Free Shipping Label Templates

Six free shipping label templates in Microsoft Word, for addressing parcels, printing return labels and marking what is inside. One thing to settle first, because it causes more confusion than anything else on the subject: a tracked courier label is not something you can design, and almost everything else about a parcel is.

• Templates6 designs
• FormatMicrosoft Word
• Print onLabel sheets or paper
• CostFree, no signup

What you can print yourself, and what you cannot

Label	Who makes it
Tracked carrier label	The carrier. The barcode encodes a tracking number issued by their system, so it has to be generated by them — through their website, a shipping platform, or over the counter. A barcode you draw yourself scans as nothing.
Address label	You. For untracked post, for courier services that accept a written address, and as a backup under the carrier label. This is what these templates are for.
Return address label	You. Small, on the back or top left, and the thing that gets an undeliverable parcel home.
Contents or packing label	You. Order number, item list, who packed it.
Handling labels	You. Fragile, this way up, keep dry, heavy. Carriers do not guarantee to act on them, but they visibly help.
Customs documentation	Shared. The forms come from the carrier or postal service, but you supply and sign the contents declaration.

The practical approach for anything tracked: print the carrier’s label, and put your own address label inside the box as well. If the outer label is torn off, soaked or scuffed away — which happens — a slip of paper inside with both addresses on it is the difference between delivery and a warehouse of unclaimed parcels.

The templates

Six Word layouts to edit and print. Each download is a zip file — extract it before opening, and print one sheet on plain paper to check alignment before using label stock.

Never tape over the barcode

The old version of this page suggested laminating labels to waterproof them. It is a reasonable instinct and it is the wrong thing to do, so it is worth being direct about.

Lamination and clear tape across a barcode reflect the scanner’s light. A scanner reading a shiny surface at the wrong angle sees glare rather than bars, and the label fails to read — which means the parcel drops out of automated sorting and gets handled by hand, delayed, or returned. The same applies to a label inside a shiny plastic sleeve pulled tight enough to create reflections.

What to do instead:

• Tape around the edges of the label, not across the barcode. This is what carriers ask for, and it holds the label on perfectly well.
• Use a proper adhesive document pouch for genuinely wet conditions. They are matte enough to scan through and cost very little.
• Print with a laser printer if you have one. Inkjet ink runs the moment the box meets rain; laser toner is fused and does not.
• Stick the label flat on the largest face, not wrapped around a corner, not over a seam, and not over the tape join. A barcode bent around an edge cannot be read at all.
• Remove or fully cover old labels and barcodes when reusing a box. A scanner finding the previous barcode will cheerfully send your parcel back where it came from, and this is one of the commonest causes of a mysterious misdelivery.
• Print at 100%. Turn off “fit to page” and any scaling — resizing a barcode changes its dimensions and can make it unreadable even though it looks fine.

Writing the address so machines read it

Postal sorting is automated, and the machines have preferences. The United States Postal Service sets these out in Publication 28, and the principles travel well even where the details differ.

• Uppercase, in dark ink on a light background. No script, no italics, no bold, and nothing handwritten if you can avoid it.
• Punctuation can be left out — the exceptions being the hyphen in a ZIP+4 code and in hyphenated street numbers. Commas and full stops add nothing a sorting machine uses.
• One uniform left margin down every line of the address block.
• Nothing printed below the last line of the delivery address. That bottom area is where the sorting equipment looks, so a logo or a slogan there causes problems.
• For international post, the country name goes on the last line by itself, in English and in capitals. This is the rule most often broken, and it is the one that determines whether the item even leaves the country correctly.
• Get the postcode right above all else. Automated sorting leans on it more heavily than on the street name, so a correct postcode with a slightly wrong street usually still arrives, and the reverse often does not.

Add a phone number for the recipient where the carrier asks for one — couriers delivering to businesses and to apartment buildings genuinely use it, and its absence is a common reason for a failed first attempt.

Printing a batch with mail merge

If you are sending more than a handful, typing each label is the wrong approach. Word’s mail merge takes a spreadsheet of addresses and fills a sheet of labels in one pass.

1. Put the addresses in a spreadsheet first

   One row per recipient, one column per element — name, company, street, city, state or region, postcode, country. Separate columns matter: a single “address” column cannot be reformatted later. Our address list templates are already laid out this way.

2. Clean the data before merging, not after

   Convert to uppercase, strip stray punctuation, and check for blanks in the postcode column. Fixing a hundred labels after printing is a sheet of wasted label stock; fixing a spreadsheet column takes seconds.

3. Choose the label size before you lay anything out

   In Word, Mailings then Labels, and pick the product code printed on your label sheet packaging. Setting this first means the template matches the physical sheet; doing it afterwards means redoing the layout.

4. Print one sheet on plain paper and hold it against the labels

   Up to the light, against an actual sheet of label stock. Alignment drifts between printers, and this is a ten-second check that saves a packet of labels.

5. Feed label sheets one at a time

   And use the manual feed or rear tray if your printer has one, so the sheet travels in a straighter path. Label sheets jam more readily than paper, and a label peeling off inside a printer is a bad afternoon.

Sending abroad

International parcels need a customs declaration as well as an address, and the contents description is where things go wrong.

• Describe the contents specifically. “Gift”, “sample” and “goods” are not descriptions. “Cotton t-shirt, 1 unit” is. Vague declarations are a leading cause of parcels being held.
• Declare the real value. Under-declaring to reduce duty is a customs offence rather than a shipping tactic, and it also voids most insurance — if the parcel is lost, you are compensated at the value you wrote.
• Use the correct commodity code where the form asks for one. The carrier’s tools will look it up.
• Say who pays the duty. If it is the recipient, tell them in advance. A surprise customs bill at the door is the single most common complaint in cross-border selling.
• Keep the paperwork consistent. The label, the customs declaration, the invoice and the packing list must agree with each other. Our export packing list templates cover the documents that travel with a commercial consignment.

Who carries the risk if a parcel goes missing

The old version of this page stated that the seller is responsible for delivery errors. That is too broad to be useful, and sometimes wrong.

Who bears the loss depends on what was agreed: the terms of the contract, the Incoterm on an international sale, consumer protection law where the buyer is a consumer, and who supplied the address in the first place. A business-to-business sale on terms where risk passes at dispatch sits very differently from a consumer sale, where in many jurisdictions the seller carries the risk until the goods reach the buyer regardless of what the carrier did.

Two practical conclusions. Say in your terms when risk passes, rather than leaving it to be argued about afterwards — our sales contract templates cover the title and risk clauses. And keep proof of dispatch and the tracking reference, because whoever carries the risk, the conversation starts with evidence of what was sent and when.

Common questions