Avery 5163 template
Avery 5163 is the half-sheet shipping label: two inches by four, ten to a page, two across and five down.
Dimensions
- Label size
- 2" x 4"
- Labels per sheet
- 10 (2 across × 5 down)
- Sheet size
- US Letter, 8.5in × 11in
- Top margin
- 0.5in
- Side margin
- 0.1563in
- Horizontal pitch
- 4.1875in
- Vertical pitch
- 2in
Geometry source: LibreOffice label database, Avery Letter Size 5163 (2 x 5, 4.1875in x 2in pitch).
Check the fit before you print on stock. Print the blank template on plain paper, hold it against a sheet of Avery 5163 up to the light, and check the boxes land on the die-cuts. That is worth doing with any label template on any printer — paper size, driver margins and print scaling all shift a sheet, and one sheet of plain paper is cheaper than one sheet of labels. It is worth doing here in particular: these measurements are taken from an open label-template database and checked arithmetically on every build, and that same database’s Avery 5160 entry reproduces our own print-verified geometry exactly — but Avery 5163 has not itself been confirmed against physical stock.
What Avery 5163 is for
Parcels. At two by four inches it is large enough to carry a full delivery address at a size a courier can read at a glance, with room left over for a reference number, an order ID, or a barcode.
It is the biggest of the common rectangular address formats. Where a 5160 forces you to abbreviate, a 5163 lets you print the sender and the recipient on the same label with space between them.
Barcodes on 5163
This is the format where barcode mode makes the most sense. Two inches of height leaves plenty of room for a tall symbol above three lines of text, and four inches of width means the bars can be wide.
Bar width is the thing that decides whether a printed barcode scans. A symbol squeezed onto a small label has narrow bars that ordinary printer tolerances can smear together; the same symbol on a 5163 has bars roughly half again as wide, with margin to spare.
Printing 5163 labels from a spreadsheet
Import your order export, map the address columns to lines, pick a column for the barcode value if you need one, and print. Ten to a sheet means a fifty-parcel day is five sheets.
The barcode is drawn as vector rectangles, one per bar, rather than as an embedded image. Bar edges stay exactly where the geometry puts them regardless of print resolution, which is not true of a rasterised barcode.
Ten to a sheet, and what that means in practice
Two by four inches is a quarter of a US Letter page, so a 5163 sheet is ten labels laid out two across and five down with almost no wasted paper. For despatch work that is a convenient batch size: a sheet is a run, and a part-used sheet is easy to account for.
It also makes the format the cheapest per square inch of the address labels here. If you are printing a small number of large labels, you get more usable label area per sheet than any other layout on this site.
The trade-off is that a misfeed costs more. Ten large labels is a lot of stock to lose to a skewed sheet, so it is worth feeding these one at a time rather than loading a stack, and worth running the plain-paper alignment check before the first real sheet of a session.
Print Avery 5163 labels
1 Your spreadsheet
.xlsx, .xls or .csv. The file is read inside this tab and never uploaded.
2 What goes on each label
Drawn as a Code 128 symbol in vector, not as an image.
Assign a column to each line. Lines you leave unused are skipped, so the remaining lines close up rather than leaving a gap.
Pick a column holding a count to repeat each row that many times.
3 Label sheet
Skip labels you have already peeled off a part-used sheet.
4 Preview and print
Single label
First page
Print at actual size. Never use “Fit to page” or “Shrink to fit” — either one moves every label out of alignment with the sheet.
Other Avery formats
Sizes, uses and a full comparison are on the Avery template index.