Registry entry

United States Postal Service Change of Address (Mail Forwarding)

Request that the U.S. Postal Service forward an individual's, family's, or business's mail after a move, permanently or temporarily, using the official Change of Address process (PS Form 3575 / the online Mover's Guide). This document describes the mover type, schedule, old and new addresses, contact details, and identity-verification path. It does not submit the request; the live usps.com source is always authoritative (see VERIFICATION.md).

Registry entry

us/usps/change-of-address

Jurisdiction
United States · national
Version
1.0.0
Verification
draft
Authority
United States Postal Service

GovSchema spec v0.1

Authoritative source PS Form 3575

Machine access

Schema document
registry/us/usps/change-of-address/1.0.0/schema.jsonapplication/schema+json
Verification record
registry/us/usps/change-of-address/1.0.0/VERIFICATION.mdtext/markdown
Registry catalog
registry/index.jsonone record per schema id

Field reference

21 fields across 6 steps, read from the published schema.json — names, types, requiredness, and validation as the document states them. The live government form remains the authoritative source.

About your move

  • moverType enum required

    individual = one person; family = everyone moving shares the same last name; business = a business is relocating. The choice determines which name fields apply.

    enum: individual | family | business
  • changeType enum required

    permanent = you are moving for good and mail should be rerouted to the new address; temporary = you are relocating for 15 days up to 1 year and mail should be forwarded for a fixed period, then returned to the old address.

    enum: permanent | temporary

Who is moving

  • firstName string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Required for an individual or family move; omit for a business move (use businessName instead).

    length: 1–100
  • middleName string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 0–100
  • lastName string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Required for an individual or family move. For a family move this is the shared household last name; mail is forwarded for everyone with that last name at the old address. Omit for a business move.

    length: 1–100
  • businessName string optional

    Required for a business move; omit for an individual or family move.

    length: 1–120

When to start forwarding

  • moveEffectiveDate date required

    The date mail forwarding should begin, YYYY-MM-DD. For PS Form 3575 the Postal Service limits backdating of the start date to no more than 45 days before the submission date.

  • temporaryEndDate date optional

    Required only when changeType is 'temporary': the date forwarding should stop and mail return to the old address, YYYY-MM-DD. Temporary forwarding runs a minimum of 15 days and up to 1 year.

Address you are moving from

  • oldAddressLine1 string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. The address you are moving from.

    length: 1–120
  • oldAddressLine2 string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 0–120
  • oldAddressCity string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 1–80
  • oldAddressState string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Two-letter USPS state or territory abbreviation, e.g. CA, NY, TX.

    pattern
  • oldAddressPostalCode string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. 5-digit or ZIP+4 format, e.g. 90210 or 90210-1234.

    pattern

Address you are moving to

  • newAddressLine1 string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. The address you are moving to.

    length: 1–120
  • newAddressLine2 string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 0–120
  • newAddressCity string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data.

    length: 1–80
  • newAddressState string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. Two-letter USPS state or territory abbreviation, e.g. CA, NY, TX.

    pattern
  • newAddressPostalCode string required

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. 5-digit or ZIP+4 format, e.g. 90210 or 90210-1234.

    pattern

Contact and identity verification

  • phone string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. In international E.164 format, e.g. +12025551234.

    pattern
  • email string optional

    Personal identifier; handle as sensitive data. A valid email address; used by USPS to send a confirmation. The online process sends a confirmation code to this address.

    length: 0–254
  • identityVerificationMethod enum required

    online_card = verify online using a credit or debit card whose billing address matches the old or new address (USPS charges a small identity-verification fee; the current amount is published on the live source); in_person = verify at a Post Office with acceptable photo ID. The fee is intentionally not encoded here.

    enum: online_card | in_person

Verification record

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

  • status: draft
  • verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
  • verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-06-30

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official source below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against the live online Mover's Guide flow. It therefore remains draft, not verified. Consumers SHOULD treat this as an accurate, source-grounded structural reference, not a load-bearing description of the live process.

Source examined

  • Document (id, version): us/usps/change-of-address / 1.0.0
  • Spec version: GovSchema 0.1.0
  • Authority: United States Postal Service (USPS)
  • Primary source URL: https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm
  • Official form id: PS Form 3575 (paper equivalent of the online Change of Address)
  • Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-06-30
  • Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

What was confirmed against the source

| Source element | Field(s) | |---|---| | Change of Address can be for an Individual, Family, or Business | moverType | | Change can be permanent or temporary (15 days up to 1 year) | changeType, temporaryEndDate | | Forwarding has a start / move effective date | moveEffectiveDate | | Old (from) and new (to) addresses are collected | oldAddress*, newAddress* | | Contact details (phone and email) are collected | phone, email | | Identity is verified online with a card (billing address matching the old or new address, small fee) or in person with photo ID | identityVerificationMethod |

Confirmed source rules folded into field descriptions rather than encoded as constraints (v0.1 has no cross-field or temporal rules):

  • For a family move, everyone shares the same last name and mail is forwarded for that last name at the old address (lastName).
  • Temporary forwarding minimum is 15 days (temporaryEndDate).
  • PS Form 3575 limits backdating of the start date to no more than 45 days before submission (moveEffectiveDate).

Conditional requiredness (not encoded structurally in v0.1)

Name requiredness depends on moverType: an individual or family move requires firstName/lastName; a business move requires businessName instead. The GovSchema v0.1 field model has no conditional-required mechanism, so firstName, lastName, and businessName are all declared required: false and the conditional rule is documented in their descriptions. This is the same limitation tracked for conditional flow in GSP-0004; when a conditional mechanism is adopted, a new schema version should encode the rule directly.

What is NOT yet independently verified

  • The exact field order and labels of the live online Mover's Guide were not captured screen-by-screen; label/sourceRef annotations are indicative, derived from the public "Standard Forward Mail" page and PS Form 3575, not a verbatim transcription of the current online flow.
  • Constraint patterns (state, ZIP, phone) are reasonable encodings consistent with the rest of the registry, not citations of a published USPS validation rule.
  • The identity-verification fee and current pricing are deliberately not encoded as data (they change); the document points consumers to the live source.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2 field-by-field, step 3 flow), confirms the source is authoritative, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy. This v1.0.0 record stays as the authoring provenance.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2026-12-30 (6 months): the Change of Address process carries an identity-verification fee and is pricing-sensitive. Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.

View the raw record (VERIFICATION.md)

Version history

  • 1.0.0 draft latest this page has verification record schema.json

Independent and non-affiliated

GovSchema is an independent, open-source project. This reference is not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by United States Postal Service or any government. The authoritative source is always the live government form and its official instructions.