High Programmer > Blog Archive > Price of US First Class Stamps
Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Price of US First Class Stamps

The US Postal Service is proposing a $0.02 price increase on first class stamps. Magazines and junk mailers complain that it's unreasonable. How unreasonable is it? Let's look at the inflation adjusted price for US first class stamps:

Graph of price of stamps over time.

Despite raising rates 4 times in the last 5 years, the inflation adjusted price of stamps has held steady at about $0.44 since the 1970s! Bumping the price to $0.46 is just a bit more expensive than it's been recently, but it's only a very minor premium.

"Inflation" data is based on "Consumer Price Index, All Urban Consumers - (CPI-U), U.S. city average, All items". I used the monthly data.

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