The copy notation in a business letter is one of the smallest elements on the page and one of the most frequently mishandled. Writers either omit it when it's needed, format it inconsistently, or confuse the blind copy with the standard copy in ways that create real professional problems. Get it right and your letter is transparent, accountable, and easy to route. Get it wrong and you may inadvertently reveal information you intended to keep private, or leave recipients wondering who else saw the correspondence.
What the copy notation does
The copy notation tells the primary recipient that one or more other parties are also receiving the letter. It sits at the end of the document, after the signature block, the enclosure line, and any postscript. Its job is simple: disclosure. If you send a letter to a client and copy their account manager, the client has a right to know. The copy notation makes that explicit without interrupting the body of the letter.
In formal correspondence, transparency about distribution matters. Courts, regulators, and professional bodies have all treated undisclosed distribution as a breach of good faith in specific contexts. Even in ordinary business settings, a recipient who later discovers copies were sent without notice tends to feel managed rather than communicated with. The notation costs you nothing and protects the relationship.
How to format the standard copy notation
The standard abbreviation is cc, written in lowercase. It stands for "carbon copy," a term that dates from the era of typewriters and actual carbon paper. The abbreviation has survived completely unchanged into digital correspondence because it is universally understood.
Place cc flush left, two line spaces below the signature block or the last notation above it. Follow it with a colon, a single space, and the name of each copied recipient. For one recipient, the format is:
cc: Sarah Okonkwo, Head of Procurement
For multiple recipients, list each name on its own line, aligned beneath the first name:
cc: Sarah Okonkwo, Head of Procurement
David Lim, Legal Counsel
Maria Ferreira, Project Director
Don't write "CC:" in uppercase. Some style guides allow it, but the lowercase form is preferred in most professional contexts and aligns with how the abbreviation appears in email headers. Don't write "Copy to:" as a substitute unless your organisation's house style requires it.
Order the names by seniority if you know the hierarchy, or alphabetically by surname if you don't. Either approach signals thoughtfulness. A random order can read as careless.
When to use the blind copy notation
A blind copy, noted as bcc, means the primary recipient does not see that the additional party received the letter. The bcc notation appears only on the copy sent to the blind recipient, not on the original letter. This is a critical distinction. If you type "bcc: James Whitfield" on the letter you send to your client, you have just told your client that James Whitfield received it, which defeats the purpose entirely.
In practice, managing bcc in physical correspondence means keeping a separate file copy with the bcc notation marked. In organisations that send formal letters as PDFs, the same logic applies: the version that goes to the primary recipient carries no bcc notation; the version retained internally, or forwarded to the blind recipient, carries it.
Use bcc sparingly. Its legitimate purposes include copying a compliance officer, a supervisor reviewing a sensitive matter, or a legal team monitoring a dispute. Using it to circulate correspondence without the primary recipient's knowledge for other reasons crosses into territory that is, at minimum, ethically fraught.
The distribution notation for multiple primary recipients
Some letters go to a list of recipients rather than one primary addressee. Internal memos, policy circulars, and stakeholder briefings often use a distribution or dist. notation in place of cc. The format mirrors the cc notation:
Distribution: All Regional Managers
Or, when names are listed individually:
Distribution: A. Brennan, B. Nakamura, C. Osei, D. Torres
This notation is more common in government, military, and large institutional correspondence than in private-sector business letters. If you write primarily to commercial clients, cc covers almost every situation you'll encounter.
Where the copy notation fits in the full letter structure
A well-formatted business letter has a specific sequence after the body. The signature block comes first. Then the typist's initials, if used. Then the enclosure line. Then the copy notation. Then the postscript, if any. Placing the copy notation before the enclosure line, or after the postscript, isn't technically wrong in every style guide, but the sequence above is the most widely accepted and the one that looks most professional to a careful reader.
If your letter carries both an enclosure and a copy notation, the page looks like this near the bottom:
Sincerely,
[Signature]
Thomas Adeyemi
Senior Contract Manager
Enc: Service Agreement (3 pages)
cc: Rachel Kim, Director of Operations
For a full treatment of how the enclosure line works alongside other letter notations, see how to write a business letter enclosure line, which covers placement, wording, and formatting across different letter styles.
Common mistakes with copy notations
Three errors appear repeatedly in professionally formatted correspondence.
- Uppercase CC: Not wrong in every guide, but inconsistent with modern email convention and the preferences of most major style manuals. Stick with lowercase.
- Bcc on the primary letter: As noted above, this reveals the blind copy. Keep bcc off the primary recipient's copy, always.
- Omitting titles: Listing only a name without a title or organisation can create ambiguity when the same name appears in several departments or companies. Include enough context for the primary recipient to understand who was copied and why.
A fourth mistake is rarer but worth flagging: some writers place the copy notation in the body of the letter ("I have also copied this correspondence to our legal team"). This is usually unnecessary. The notation at the foot of the letter does the same job more cleanly and keeps the body focused on the actual message.
Copy notations in digital and PDF letters
Most business letters today travel as PDF attachments to email. The copy notation in the letter itself is separate from the CC field in the email. Both serve different functions. The email CC tells the recipient who received the email. The letter CC tells the reader who received the formal document. These don't have to match, though in most cases they should. A letter that copies three people should generally be emailed to those three people as well, unless there's a specific reason to distribute it differently.
If you find yourself thinking through how the CC line in the email relates to the cc notation in the letter, it's worth reviewing how to write a business email CC line correctly, which addresses when to use CC versus BCC in email and the professional norms around each.
The copy notation is one of the details that separates a letter written by someone who knows business correspondence from one written by someone who picked up habits informally. It takes three seconds to add correctly. It takes considerably longer to repair the confusion that comes from leaving it out or getting it wrong.