Send a letter to Canada from Sweden

The house number comes before the street name, and cardinal directions are written after the street name: 123 Main Street West.

The last address line before the country contains city, province code, and postal code: OTTAWA ON K1A 0B1. Canada Post recommends two spaces before the postal code.

The postal code has six characters alternating letter and digit, with a space in the middle: K1A 0B1. The letters D, F, I, O, Q, and U are never used—if you see them, something has been misread.

The province code is two letters: ON Ontario, QC Québec, BC British Columbia, AB Alberta.

The final line is KANADA in capital letters—this is Swedish and must be written this way because your letter is sorted in Sweden before leaving the country.

The last line is always the country name in Swedish: KANADA. This surprises people who write the rest of the address in English, but the letter is sorted in Sweden before it leaves the country, and Swedish sorting reads Swedish. Everything above that line should look exactly as it would if the letter had been posted inside Canada, because a postal worker there is the one who has to read it.

Almost every letter that fails to arrive has an address problem, not a transport problem. These are the mistakes that keep coming back on mail posted from Sweden to Canada:

Always add a sender address. A letter with a correct sender comes back to you if the address is wrong, and you can then send it again. Without one, the letter is simply gone.

Normal delivery is 6–12 vardagar, counted from the moment we hand the letter to PostNord — not from the moment you order. Order before 11:45 on a weekday and the letter is handed in the same day.

Most of the variation comes from distribution inside Canada rather than from the flight. A letter to a major city arrives faster than one to a rural address in the same country.

A standard letter to Canada costs 88 SEK and an express letter 128 SEK. Printing, paper, envelope, postage and hand-in to PostNord are all included. The price is the same to every country, so you never need to know which postal zone Canada belongs to.

PostNord divides the world into seven zones if you buy stamps and post the letter yourself, which is why other services charge different amounts for different countries. The table below shows both options.

Canada Post covers immense distances across the second-largest country in the world. A letter to Toronto or Vancouver follows well-established routes, but mail to Nunavut and northern Québec travels by air and can take significantly longer than the standard timeframe.

In Québec, addresses are often written in French, but the Canadian format—house number before street name—applies nationwide. Whether your recipient lives in a French-speaking or English-speaking area, the structure remains the same.

Registered international mail (Rek utrikes) may contain documents only, weighs no more than 2 kg and carries liability up to 2,000 SEK. It can be tracked to most countries, and only one recipient may be named.

It is the right service for notices of termination, powers of attorney and legal documents where you need proof that the letter was sent. The country name still has to be written in Swedish on a registered letter — KANADA on the last line.

Banknotes and coins may not be sent in an international letter, in any currency and for any amount. Dangerous goods are prohibited. Goods sent in a letter to a country outside the EU require a customs declaration and a barcode that an ordinary letter does not carry.

We therefore send documents and personal letters only. That is also what keeps the service simple: no customs forms, no weighing and no questions about the contents.

You need no printer, no envelope and no international stamps. Everything happens in your browser, and the letter is handed to PostNord in Sweden by us.