Postcrossing Blog

Another year has flown by in a blur of stamps, mailbox walks, and little moments of connection… and that means it’s time for one of our favorite traditions: looking back at the year through the numbers. So, without further ado… here’s Postcrossing in numbers for 2025!

4,846,355 postcards received

That’s almost 4.9 million little pieces of paper that made someone smile, taught them a fun fact, or simply arrived at just the right moment. 🥰

30.2 average travel days and 20.2 median travel days

As always, postcards traveled at wildly different speeds — some arrived in just a few days, while others took the scenic route (and occasionally a long nap in a sorting center). The median travel time gives a nice “typical postcard” picture: about three weeks from one mailbox to another. It’s a bit sad to slowly see these numbers go up over the years… but not much we can do about that.

26,797,284,438 kms (16,651,060,580 miles) traveled

It’s always hard to wrap your head around this one… but it’s a lot of distance powered by handwritten messages and tiny stamps — farther than the most distant human-made object in space (currently at about 169 AU, or ~25.3 billion km away). 🤯

19,982 kms (12,416 miles) was the longest distance traveled

This time, instead of a postcard from Spain to New Zealand, it was a postcard from New Zealand to Spain (NZ-266139) that took the longest route, almost 20,000 km! We hope it enjoyed the ride from Feilding to Barraco! These two countries are antipodes and both have a fair number of postcrossers, which is why they’re so often featured in this particular statistic.

The average distance a postcard traveled in Postcrossing in 2025 was around 5,529 kms (or 3,436 miles) — more or less the distance between London and New York, or from Tokyo to Singapore!

1,092,822 postcards were sent from Germany

As they have done for a long time, Germany takes the top spot again this year — and as always, we’re a little in awe of the dedication of German Postcrossers. 👏 There are fewer postcards being sent from there than in previous years, but this is understandable, given last year’s increase in postage.

Here’s a snapshot of other countries in the top 20:

As expected, Europe, North America, and Asia continue to be the strongest continents in Postcrossing!

Shelleh sent the most postcards

A big round of applause to Shelleh, who sent the most postcards in 2025 and recovered her crown from 2023! 🎉 Amazing!

Åland Islands sent the most postcards per capita

And for the “postcards per capita” crown… Åland Islands! This ranking always makes us smile, because it highlights places where Postcrossing has become a real community habit.

(*) This ranking is calculated per 1,000 inhabitants, for countries with at least 10 members.

October 1 was the day in which the most postcards were sent in 2025 (83,069)

Naturally, October 1 (World Postcard Day) stands out as the busiest sending day of the year — a truly impressive spike of postcards heading out into the world. If you were part of that wave, thank you!

October 1 was the day in which the most postcards were received in 2025 (19,576)

And on the receiving side, unexpectedly, October 1 also takes the top spot! Clearly, it was a very postcardy day! 😊

Postcards were sent from 226 countries and received in 163 countries

This is one of those numbers that always makes us pause. Postcrossing is, at its heart, a global project — and seeing postcards being sent from 226 different countries and territories is a reminder of how far this community reaches… and also, how popular the Travel Mode has become over the years!

13,049 new forum topics and 912,468 forum posts in 2025

The forum continued to be a very lively place in 2025 — for sharing postcard joy, asking questions, organizing swaps and meetups, celebrating milestones, and (of course) showing off beautiful postcards and stamps. If you’ve ever thought “I should check out this forum thing”… this is your sign!

2,329 meetups in 66 countries

And speaking of community: meetups! From big gatherings to tiny café meetups, it’s always wonderful to see Postcrossers turning postcards into real-life friendships. 2025 was an anniversary year and thus saw a big spike in the number of meetups taking place around the world — about 27% more than tje previous year. If you’ve never been to one, what are you waiting for?

12,597 email replies

Behind the scenes, the team kept busy too — replying to emails, helping with accounts, and untangling the occasional postcard mystery. Thank you for your patience and kindness whenever you write to us.

And that’s 2025 in numbers! We hope these little stats snapshots can help give you a big picture of what Postcrossing is like. Whether you sent 5 postcards or 500, thank you for being part of this project and for keeping our analog corner of the internet alive.

Here’s to another year of happy mail, pretty stamps, and postcard-sized surprises in 2026! 💙

PS: For those of you who would like to see longer rankings that don’t fit on a blog post, here they are.

