EDDM vs door hangers, honestly compared: cost per home with labor counted, reach, the mailbox law, speed, tracking, and when door hangers actually win.
If you typed EDDM vs door hangers into Google, there's a good chance the first answer you read was written by a company that sells door hangers. Nothing wrong with that. But it's not exactly a neutral referee, right? And full transparency, I'm not neutral either. My whole business runs on EDDM. So here's my deal: I'll show every number, tell you where it comes from, and tell you straight up where door hangers win.
Three options, compared for a local business owner: door hangers, a solo EDDM mailing, and one slot on a shared 9x12 postcard. Let me break it down.
Door hanger marketing cost comes in two pieces: printing, and getting them onto doors. That second piece is mostly labor. I couldn't find a neutral public source for distribution rates (the numbers online mostly come from companies that sell it), so here's the math with my assumptions written out. Swap in your own.
Assumption
Low-cost case
High-cost case
Pay for a walker, per hour
$15
$20
Doors hung per hour
100
60
Printing per hanger (run of 5,000)
5 cents
15 cents
Doors per hour depends on density: townhouse rows go fast, half-acre lots go slow.
Labor per door: $15 divided by 100 doors is 15 cents. $20 divided by 60 doors is about 33 cents.
Printing per door: 5 to 15 cents.
Total: roughly 20 to 48 cents. Call it 20 to 50 cents a home.
For 5,000 homes, that's 50 to 83 walker hours, about $750 to $1,670 in labor, and $250 to $750 in printing. Roughly $1,000 to $2,400, all in.
Hang them yourself and the labor disappears from the invoice, not from your week. That's one to two full work weeks of walking.
EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) is the USPS program that delivers your piece to every address on the carrier routes you pick. No mailing list. I wrote a full breakdown of what a solo EDDM mailing really costs, so here's the short version, using a 6x11 card from our own price sheet at 9x12 Method Printing. EDDM Retail postage is $0.26 per piece (the USPS price as of July 12, 2026).
$839
Printing 5,000 6x11 cards (Print Only)
$1,300
Postage (5,000 x $0.26)
$2,139
Total, you bundle and drop off
$2,499
Or All Inclusive, done for you
That's about 43 cents a home if you handle the bundling and Post Office drop-off yourself, or about 50 cents if you never want to touch a bundle. A solo 9x12 runs about 52 cents a home (Print Only plus postage).
Notice something? Per home, that overlaps the door hanger range. The real differences are reach, rules, and labor.
Here's the option most business owners never hear about: one slot on a shared postcard. A local operator sells about 16 slots to 16 non-competing businesses, and everybody splits the cost.
A $500 slot on a 9x12 card going to 5,000 homes works out to 10 cents a home. That's where the door hangers vs postcards math gets lopsided.
Full honesty on the trade-off. You get one slot, usually about 3.8 by 2.8 inches, not a whole card. The operator picks the routes and the mail date. And other businesses share the card with you, just never a direct competitor, because it's one business per category.
Door hangers only reach doors a person can walk up to. That leaves out apartment buildings with locked lobbies, gated communities, homes with "No Soliciting" signs, and anything the wind takes off the knob. And you're trusting the crew. When nobody checks, dumping a box of hangers is a lot faster than 83 hours of walking. Spot-check a few streets, or ask a distribution company for GPS proof of the route.
EDDM goes out with your regular mail carrier to every active address on the routes you choose (or every residential address, if you pick that). Apartments and gated neighborhoods the carrier already serves are included. The catches: USPS doesn't guarantee a delivery window for Marketing Mail, and you buy whole routes, never part of one.
A shared card rides the same EDDM delivery, on routes the operator chose. Make sure they cover your service area.
Door hangers win the street. Mail wins the neighborhood.
Hangers on the door itself are generally legal. Legal and welcome are two different things, though. Here's the etiquette I'd hand any crew:
Hang it on the knob or handle. Not in or on the mailbox, not jammed into a storm door.
Respect the signs. Some cities make it illegal to leave handbills where a sign says not to. In San Francisco, once a resident posts a notice of at least eight square inches, leaving handbills anywhere on the property is illegal, with fines up to $250.
