How Much Does It Cost to Mail a Nengajo?
The honest answer to "how much does a nengajo cost to mail" is: it depends on the card and the destination, and the specific yen amounts change when Japan Post revises its rates — so this page explains the structure of the costs and links you to the official pages where the current numbers live. Any specific price you find on an unofficial page may be years stale; the structure below is durable.
Official cards: postage is built in
The standard route is the official New Year's postcard (nenga hagaki) sold by Japan Post each season. Its purchase price includes the postage — the card is its own stamp, so to speak — plus the printed lottery number. Buy the card, write it, drop it in the box during the December window: no separate stamp needed. Decorated and character-design versions of the official card may sell at a premium over the plain one, but all carry the same prepaid postage.
Homemade cards: the domestic postcard rate
If you make your own card on plain stock, it travels at Japan Post's standard domestic postcard rate, provided it meets the size and weight specification for a postcard. Both the specification and the current rate are published on Japan Post's domestic postage list for letters and postcards — that page is the single authoritative reference, and it's worth checking each season because Japan has revised postal rates in recent years. A card that exceeds postcard dimensions or weight is charged as a letter instead, at the letter rates on the same page. Remember to mark a homemade card 年賀 in red if you want New Year's handling, as covered in our addressing guide.
Overseas cards: zone-based rates
Cards mailed from Japan to another country are priced by destination zone and by the card's size and weight. Japan Post's overseas greeting card page publishes the zones, the limits a card must meet, and the current rates; the United States sits in the Americas zone. Details and practicalities for the US–Japan lane in both directions are in our overseas mailing guide. Going the other way, a card from the US to Japan is priced by USPS international rates, which are USPS's to publish — typically a dollar-and-change proposition for a standard card, but check current rates before assuming.
When a card goes to waste
Buying prepaid cards in advance means occasionally holding cards you can't use — a spoiled address, an overbought batch, or a family entering mourning. Japan Post's policy on exchanging unused New Year's postcards lets you exchange unused or mis-written cards at a post office counter: ordinarily for a small per-item fee, and free of that fee in the mourning case, which we cover fully in the mourning etiquette guide. The practical upshot is that prepaid cards are a low-risk purchase — a mistake costs you a small exchange fee, not the whole card.
The budgeting picture
For a typical household list of a few dozen domestic cards, the cost of a nengajo season is the per-card price times the list, plus printing if you use a photo print shop. Whether that's worth it against a free digital greeting is a judgment about relationships, not arithmetic — the Format Chooser lays out the trade-offs.