How much does a First-Class Forever stamp cost in the United States?

How to get close to this number

Price it against what it buys. A stamp pays for physical collection, sorting, transport across a continent and hand delivery to an address, all within days. Under a dollar for that service is the remarkable part rather than the price rising.

The Forever mechanism in the explanation is a genuinely unusual financial product: a stamp bought at any price stays valid at face value no matter how many times the rate rises afterward. It is an inflation-indexed prepayment issued by a government agency, sold at a post office counter, with no limit on how long you can hold it.

That makes stamps a mild store of value, and people do buy them in bulk before announced increases. A service that offers a permanent hedge against its own future price rises is an odd thing to exist, and it exists because the alternative — reprinting and reselling denominated stamps at every rate change — was more expensive than the hedge.