All mail items need to be printed with the Access Indicia – the Wholesale equivalent of a stamp. The indicia is comprised of two elements the Customer Access Indicator and the Royal Mail Access Indicator (often known as the “S” block).

We use the indicia to identify a Royal Mail Wholesale customer: within the ‘S block’ is an Access licence number that is unique to each customer and relates to the Customer Access Indicator. The Access Indicia helps us to resolve billing, presentation and other important issues like repatriating damaged items, missorts and identifying fraud.

Each of our customers may have up to five indicia designs. We have templates to help customers design and position the indicia on their mail items, please see the link on the left.

All new indicias need to be approved and tested by us before our customer uses them. Processing a new indicia request can take  us up to eight weeks: our engineers  have to allocate a live testing environment to it, which are necessarily limited, and we may need to talk to you about  your original design and make changes to it so that  our machines can read it. Please click on the link on the left to find out more.