Make sure it can't blow away. Plenty of local handbill rules require it, and a hanger tumbling down the street is litter with your logo on it.
Stay on the walkway and check your town and HOA rules before you start.
EDDM has rules too: "Postal Customer" and the EDDM Retail indicia on every piece, bundles of 50 to 100 (no taller than 6 inches, no rubber bands) with a facing slip on each, a 200-piece minimum per mailing, and a 5,000-piece cap per mailing, per day, at each Post Office. On a shared card, the operator handles all of it.
Door hangers are the fastest. Four walkers can cover 5,000 doors in about two to three working days.
Solo EDDM takes longer. Printing and shipping come first (our All Inclusive runs 4 to 6 days of printing plus 2 to 3 days of shipping), then USPS delivers with no guaranteed window. Operators in our community usually see cards land within a few days of drop-off, but that's our experience, not a USPS promise.
A shared card runs on the operator's schedule. It mails when it fills, so ask for the target mail window and don't tie a time-sensitive offer to an exact date.
Tracking works the same for all three: a QR code, a dedicated phone number, or an offer code. Door hangers have one small edge, since you know exactly which streets got them. Here's how to measure what your direct mail brings in.
Your target area is tiny. EDDM sells whole carrier routes, usually hundreds of homes each, with a 200-piece minimum per mailing. A shared card covers thousands. If you only care about 150 houses, hangers are the clean answer.
You want hand-picked streets. Roofers, painters, landscapers, and pest control companies love the "we're working on your neighbor's house this week" hanger on the 30 or 40 homes around a job. Mail can't do that.
You need it out this week. An event this weekend, storm cleanup, a sale that ends Sunday.
Mail wins when you want thousands of homes, no crew to manage, and to show up again and again. At 10 cents a home, showing up every month is realistic. Rachel has a roofer on her cards who bought 12 monthly mailings and paid $3,000 up front. He gets it.
Quick clear-up on EDDM vs saturation mail, because people mix these up. Saturation mail is the USPS term for mail sent to all or nearly all of the addresses on a carrier route. EDDM is one kind of it. It skips names, uses "Postal Customer" instead, and has to reach every address (or every residential address) on the route.
The other kind is addressed saturation mail, which uses a mailing list and a mailing permit. Co-op mailers, where several businesses share one mailing, can go out either way. Door hangers aren't mail at all, which is exactly why they can't go in the box.
Full transparency. I teach people how to put these shared cards together inside the 9x12 Method community. If you're a business owner, you don't need any of that. Just look for a shared card in your town. Our Local Spotlight has a map of 400+ operators running them around the country.
Neither wins everywhere. EDDM is better for whole neighborhoods, including apartments, with no crew. Door hangers are better for tiny areas, hand-picked streets, and anything that has to go out this week. Per home, they cost about the same once you count the walking.
With my assumptions ($15 to $20 an hour for a walker, 60 to 100 doors an hour, and 5 to 15 cents to print each hanger), it's roughly 20 to 50 cents a home, or about $1,000 to $2,400 for 5,000 doors. Your local wages, density, and print quotes will move that number.
Yes. Under 18 U.S.C. 1725, putting unstamped circulars in a mailbox is a federal offense punishable by a fine, and USPS rules say nothing without postage can be placed on, attached to, or hung from a mailbox. Hang it on the door, never the mailbox.
It depends on the job. Door hangers let you pick individual streets and go out fast. Postcards mailed through EDDM reach every address on a route without a crew, and a shared postcard slot costs about 10 cents a home. For a few streets, use hangers. For a whole town, use mail.
Saturation mail is mail sent to all or nearly all of the addresses on a carrier route, and EDDM is one type of it. EDDM uses "Postal Customer" instead of names and has to reach every address (or every residential address) on the routes you pick. Addressed saturation mail uses a mailing list and a permit.
I assumed 60 to 100 doors an hour on single-family streets. Townhouse rows go faster. Big lots, hills, and bad weather go slower. Time your own crew on one street before you price a whole campaign.
Look, there's no villain here. Door hangers, solo mail, and shared cards are all just ways to get your name in front of your neighbors. Pick the one that fits the job, track it, and keep what works.
As always, I'm rooting for you.
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Mitchell Tebo
