The order of the lines
Postal services standardise addresses on at most six lines, read top to bottom, from the specific to the general. The order matters: it is what sorting machines read.
- Line 1 — Title, first name and surname of the recipient.
- Line 2 — Identification detail: flat, floor, care of.
- Line 3 — Location detail: building, estate, entrance.
- Line 4 — House number and street name.
- Line 5 — Locality, PO box, or delivery service.
- Line 6 — Postcode and town, in capitals, on one line.
The formatting rules that help sorting
Write the last line entirely in capitals, without accents on the town name and without punctuation. The text layer in Stick-it has an "uppercase" option that applies this without you retyping anything.
Left-align the block, keep the same typeface across all lines, and avoid italics. An address does not need to be elegant, it needs to be read by a machine.
For international post, add the destination country in capitals on an extra line, in English or in the language of the sending country.
Sender and recipient: two separate labels
The recipient label goes in the centre of the front face, along its length. The sender label, smaller, goes top left of the same face, or on the back of the envelope.
A parcel with no sender address cannot come back if delivery fails. If you post regularly, print a whole sheet of sender labels at once: they never change.
Which size to print
An address needs width, because an address line broken in two reads badly. Large is the default choice for a recipient.
- Recipient on a parcel or large envelope: Large (96 × 50 mm).
- Recipient on a standard DL or C6 envelope: Medium (63 × 33 mm).
- Sender, whatever the envelope: Small (47 × 25 mm) is plenty.
A QR code, where it earns its place
On a business shipment or an online-sale parcel, a QR code pointing at a tracking page, a website or a profile is one extra layer. Stick-it automatically encodes the address with `https://` if you leave the protocol out.
The QR code layer is part of the Pro version.
The templates in the app
The Envelope category holds a Sender template, a Parcel recipient template and a clean address template. The line blocks are already stacked in the right order.
Updated 2026-08-21
