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Canadian provincial and territorial postal abbreviations are used by Canada Post in a code system consisting of two capital letters, to represent the 13 provinces and territories on addressed mail. These abbreviations allow automated sorting. ISO 3166 2:CA identifiers' second elements are all the same as these; ISO adopted the existing Canada Post abbreviations. Some of the French versions included a hyphen. Nunavut (created in 1999) does not have a designated abbreviation because it did not exist when these codes were phased out, though some can be found in other official works.

Province or Territory Postal and ISO 3166‑2:CA abbreviation Traditional abbreviation (English) T. N. is short for Terre Neuve. T. N. L. is short for Terre Neuve et Labrador. NF was the two letter abbreviation used before the province's name changed to Newfoundland and Labrador. LB was commonly used for Labrador—the mainland part of the province—prior to 2002. It was an official code available for optional use in lieu of NF and was listed in the Canada Postal Guide. Northwest Territories NT N. W. T. T. N. O. T. N. O. is short for Territoires du Nord Ouest. Nova Scotia NS N. S. N. É. N. É. is short for Nouvelle Écosse. Nunavut NU Nvt. Nt These traditional abbreviations are not listed by Natural Resources Canada and TERMIUM Plus, both of which only used NU. Later, PQ evolved from P. Q. as the first two letter non punctuated abbreviation. Later still, QC evolved as the second two letter non punctuated abbreviation, making Quebec's abbreviation consistent with other provinces insofar as using letters solely from the name of the province, but not the word "province", as PQ did. New York State and New York City use QB to identify Quebec vehicle licence plates. Also to distinguish PQ: Province du Québec from PQ: Parti Québécois (the political party). Saskatchewan SK Sask. Sask. Yukon YT Yuk. Yn YK is common but not official. It is used as the second level country code domain (. yk. ca). ISO 3166 2 lists YT as official.

The sources of the postal abbreviations vary. Some are from the initials of two of the words in the name of a province or territory, while others are from the first and final letter or from the first and some other letter in the name. All of these names are based on the English form of the name, though they also correspond to their French equivalents in various ways (for example, NT could be read for the first and last letters of Nord Ouest, instead of Northwest Territories). For Quebec and New Brunswick, the two provinces with large numbers of French speakers, the initials in both languages are identical. French equivalents of each abbreviation once existed: see Traditional abbreviations.

These abbreviations are fully compatible with the equivalent two letter codes used for states and territorial areas of the United States, because no abbreviations overlap. The policy of not overlapping adjacent country abbreviations, which helps the postal processing system avoid dealing with naming collisions, precludes use of NV for Nunavut (compare NV for Nevada) and TN for Terre Neuve/Terra Nova/Newfoundland (compare TN for Tennessee). Manitoba's abbreviation, MB, is due to U. S. states already having abbreviations in all of the letters of the province's name besides "B". This policy later became a formal agreement between Canada Post and the USPS. The USPS changed the abbreviation for the U. S. state of Nebraska from NB to NE in November 1969 to avoid a conflict with New Brunswick. The Canadian policy of adopting provincial abbreviations that did not overlap with the state abbreviations of adjacent countries differed from the situation in Mexico, where two letter combinations for Mexican states were chosen by various competing commercial organizations (in the absence of any official Correos de México list) regardless of whether that combination was already in use in the United States or Canada, e. g., CO (Coahuila/Colorado), ME (Mexico/Maine), MI (Michoacán/Michigan), MO (Morelos/Missouri), NL (Nuevo León/Newfoundland and Labrador), and BC (Baja California/British Columbia). ISO 3166 2, an international standard, offers an alternative with globally unique administrative division identifiers, whose division elements are all between one and three letters long. This is very useful for software and web development, although it may be moot for established postal systems. Its codes for Canada, the U. S., and Mexico are listed at ISO 3166 2:CA, ISO 3166 2:US, and ISO 3166 2:MX, respectively.

In 1991, the code for Quebec was changed from PQ to QC. Nunavut's code became effective on 13 December 2000; before this date, but after Nunavut's creation on 1 April 1999, the abbreviation "NT" was used for Nunavut as well as the Northwest Territories. Canadian postal codes begin with "X" for both NT and NU, the only two territorial or provincial jurisdictions to share the same initial postal code letter. However, the new code NU was chosen to stem possible confusion and to reflect the new territory's creation. Newfoundland and Labrador's postal abbreviation was changed from NF to NL on 21 October 2002, to reflect the provincial name change from "Newfoundland" to "Newfoundland and Labrador" on 6 December 2001.