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to visit another planet? Aficionados of sci-fi and fantasy have probably thought about this already, and probably everyone who ever dreamed of being an astronaut… so we thought it’d be interesting to ask about the planets that everyone would love to visit!

Those who’ve been reading my writing prompt posts for a while probably already know that I’m a huge fan of the massive multiplayer online roleplaying game Final Fantasy XIV (don’t worry, I won’t launch into the full joke/meme about the extended free trial, etc). It’s a world “I” spend a fair amount of time in as my avatar, the Warrior of Light, getting up to all kinds of adventures—learning a dozen different fighting styles from mage to monk, becoming a master crafter, catching all the “Big Fish” the game has to offer, etc, etc. (I’m a terrible monk, though.) So I think it’ll have to be my choice now!

There’s so much variety in the world of Final Fantasy XIV, after all, starting with Eorzea (where the story begins) and spreading across the world to Tural, the home of the most recent expansion. There’s something for everyone, and while I don’t possess the skills of a Warrior of Light, I’m pretty sure no one could object to me slipping into the huge library in Old Sharlayan and finding myself a book (or two, or three). And surely I couldn’t get into too much trouble if I took ship for Tuliyollal, to indulge in what look from the cutscenes like truly awesome tacos.

Of course, there are so many other worlds I’m a fan of from fiction, from various fairylands to utopian societies on planets orbiting stars we can see in our night sky. But I’m a humble and unadventurous soul, really, so curious as I am, I’d have to leave the heroics to someone else… but what about you? Is there a planet you’d love to see, and would it be full of adventures?

You can share in the comments here, if you like, and use this as a prompt when you’re not sure what to write on your postcards this month!

When I recently posted some mini-reviews, I talked about being blown away by Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, so here is the promised post about that book! It’s an epistolary novel told entirely through letters from and to the protagonist, Sybil van Antwerp. She’s a retired woman who worked in law and now strictly structures her life around reading and her correspondence, and I really wasn’t sure in reading the blurb whether it’d actually be interesting for me: I thought it might be a bit too literary, or lacking in plot. Honestly, I picked it up mostly because I thought it’d be interesting for a review for Postcrossing! I wasn’t wrong about that, at least…

I’d also wondered how successful the epistolary format would be: apart from the preface and maybe one or two other sections, it’s entirely made up of letters (though some of them aren’t sent), which is also quite the feat. It can be hard to make a story run well through multiple different letters in a way that feels fairly natural but which the reader can follow, but Evans definitely nailed it.

The story doesn’t really have a plot as such, so I was right on that score, though there are a few themes and events that run through the letters. It’s definitely more of a character study, and the letters were the perfect way to show us Sybil’s character (and those of her family and friends)—flaws and all, because Sybil’s absolutely no saint, though she’s no devil either.

There were a couple of things I didn’t love, but they didn’t mar my enjoyment of the book: the main one was that it could be hard to tell whether the letters were directly responding to one another or whether there were gaps in between. They’re dated, and in the right sequence, but I realised after a bit that some of them were responding to letters that aren’t “included”. It makes sense as a decision to keep things a bit tighter and avoid padding it out, but it did feel like a bit of a leap between letters in terms of events or changing attitudes. It’s worth knowing going in that there are letters “missing” (so to speak, since of course, they aren’t real letters and the “missing” letters don’t actually exist), so you don’t always get the full story.

In the end, I absolutely tore through the book, and really enjoyed my time getting to understand Sybil and her circle through the letters. There are some hard-hitting themes (coming to terms with disability, family rifts, and the loss of a child) which it unfurls carefully, giving you a piece at a time and making sure it’ll land before you learn the truth about each bit of the story. Highly recommended!

For many postcrossers, the travel mode is a welcome change and a great way to pursue our hobby on vacation or while on business trips. Sending postcards from a new country with that country’s postcard ID is always exciting!

But there are some places in the world where you can send your cards in travel mode from two different countries at the same time! Frank (aka xmyrxn) visited a very special place and shares his experience:

"I spent my summer holidays in the Netherlands and made a day trip to the town of Baarle. Indeed Baarle is not just one town but literally two towns in one. So when you enter the city there are two signs displaying Baarle-Nassau (Netherlands) and Baarle-Hertog (Belgium).

