Blank ID Cards & PVC Card Stock

Blank ID cards are the stock your printer prints on: plain plastic cards, no design, no chip, nothing encoded. They are the least interesting item in a card program and the one most likely to quietly cause trouble, because the wrong stock shows up as bad print quality, double feeds, and a printhead that wears out early. We have sold card stock since 1984, and this page covers what to buy, how much, and what actually separates a good blank card from a cheap one.

What blank actually means

A blank card is unprinted. It is not necessarily featureless.

Plain blank PVC is exactly what it sounds like: a white plastic rectangle waiting for a photo and a name. That is what most people mean and it is what most programs run on.

But blank also gets used for cards that carry a technology and simply have not been personalized yet. A blank RFID card has a chip in it. A blank magnetic stripe card has a stripe on the back. A blank prox card has a credential inside that still needs programming before a reader will accept it. All three are blank in the sense that nothing is printed on the front, and none of them is interchangeable with plain PVC.

So the first question is always the same: does the card need to do anything besides show a face and a name? If not, plain PVC is the right and cheapest answer.

The size and thickness you almost certainly need

CR-80 at 30 mil. That is credit card size, 3.375 by 2.125 inches, at credit card thickness, 0.76 millimeters.

It is what every card printer we sell expects out of the hopper, and it is what every badge holder, reel, clip and slot punch on the market is built around. Ordering anything else means checking compatibility at every step afterward.

Thinner stock, usually around 10 mil, exists for disposable event badges and promotional cards. It is genuinely flimsy, and many card printers will not feed it reliably because the hopper gate is set for 30 mil and two thin cards go through together. If you have a reason to use it, check the printer specification first.

Our guide to ID card sizes and thickness works through the numbers, the mil-versus-millimeter confusion, and the handful of cases where something other than 30 mil is correct.

Card surface is what you are actually buying

Blank cards look identical in a photograph. The difference is the surface, and it is the difference between a badge that looks professional and one that looks homemade.

Dye sublimation printing works by heat transferring dye into the card surface. A graphic quality card has a surface prepared to accept that dye evenly across the whole card. A cheaper card can have an inconsistent surface, and what you get is banding through solid color fills, blotchy patches, and photographs that look washed out in one corner and fine in the other.

There is a second cost that is less visible. A poor card surface leaves more residue on the printhead. More residue means more cleaning cycles, and over a printer's life it means a shorter printhead life. A printhead is one of the more expensive parts on a card printer, so saving a cent a card can end up costing several hundred dollars.

This is why we stock graphic quality stock rather than the cheapest available. It is not an upsell; it is the difference we would want explained to us.

How many to buy

Card stock does not expire, and buying in larger packs lowers the cost per card, so the honest advice is to buy roughly a year of stock if you have somewhere clean and dry to keep it.

To work out a year: take the number of cards you issue annually, then add your reprint rate. Reprints are the number people forget. Between lost badges, staff turnover, damaged cards and the occasional bad print, a realistic allowance is somewhere between ten and twenty percent on top of new issuance, and higher in schools.

The other thing worth doing is matching card quantity to ribbon yield so the two run out at roughly the same time. A 300-print ribbon and a 500-card pack are not aligned, and the result is a drawer with plenty of one and none of the other. Every ribbon we carry lists the manufacturer's own yield in our ribbon compatibility guide, which is the number that calculation needs.

If your printing is one big annual run rather than a steady trickle, it may be worth not buying stock at all. Our card printing service takes your data and artwork and ships finished cards, which removes the stock, the ribbon and the printer from your side entirely.

Storing and handling blank stock

Cards are more sensitive to handling than most people expect, and nearly every mystery print defect we get called about traces back to one of three things.

Fingerprints are the big one. The oil from a thumb on the print surface repels dye, and it shows up as a pale patch exactly where the thumb was. Handle cards by the edges, or leave them in the wrapper until they go in the hopper.

Dust is the second. An open pack sitting on a shelf collects it, and dust on the card surface becomes a speck of missing print and, worse, a scratch dragged across the printhead. Keep partial packs closed.

Temperature and humidity are the third. Cards stored somewhere cold and brought straight into a warm room can carry condensation, and cards stored somewhere hot can develop a slight bow that makes them feed badly. Room temperature and dry is all it takes.

Technology cards, when plain stock is not enough

If the card also opens a door, clocks someone in, or checks a member into a club, you need stock with the matching technology built in.

Magnetic stripe cards carry a stripe applied during manufacture, so it cannot be added afterward. Every stripe we sell is high coercivity, three track, which resists accidental erasure far better than low coercivity and is what access, time-and-attendance and hotel systems expect.

Prox cards carry a 125 kHz credential and have to be programmed to your facility code and format before a reader will accept them. We program HID credentials to your system, and our prox card guide covers the four pieces of information we need to do it.

Contactless smart cards work at 13.56 MHz and hold protected data rather than broadcasting a number. Our smart card guide explains what that changes.

A note on cost control: technology cards are several times the price of plain PVC, and it is normal to prove a card design on plain stock first and only move to the expensive cards once the layout, the photo crop and the punch position are right.

Ordering from us

Our standard blank is graphic quality CR-80 PVC, 30 mil, in a 500 card pack, and for most programs that is the whole decision. It fits every printer we sell and every accessory you already own.

You can browse the full range, plain stock through prox, smart and magnetic stripe, in Cards and Credentials. Every card page lists size, thickness, material and pack size, so you can confirm compatibility before you order rather than after a case arrives.

One thing worth sorting at the same time: a box of finished cards still needs something to hang it from. Holders, reels, clips and lanyards are covered on our badge accessories page, including how the slot punch position ties back to the card design.

If you are not sure what will feed in the printer you have, or whether your existing badges are prox or smart, tell us the printer model or send us a sample card. We would rather spend two minutes identifying it than have you order the wrong case. We have been doing this from Woodridge, Illinois since 1984, and we ship nationwide.