Forever Stamps by Year

Every forever stamp carries a year of issue printed in small type along its edge, and that little date confuses more buyers than anything else we deal with. People find our forever stamps 2025 listings, then spot a 2019 booklet a few rows down and assume something's wrong with it. Nothing is. A forever stamp from any year covers a one-ounce First-Class letter today, tomorrow, and twenty years from now. The year only tells you when USPS printed the design.

We're an independent stamp shop, not affiliated with the Postal Service. Our inventory comes from surplus — estate lots, business overstock, offices that ordered ten rolls and closed before using two. That's why you'll see sealed booklets from 2017 sitting next to this year's flags. This page walks through what came out each year from 2017 to 2026, which of those issues we currently stock, and when an older year is actually the smarter buy.

What a Year-Dated Forever Stamp Actually Is

USPS refreshes its core designs on a rough annual cycle. The US Flags stamp gets redrawn almost every year. The Love stamp gets a new design each January, timed for Valentine's mail. Commemoratives — the Betty Whites and lunar new year issues — come out once and never return. So "2023 forever stamps" isn't a special category with its own rules. It's just the set of designs that entered post offices that year.

Two things follow from that. First, the year matters a lot to collectors, because print runs end and unused booklets get scarce. Second, the year matters almost not at all to someone mailing a stack of invoices. Keep both audiences in mind as you read the year sections below — we'll flag which issues lean which way.

2017 Forever Stamps

2017 was the year of the Total Solar Eclipse stamp, the first US issue printed with heat-sensitive ink — press your thumb on the black disc and the moon appears. That one sold out fast and mostly lives in collections now. The everyday workhorse was the flag design, and we still have sealed 2017 US Flags forever stamps from surplus lots. Eight years old, full postage value, and honestly one of the cleaner flag illustrations USPS has done.

2018 Forever Stamps

The 2018 program honored Mister Rogers and astronaut Sally Ride, two of the most requested subjects USPS had ever polled. The flag stamp that year showed the flag rippling against a plain sky. Our 2018 US Flags forever stamps come from the same kind of overstock — unused, unhinged, and they run through a postage meter line just like a fresh roll.

2019 Forever Stamps

2019 gave us Sesame Street's 50th anniversary set and the Transcontinental Railroad 150th, both heavy collector favorites. For everyday designs we stock two: the 2019 US Flags stamps in rolls and booklets, and the 2019 Love Hearts Blossom stamps — that January's Valentine issue, hand-lettered hearts on a white field. Wedding planners buy the Hearts Blossom more than anyone else. The design never came back after 2019, so once surplus stock runs out, that's it.

2020–2021 Forever Stamps

We're grouping these because pandemic-era mail volume chewed through most of the 2020 print runs — surplus from that year barely exists. 2021 stock survived better. We carry the 2021 Love forever stamps and the A Visit From St. Nick 2021 holiday stamps, which people grab in October and forget exist the rest of the year. Buy holiday designs off-season. They're the same stamps.

2022 Forever Stamps

2022 was a strong commemorative year — Title IX's 50th anniversary, and a stamp for shark researcher Eugenie Clark that we liked enough to keep as its own listing. For the standards, we stock 2022 forever stamps in both formats: 2022 US Flags in sheets and rolls and the 2022 Love stamps. If you're mailing at volume, the flag rolls from this year are usually our deepest stock.

2023 Forever Stamps

The 2023 flag issue was the "Freedom" flag — a stylized flag with the word worked into the design, and people either love it or ask us for the older realistic flags instead. We carry the 2023 US Flags Freedom stamps in booklets and rolls and the 2023 Love stamps, that year's puppy-and-kitten pair. One oddball worth knowing: 2023's Sailboats forever postcard stamps are postcard-rate stamps, not letter-rate — same forever principle, different class of mail. Don't mix them up on envelopes.

2024 Forever Stamps

2024 forever stamps are recent enough that USPS was still selling some of them into early 2025, so surplus is plentiful and condition is uniformly clean. We stock the 2024 US Flags stamps and the 2024 Love stamps. The Year of the Dragon lunar issue was the collector headline that year and moves quickly whenever we land a lot.

Forever Stamps 2025

The current core lineup. USPS forever stamps 2025 include the redrawn flag — we carry 2025 US Flags in booklets and rolls — and this year's 2025 Love stamps. Two commemoratives stood out: the U.S. Army 250th anniversary stamp, and the Betty White forever stamps, which outsold everything else on this page the month they arrived. If you just need reliable letter postage and don't care about the year, 2025 flags are the default answer.

2026 Forever Stamps

Forever stamps 2026 are arriving now, led by the 2026 Love stamps in stock already. This is America's 250th anniversary year, and the USPS program leans hard patriotic — expect flag and founding-era designs to dominate the schedule. We'll add 2026 issues to this page as surplus lots reach us, which typically lags the post-office release by a few months.

Does an Older Year Still Work?

Yes — every letter-rate stamp on this page, 2017 through 2026, covers full First-Class postage today, and we've written up exactly why (and the two exceptions to watch for) in our guide to whether forever stamps stay valid.

Collecting vs. Actually Mailing With Them

If you're mailing: buy whichever year is cheapest per stamp and don't overthink it. Flags from 2017 seal an envelope exactly as well as flags from 2025. Mixed-year lots are how offices with real mail volume save money.

If you're collecting: the year is everything. Retired one-off designs — Hearts Blossom, Eugenie Clark, the lunar new year animals — only get harder to find in sealed, post-office-fresh condition. A tip from watching our own inventory for years: the designs that vanish first aren't the famous ones. It's the quiet annual issues, because nobody thinks to save them until the surplus dries up.

And there's a middle group we see constantly: people mailing wedding invitations or holiday cards who want the envelope to look right. For them, a retired Love design from the year they met, or a St. Nick stamp on a Christmas card, is worth hunting down. That's postage as part of the message.

FAQ

Are 2025 forever stamps worth more postage than a 2018 stamp?

No. Postage value is identical across every year — that's the entire point of the forever designation. The differences are design, availability, and collector interest, never mailing power.

Which year should I buy for everyday mail?

Whichever is in stock at the best per-stamp rate. Most bulk mailers take our deepest-inventory year, currently the 2022 and 2024 flag rolls, and mix years freely across an envelope run.

Why does an independent shop have sealed stamps from 2017?

Surplus. Businesses close, estates get settled, offices switch to metered mail — and their unused postage ends up in lots we buy, verify, and resell. Forever stamps hold their function no matter how long they sat in a drawer, which makes them one of the few paper goods where "old stock" costs you nothing in usefulness.