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Sending Christmas cards, presents and parcels makes this time of year one of the busiest for both households who need to use Royal Mail and for postmen and women trudging to our letterboxes each morning.
But price rises and stamp changes have made the simple act of sending a Christmas card more expensive and more complicated.
However, there’s a little known loophole with Christmas stamps that means you can avoid Royal Mail price rises.
Two years ago, Royal Mail changed first class and second class stamps to a new barcode system, aimed at cutting down on fraud and people trying to reuse the same stamp.
When the old stamps became invalid, Royal Mail would no longer accept them, even if you’d already bought and paid for them, and for months it ran a swap-out scheme to allow people to change them for the new barcode versions.
At the same time, the price of stamps has continued to increase, with the price of one first class stamp put up to £1.70 in April 2025, and a second class stamp to 87p.
But there is one type of stamp that can still be used and sent without a barcode: Christmas stamps.
And because they don’t require a barcode, you can use Christmas stamps that you bought years and years ago, before all the price rises.
Royal Mail confirms on its website: “Special Stamps with pictures on and Christmas Stamps without a barcode will continue to be valid and don’t need to be swapped out.”
This loophole was also pointed out by users of Reddit who deliberately snapped up cheap old Christmas stamps from sellers who didn’t know about the loophole. Posting in R/CasualUK, user u/mantolwen said: “I made out well on this as a charity shop was selling books of special stamps cheap since they didn’t know they could be used for postage, so I got 60 first class stamps at 50p each.”
Other stamps that are still valid include various special photographic stamps.
Royal Mail adds: “Following our announcement on 1 Feb 2022, and subsequent discussions with key stakeholders, including feedback from our customers, we have removed Christmas stamps from our Swap Out scheme.
“These stamps are mostly kept by customers to send their Christmas cards and we anticipate that the vast majority will have been used by the end of this year. We are still adding a barcode to Christmas stamps, but non-barcoded Christmas stamps will remain valid so can continue to be used after 31 July 2023 and therefore there is no requirement to swap them out.”
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