Comp Card Guide 2026: Specs, Examples, Costs + Free Comp Card Maker

Almost every “comp card package” sold to beginners is sold too early. The card is a booking tool, and you cannot use a booking tool before anyone is booking you. This guide covers what actually goes on one, what it should cost, what the versions for different markets look like, and how to build the front side yourself in about two minutes.

What is a comp card?

A comp card is a single printed card, usually 5.5 by 8.5 inches, carrying a model’s headshot, a small set of additional images, their measurements, and their agency’s contact details. It is the physical business card of a working model: the thing a booker leaves on a casting director’s table after you walk out of the room.

The name is short for composite card, because it composites several images onto one sheet. You will also hear zed card or Z-card, a term that comes from the Z CARD registered fold-out format and stuck as generic industry slang. Model card and sed card, the German and European variant, mean the same object. All four words describe the same thing and no one will correct you for using any of them.

What it is not: a portfolio, a résumé, or a headshot. Your portfolio is fifteen to twenty images that prove range. Your comp card is the four that prove you are worth calling in. The card is deliberately reductive, because a casting director going through eighty of them gives each one about three seconds.

What goes on a comp card?

The format is fixed enough that deviating from it reads as inexperience. Here is the full specification agencies actually use in the US market.

Element	Specification	Why it is that way
Trim size	5.5" × 8.5" (half a letter sheet)	Fits a standard casting folder and a jacket pocket; A5 in Europe
Resolution / bleed	300 dpi, 0.125" bleed, CMYK for print	Anything under 300 dpi shows pixel edges on skin at this size
Cardstock	14–16 pt gloss, matte, or silk	Thin stock curls in a folder and reads as cheap in hand
Front	One headshot, full bleed, plus your name	One image, one job: make your face unmistakable
Front type	Name only — large, clean, bottom third	The only text a casting director needs to read at arm's length
Back images	3–4 shots showing range and body line	Full-length, three-quarter, a smile, and one specialty frame
Back stats	Height, bust/chest, waist, hips, shoe, hair, eyes	Sample sizes are the actual filter; wrong stats waste everyone's day
Back contact	Agency logo, phone, email, board name	Clients book through the agency, never through you directly
Dress/suit size	Optional; common on commercial cards	Useful for catalog and fit work, irrelevant for runway

Two rules about the stats that beginners break constantly. First, list a height without shoes, measured against a wall by someone else. Agencies re-measure at the meeting, and a two-inch gap between your card and the tape reads as dishonesty rather than optimism. Second, do not print your age. Print an age range if anything at all, because a card outlives the year it was made and a hard number dates it instantly. Most working cards carry no age at all.

Contact details deserve their own warning. If you are signed, the card carries your agency’s phone and email and nothing of yours. If you are freelance, it carries a professional email address and, at most, an Instagram handle. Never put your home address or personal mobile number on a card you hand to strangers at an open casting.

What do comp card examples look like by type?

The layout is standard. The image selection is not. What separates a card that books from a card that gets set down is whether the four images match the category you are actually being sold into.

Fashion and editorial cards run cold and simple. The front headshot is usually straight to camera, minimal or no makeup, neutral expression, hair pulled back or flat. The back carries a full-length in something fitted and plain, a three-quarter shot that shows shoulder line and posture, one movement or walking frame, and one editorial image with real styling. No smiling in most of them. The point is to prove bone structure, body line, and that clothes hang correctly on you. Backgrounds stay grey, white, or seamless. A fashion card with a beach sunset on it is a commercial card wearing the wrong label.

Commercial and lifestyle cards run warm. The front headshot smiles, with teeth, eyes engaged. The back carries a genuine laugh, a casual full-length in normal clothes, one in a setting that suggests a real life — a kitchen, a street, a gym — and one clean neutral frame for range. Commercial clients are casting a person who could plausibly be their customer, so approachability is the product. These cards often carry a dress or suit size and sometimes a short list of skills like driving, swimming, or a second language.

Parts cards ignore the face almost entirely. A hand model’s card is four to five images of hands: a product hold, a flat lay showing nail bed and finger length, a lifestyle grip, and a close crop of skin texture. Stats change too — ring size, glove size, nail length, and any scars or distinguishing marks in place of bust and hips. A foot model’s card follows the same logic with shoe size front and center. There is usually a small headshot in a corner for identification, and no more than that.

Two things every good card of every type shares: the images look like the same person, and they were shot within about a year of each other. A card assembled from four different eras of your life reads as a scrapbook, and the booker who calls you in based on the 2023 image is the booker you disappoint in person.

Make your comp card free

Most comp card templates you find online are either locked behind a subscription or built around a layout no agency uses. The maker below is neither. It renders the front side at the exact print dimensions — 1050 by 1650 pixels, which is 5.5 by 8.5 inches at roughly 191 dpi — using the same restrained typography this site is set in: a large serif name, a hairline rule, and a small-caps stat strip along the bottom edge.

Type your stats, add one headshot, and download the PNG. The image is read by your browser with FileReader and drawn straight onto a canvas element. It is never sent to a server, ours or anyone else’s, so nothing you load here can be stored, indexed, or resold. Refresh the page and it is gone.

