Letterbox design

Every day, our posties deliver mail to around 1000 homes each across the entire country. That's why providing easy access to your letterbox is so important.

Letterboxes positioned in a place that's difficult to reach or with design flaws that make delivery difficult, slow down mail delivery and can cause injury to our posties. 

In order to ensure your mail is delivered safely and efficiently, New Zealand Post has developed a set of recommended guidelines to follow when setting up your letterbox. 

Choosing your letterbox:

• Ensure the main posting slot is big enough to take several A4 size magazines without needing to fold them
• Keep your letterbox deep enough (from front to back) to take the length of an A4 size article so that mail can be pushed in far enough to drop out of sight and be protected from the weather
• If you frequently receive parcels, ensure you have a door on the front of your box to make parcel delivery easy and choose a bigger box to keep your parcels safe
• Choose a box with a secure door (preferably one that can be locked) to prevent mail being stolen, or falling out the other end when it is delivered
• Ideally, your mailbox will have a separate area to take newspapers.

Remember you can still have fun with your letterbox design - just allow for the minimum internal dimensions shown in the diagram below to make mail delivery easy and safe.

Setting up your letterbox:

• Ensure your letterbox is clearly numbered
• Position your letterbox so that it is on the streetline and easily accessible to posties
• If possible, make sure your letterbox is not obstructed by shrubbery, gardens, or a fence. This ensures you have a clear view of pedestrians - including posties - when backing your car out
• Ensure your mailbox is not too high or low - this will not only help protect your own back, but also your postie's!

Letterboxes for flats or apartments

• Outside letterboxes: Groups of outside letterboxes for flats or apartments should be at right angles to the footpath or road way. We recommend that the height of the letterbox should be 600-1600mm from the ground to the mail slot.
  
• Inside letterboxes: If you have letterboxes located inside the building in an apartment block of five or more apartments you should have ground floor lockable letterboxes with a common entrance.

Spring-loaded flaps are postie-traps

If you have a letterbox with a spring-loaded flap this can act like a mouse-trap on fingers and means that posties have to use two hands to open the flap and get mail into your letterbox. If they are on a heavily laden bike then they have to take both hands off the handle bars - which means the bike can easily topple and cause injury.

You can help avoid this happening by stretching the spring - the flap will still protect your mail from the weather, but won't cause harm to posties.

For rural mailbox information, see the Rural Delivery page.

For more detailed information on mail delivery and collection see the Postal Users' Guide.