If you take a look at the map you find out that there are some Belgian areas within the Dutch territory. But it’s not just a Belgian exclave within the Netherlands, it’s a patchwork of different sized exclaves and enclaves! There are even spots of the Netherlands within a Belgian area which is surrounded by the Netherlands again! To make it just a bit more complicated, the border lines don’t stop at the front doors but cut houses so that your kitchen may be in Belgium and your living room in the Netherlands! Crazy, isn’t it?

When walking through the town you will cross the border several times and it may happen that you wonder in which municipality you actually are. For a better overview all house numbers show the flag of the actual country. And usually the house belongs to the country in which the entrance lies. You also can see the border demarcation on the ground.

But how has this strange situation arisen? Well, long story short: It all began in the dark Middle Ages. The border’s complexity results from numerous medieval treaties, agreements, land swaps and sales between the Lords of Breda and the Dukes of Brabant. Later on Breda became a possession of the House of Nassau, then Nassau-Oranje and finally the Netherlands while the parcels owned by the Dukes (in Flemish, the word Duke translates to “Hertog”) of Brabant went to the Duchy of Burgundy and finally became part of Belgium.

So how is the situation today? In Baarle-Nassau/Hertog you can find the best things from both countries: Cheese, stroopwafels and liquorice from the Netherlands as well as Belgian chocolates, frites and monastery beers.
And more: There’s a Dutch garbage truck in the streets and a Belgian as well, there are Dutch and Belgian schools (and some Dutch children go to the Belgian school and vice versa since the languages Dutch and Flemish are very similar). And there are Dutch and Belgian policemen, sharing a joint police office!

And yes, there are two postal systems!

A Belgian post office bpost can be found in Baarle-Hertog and a Dutch PostNL service desk in a stationery shop in Baarle-Nassau.
So I thought I could go into travel mode and send two postcards from the Netherlands. And then two from Belgium. And again two postcards from the Netherlands and finally two more from Belgium.
The only challenge was finding WIFI from both countries to proove Postcrossing that I am sending from these countries. I found free Dutch wifi in a really nice café in Baarle-Nassau and Belgian wifi only a few meters up the street in a pub in Baarle-Hertog. Koffie met Gebak in the Netherlands and a cool drink in Belgium. Could be worse!

After drawing the addresses I decided to try something crazy: Putting stamps of both countries on some of the postcards and collecting the postmarks of both post offices!

Thanks to the kind and helpful staff in both post offices I was able to receive the local handstamp postmarks! Usually nearly all mail of both countries is cancelled in big sorting centres and not postmarked locally anymore. So I think these postcards are very special and I’m a little bit proud to bring some nice mail items into Postcrossing. Four cards went to the USA, three to Russia, two to China and two to Ukraine.

And of course I sent one to myself ;-)"

Do you know a young artist who loves postcards or maybe you are one yourself…?

PostEurop (the association of European postal services) is celebrating 70 years of EUROPA stamps in 2026, and to mark the occasion they’re organizing a postcard design competition for young creatives — with winning designs printed by postal services and a cash prize for the artists! 🥳

EUROPA stamps have been around since 1956, when six countries started issuing them to highlight peace, unity and cooperation in Europe. Today there are over 50 postal organizations involved, and for this special anniversary PostEurop is inviting the next generation to show what “Unity in Europe” looks like to them, in the form of a postcard illustration or design.

The competition is open to young people and design students aged 18–25 who live in countries or territories that issue EUROPA stamps. Participants are asked to create a postcard-sized design (148×105 mm) on the theme of “Unity in Europe” and submit it according to the technical specs.

During the summer, a jury of international designers will select three to five winners. Each winning design will receive a €500 prize, be professionally printed as postcard sets on premium paper, and be showcased on the EUROPA stamps website. Winners will also receive copies of their cards, and PostEurop members will be able to use the winning designs on postcards during 2026–2027.

The call for entries is already open, and the deadline for submissions is 14 April 2026. You can find all the details, technical requirements and submission form on PostEurop’s website.

We thought some creative postcrossers might enjoy taking part in something that combines art, postcards and the union spirit, all in one go. Wouldn’t it be awesome if your design matches the design of 2026's Europa stamps, which will be a common one in all countries? Then we could make some super cool maxicards! 😍