Overprints and surcharges: why they exist

Stamps · 7 September 2026

An overprint is text or a design printed onto a stamp that was already finished. Postal services did it because it was fast and cheap: when a currency changed, a territory changed hands or a rate moved overnight, overprinting existing stock solved the problem in days rather than months. That speed is exactly why overprints are both historically interesting and the most forged thing in philately.

Five kinds you will meet

1. Surcharge. A new denomination printed over the old one, used when rates or currency changed faster than new stamps could be printed.
2. Change of authority. A new country or administration name over stamps of the previous one – common after independence, occupation or partition.
3. Change of purpose. Turning an ordinary stamp into an official, airmail, postage due or charity issue by adding a word.
4. Commemorative. An event, date or slogan added to existing stock to mark something without a new printing.
5. Control and specimen marks. Overprints that restrict use – specimen, cancelled, local validity – which look like the others and are catalogued very differently.

Why they are forged so often

The base stamp is usually cheap and the overprint is usually simple: a few letters or digits in one colour. Adding those to a common stamp is the least demanding forgery in the hobby, and the reward is large because the overprinted variety can be many times scarcer than the stamp beneath it. That imbalance – cheap base, valuable addition – is the whole reason for caution.

How to check an overprint

• Ink on top of ink. Under magnification the overprint should sit clearly above the stamp's own printing, with slightly different sheen. Ink that merges with the design was printed at the same time, which is a different thing entirely.
• Impression. Letterpress overprints often leave a faint indentation you can feel on the back of the stamp. A perfectly flat overprint on a period stamp deserves a second look.
• Typeface and spacing. Compare letter shapes, thickness and gaps against a reference image at the same scale. Forgeries drift here first, exactly as described in the guide to telling an original from a copy.
• Position. Genuine overprints vary slightly in position across a sheet; identical placement on several examples is suspicious.
• The base stamp. Check that the underlying stamp is the right issue, perforation and paper for that overprint – measured, not assumed, as in the guide to perforation.

Errors within overprints

Because overprinting is a second pass through a press, it produces its own family of errors: inverted, doubled, misplaced, wrong colour, or applied to the wrong stamp. These are catalogued separately and are precisely what forgers imitate. The distinction between a genuine production error and something made later is the same one described in the guide to errors and varieties: an error repeats within a print run in a way damage cannot.

How common are they

Common enough to matter and rare enough to notice. In the open archive, 1,713 of the 80,472 stamp images across 271 countries are recorded as overprints – roughly one in fifty. They cluster where history was unstable: currency reforms, new states, occupations. That distribution is itself a useful reading, because an overprint often marks the exact year a postal system changed hands.

Open the catalogue: world stamps, Soviet stamps.