Door Hanger Sizes and Specs: What Actually Hangs on the Door
Door hanger sizes explained: the 4.5 x 11 inch card, what fits in a quarter, half, full, or double page slot, and how to design for the door handle.
Most door hanger size guides are written by print shops. They cover stock weights, bleed margins, and dieline templates, then leave you to figure out what actually works once the card is on a door. This one comes from the field. We design, print, and hang cards on Calgary and Red Deer doors every week, and the door hanger dimensions question we hear is not really about paper. It is about space. The StreetDrop hanger is a single 4.5 x 11 inch card that hangs on the door handle, and advertisers buy a slot on that card: quarter page, half page, full page, or the entire double page. Here is what fits in each slot, with real prices.
The physical card: 4.5 x 11 inches on the handle
The card is 4.5 inches wide and 11 inches tall, with a die-cut opening at the top that slips over the door handle. Three things follow from that shape:
- It reads top to bottom, like a phone screen. Tall and narrow forces a vertical hierarchy: hook up top, detail in the middle, action at the bottom.
- The handle opening eats the top of the card. The top section is die-cut and sits partly behind the handle, so nothing critical lives up there. Treat the usable area as a little shorter than 11 inches.
- It has to be touched. A homeowner cannot open their door without physically moving the card. That single mechanical fact is most of why the format works, and we will come back to it.
Door hanger sizes: the four slots and what fits in each
You are not buying the whole card unless you book the double page. You are buying a slot on it. Four options:
| Slot | Approximate space | Built for | 1 zone | 4+ zones |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quarter page | 4.5 x 2.75 in | One offer and a phone number | $400 | $325 |
| Half page | 4.5 x 5.5 in | Offer, proof, QR code | $700 | $550 |
| Full page | The entire front | A mini landing page | $1,400 | $1,100 |
| Double page | Entire front AND back | A full campaign | $2,900 | $1,925 |
Prices are per zone, per campaign, in CAD plus 5% GST. Two-zone and three-zone bookings price between the ends of each range. A Calgary zone is roughly 6,000 homes.
Quarter page: one offer, one number
Roughly the footprint of a business card and a half. That buys you one headline offer, one deadline, and one phone number. Not a service list, not a brand story. If your trade has a single obvious job (junk pickup, gutter clean, furnace tune-up), the quarter page is the cheapest way to put it on 6,000 doors: about 7 cents a door at the single-zone rate, closer to 5 cents at four zones or more.
Half page: offer plus proof plus QR
Twice the space buys you a proof element: a before and after photo, a review line, a years-in-business badge, plus a QR code that lands on your booking page. Most first campaigns should start here, because proof is usually the thing a cold homeowner is missing before they will call a stranger.
Full page: a mini landing page at the door
The entire front of the card. Headline, offer, three benefit bullets, one photo, a QR code, and a phone number big enough to read from the doormat. Structure it exactly like a landing page: one message per vertical band, the call to action at the bottom where the reading eye finishes.
Double page: front sells, back closes
The double page is the whole physical object, front and back. The front does the selling: offer, deadline, phone number. The back does the closing: what is included, service area, a second smaller offer, and a referral line for the neighbour who was not home.
Design hierarchy: three rules that outrank the slot size
Whatever slot you buy, the same hierarchy applies:
- Phone number largest. Larger than your logo. Larger than the headline if you have to choose. The card has one job: make a phone ring.
- One offer. A menu of five services reads as none. Pick the job you most want this month and lead with it.
- One deadline. "Book by Saturday" beats an open-ended offer because it gives the card an expiry date instead of a permanent spot on the fridge.
We wrote up the failure modes in the door hanger design mistakes we keep fixing. Short version: bury the phone number, stack multiple offers, or skip the deadline, and the slot size stops mattering.
Why the door handle beats a mailbox insert
A mailbox insert arrives inside a stack. The stack gets sorted over the recycling bin in one continuous motion, and whether your piece was on top or in the middle, that sort takes seconds.
A card on the door handle arrives alone. Three physical differences:
- It must be handled. Nobody gets into their own house without moving it. There is no sort-the-stack motion available. It is one item, in the hand, at the moment someone arrives home.
- It hangs at the decision point. The person lifting it off the handle is standing at their own front door, looking at their own property: the lawn, the gutters, the roof, the junk pile beside the garage. The trigger for the job is in their field of view while your offer is in their hand.
- It keeps working until touched. A hanger on the door of a late commuter or a family away for the weekend stays visible for hours or days. A mailbox insert works for exactly one mail check.
Mail has its uses. But slot for slot, the handle is the premium physical placement, which is why we build the whole business around it.
You do not need print-ready art
Every slot includes design. StreetDrop builds the artwork in-house, so you do not need a dieline, a template, bleed settings, or a designer on retainer. Send the offer, the phone number, and a logo if you have one; we handle the hierarchy, the layout, and the print. The same team then delivers the card on GPS-tracked walking routes with our own trained couriers in Calgary and Red Deer, with a live tracking link for every campaign.
If you are pricing the whole job end to end, the Calgary delivery cost breakdown covers the distribution side of the math.
Pick a slot, pick a neighbourhood, and book the campaign in about five minutes at streetdrop.ca/quote.
