV, the IRS, employers issuing tax documents — treat their own address-on-file as the authoritative record for legal and security reasons, regardless of what USPS is doing on your behalf. Reloca8’s other US move guides cover updating several of these directly; forwarding is the backstop for what you haven’t gotten to yet, not a reason to skip them.

Standard forwarding assumes a permanent move. For a genuinely temporary relocation — a long assignment, an extended stay somewhere else — USPS offers a separate paid product, Premium Forwarding Service Residential (PFS-Residential). Instead of redirecting each piece individually, USPS collects your mail at your old address and re-ships it as one bundled shipment by Priority Mail, on a weekly schedule, with a tracking number emailed to you each time. It carries its own separate fees — currently a non-refundable enrollment fee (cheaper online than at a Post Office counter) plus a flat weekly charge for as long as the service runs — on top of, not instead of, the identity verification covered above.

A change-of-address request is, by design, a single form that can redirect someone else’s bank statements, tax documents, credit card offers, and replacement cards to a new location — which makes it a genuinely attractive target for identity thieves, not a hypothetical one. USPS’s own Office of Inspector General has audited this exact risk more than once, and its most recent management alert found the problem getting sharply worse, not better, over a single year.

The single most important built-in safeguard is one most people don’t know exists until it directly matters to them: every time a change of address is filed, USPS mails a validation letter to the old address, not just a confirmation to the new one. It exists specifically so that if someone fraudulently redirects your mail, you — still living at, or still receiving mail at, the old address — have a real chance to catch it before it does any damage.

That letter’s own wording is direct about what to do if it wasn’t you:

The practical takeaway: don’t treat that letter as junk mail just because you’re in the middle of an actual move and half-expect paperwork like it. Read it, check the details match what you actually filed, and act immediately if they don’t — the entire safeguard only works if the letter gets opened.

Beyond calling the number on the letter itself, USPS’s law-enforcement arm — the Postal Inspection Service, separate from ordinary customer service — exists specifically to investigate mail fraud, including this kind.

1. 1

   Call 1-800-ASK-USPS immediately

   The instruction given directly on USPS's own confirmation letter, whether or not you actually received one — it's also the right first call if you simply suspect something's wrong.

2. 2

   Report it to the Postal Inspection Service

   File at uspis.gov/report or call 1-877-876-2455 — this is a federal law-enforcement body, not general customer support, and is the right channel for a fraud report specifically.

3. 3

   Check whether financial or personal information is at risk

   If bank statements, cards, or tax documents may have been redirected, treat it as a possible identity-theft event, not just a mail issue.

4. 4

   File at IdentityTheft.gov if needed

   The FTC's dedicated identity-theft recovery service, for a personalized recovery plan if your information may actually have been compromised.

Pulling the above together into what actually matters when you sit down to do this: