Cost To Manufacture Stamps

Cleaning up around here I came across an Accountable Paper Shipped report for Fiscal year 2001. [note - not sure if this is total cost including design and delivery or merely printing, perfing/die cutting and packaging]

Coils in rolls (prime rate, whatever that is, but guessing it is the larger roll coils) cost 0.322 cents per stamp
Coils (guessing this is in rolls of 100) cost 0.291 cents per stamp
Booklets 0.229 cents per stamp
Commems 0.470 cents per stamp [smaller print runs = higher cost per stamp]
Sheets (guessing they mean defins since they break out commems separately) 0.276 per stamp
Ducks 12.2 cents per stamp [a tad bit higher]

Not exactly current, but it will still give you an idea. Since then the BEP was dropped (they had higher costs), but production runs have fallen (and since some costs are fixed, that will push costs per stamp higher).

This is similar to data I saw. The cost is insignificant to the face value. There is expense related for USPS to design, etc.

As the two posts above touch upon, there is a major delineation between NRE (Non-recurring engineering) costs and production costs. One time costs such as designing, tooling, and testing normally fall under NREs. Production costs typically including just about everything else including things like ink, paper, labor, packaging, and marketing costs. Both NRE and production costs are impacted by volume. For example, an NRE cost like tooling may jump up if multiple tools are needed to handle large production runs.

But I am always a bit leery about 30,000 foot costing numbers; a lot of impacting factors can be hidden in them. I have seen things like new facilities included in product costing numbers with the justification that 'we had to build a new building for this production run'. On the other end of the scale the costing numbers can sometimes include things like a major cut in the work force which happened to coincide with a production run.
Don

United States stamp contracts with the private printers typically are bid at cost per thousand stamps, from pre-production through delivery.

Multiplying the cents figures stated previously by 1000 yields figures of about $2 or $3 per thousand stamps.

The Bureau and the USPS had no contracts, only an arrangement that eventually ended.

Great post! Very interesting statistics.