To send a letter to the President, mail it to The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500. That address has reached every sitting president for decades and still reaches Donald Trump today. If you want a faster route, the online form at whitehouse.gov/contact goes to the same Office of Presidential Correspondence, and the public comments line at 202-456-1111 lets you leave a spoken message.
How to Address and Format the Letter
Write the address exactly as it appears on the envelope of any official White House mailing:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Type your letter on standard 8½-by-11-inch paper if you can. If you handwrite it, use pen and write as neatly as possible. Put your full return address on both the letter and the envelope, and add your email address if you have one. Those details give the correspondence office a way to send a reply back to you.1National Archives. Write or Call the White House
What to Include Inside
Keep the letter focused on one topic. State your position or request in the opening lines, then add the details that support it. Staff members read enormous volumes of mail every week, and a short, clear letter is far more likely to earn a substantive reply than a long or scattered one. Keep a copy before you send it, because a response may arrive weeks later and you’ll want your original wording to compare against.
Sending It Through the Mail
Standard first-class postage is fine. If you want proof the letter reached the mailroom, USPS Certified Mail or Priority Mail gives you delivery confirmation.
Every piece of physical mail passes through a Secret Service screening facility that checks for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive hazards before it moves on to the correspondence office.2United States Secret Service. FY20 Protective Operations Thick envelopes, powders, or anything unusual will slow delivery or stop it entirely. A normal letter in a standard envelope clears screening without issue.
Faster Options: Online Form and Phone
The contact form at whitehouse.gov/contact reaches the same office as physical mail and reaches it days sooner. The form asks for your name, address, phone number, and email, and gives you a comments field of up to 4,000 characters. You’ll pick a message type: Contact the President, Contact the Vice President, Help with a Federal Agency, or Request a Presidential Greeting. The form works from outside the United States too, with fields for country, city, and postal code.3The White House. Contact Us
By phone, the comments line is 202-456-1111 for leaving a message about a policy or concern. The main switchboard, 202-456-1414, connects you to specific offices. Calls are logged alongside written correspondence.
Requesting a Presidential Greeting
If you’re writing to mark a milestone rather than to share a view, use the dedicated form at whitehouse.gov/greetings. Recognized occasions include birthdays, weddings, wedding anniversaries, birth of a child, condolences, Eagle Scout awards, Girl Scout Gold Awards, graduations, spiritual milestones, and retirements.4The White House. Presidential Greetings
A few rules to know before you submit:
- Birthdays require the date and age. Children must be 17 or under, adults 18 or older.
- Wedding anniversaries are only recognized at 25 years, 50 years, or 51-plus years.
- Retirement categories include general, civilian federal agency, first responder, and law enforcement. Military retirements have to go through the service member’s branch.
- Condolence requests can include a link to an obituary along with the date of death.
Every request needs the recipient’s full mailing address and your own name, email, and phone number. Submit six to eight weeks before the event. The Greetings Office tries to time delivery for the day of or the day before, and shorter notice often means the card arrives late.
What Happens After You Send It
The Office of Presidential Correspondence reads what comes in, tracks the concerns being raised, and coordinates replies on the President’s behalf.5The White House. Presidential Departments Not every letter draws a personal response, but all of them are logged and archived under the Presidential Records Act.
Response times vary. A general letter may bring a form acknowledgment after several weeks. Greeting requests usually take six to eight weeks. A letter asking for help with a federal agency takes longer because it gets routed to the relevant department first. The online form is consistently faster than paper mail for every category.
Don’t Send It to 45office.com
You may still find 45office.com and a Palm Beach P.O. Box listed as ways to reach Donald Trump. That office was set up between his two terms under the Former Presidents Act, which funds staff and office space for former presidents handling post-presidency correspondence.6National Archives. Former Presidents Act Now that he is the sitting President again, the White House is the correct channel, and mail sent to the old post-presidency address may not be processed the same way.