For a printer, take the PNG into any layout tool, place it at 5.5 by 8.5 inches with a 0.125 inch bleed, and build the back side alongside it. For an email submission, the PNG is already the right thing to attach.

Free tool · Nothing uploaded

Make your comp card free

Fill in your stats, add one headshot, and download a print-ready 5.5 × 8.5 inch front side at 1050 × 1650 pixels. Your photo is read in your own browser and never sent to us or anyone else.

Live preview · Front

Download PNG

Name

Height

FeetInches

Measurements (inches)

BustWaistHips

Shoe (US)

City

Hair—BlackBrownDark blondeBlondeRedAuburnGreyOther

Eyes—BrownHazelGreenBlueGreyAmberOther

Headshot

Vertical works best. Stays on your device.

Reset

How much does a comp card cost?

Less than you have been told. A comp card is a short-run postcard print with a photo on it, and the printing industry prices it accordingly.

Line item	Realistic price	Notes
Digital print, 50 cards, 14 pt	$30–$60	Standard for a first run; per-card cost falls fast with quantity
Digital print, 100 cards, 16 pt	$45–$90	100 is the usual reorder quantity for an active model
Offset print, 250–500 cards	$80–$150	Only worth it above ~250 cards; better ink density, longer lead time
Rush or same-day turnaround	+$15–$40	Occasionally justified before a market week; usually not
Design — do it yourself	$0	The maker above, Canva, Figma, or your agency's own template
Design — hired designer	$50–$200	Reasonable one-time cost if you want both sides laid out properly
Photos you already have	$0	Tests and existing portfolio images are the normal source
"Comp card package" from an agency	$300–$500+	Red flag — see below

The scam to watch for is the comp card package. The pitch is a bundle — shoot, design, and 100 cards — for 400 to 900 dollars, sold to you at the point of “signing” by an outfit that turns out to be a photo studio with an agency’s name on the door. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on modeling scams is blunt about the underlying rule: a legitimate agency gets paid when you get paid, and does not require you to buy photos or a package to be represented.

The honest version of this transaction exists and looks different. Once you are signed and working, agencies commonly front the cost of your cards — 60 to 120 dollars for a run — and deduct it from your next booking. That is a real, disclosed, proportional expense against income you already earned. The difference is not the dollar amount. It is whether the money moves before or after someone with a client list decided they wanted you.

Do you need a comp card to get signed?

No. This is the single most useful sentence in this guide, so it is worth being unambiguous: you do not need a comp card to apply to agencies, and having one will not improve your odds.

Agencies scout from digitals — unedited phone photos in a plain top, no makeup, blank wall, daylight. That is what every submission form asks for, that is what open calls look at, and a slick comp card submitted instead can actively hurt you, because it signals that someone already sold you a service. Scouts read that as a person who is easy to sell things to, not as a professional.

The sequence that actually happens is: digitals, then interest, then a meeting, then a contract, then test shoots to build a book, then a comp card built from those tests, paid for out of your first bookings. The card is somewhere around step six. Most people who buy one are at step one.

There is one real exception. Freelance models who attend castings directly need a card, because there is no agency behind them to send images ahead and no booker to leave a leave-behind. If you go to open casting calls for local commercial work, regional catalog shoots, or trade shows, walking in with a clean card and walking out having left it behind is exactly how the format is meant to be used. The same is true for models working conventions, promotional events, and any market where the decision is made in the room.

If you are in that position, build the front side with the maker above, add a back side in any design tool, and print 50 cards for under 60 dollars. That is a proportional expense with an obvious purpose. Anything larger is not.

Print or digital in 2026?

Both, and the digital version does more work.

The overwhelming majority of submissions now travel by email or through a casting platform, which means the file matters more than the paper. Export your card as a PDF at 300 dpi for print and a PNG or JPEG around 1000 to 1500 pixels wide for email, keep both sides in one PDF, and name the file with your actual name — jane-doe-comp-card.pdf, not final_v3_NEW.pdf. Casting directors sort by filename. Keep the email version under about 2 MB or it lands in a spam filter.

Print has not gone away, and the reason is physical. At an in-person casting, thirty models walk through in an hour and the card is the object that stays on the table after you leave. It also survives a dead phone, a venue with no signal, and a client who wants to lay six candidates side by side. Agencies still order runs of 100 for every model on the board.

One digital-only detail worth getting right: the images inside your PDF should be the same photos in your online portfolio and on your agency board. Casting directors cross-check. A card showing four images that appear nowhere else looks less like a range of work and more like a single expensive shoot stretched to fill a template.

The practical answer: build the file once, export both, print 50 to 100 cards, and carry ten in your bag whenever you leave the house for anything industry-related.

What are the 7 most common comp card mistakes?

Using photos that no longer look like you

The most damaging mistake and the most common. If you cut your hair, changed color, gained or lost noticeable weight, or the images are two years old, the card is now a promise you cannot keep in person. Reprint. It costs forty dollars.

Over-retouching

Skin smoothed to plastic, waist narrowed, jaw reshaped. Every booker has seen the retouched version and the person, and the gap is the only thing they remember. Retouching a temporary blemish is fine. Retouching structure is a wasted trip for both of you.

Printing inaccurate stats

Rounding your height up an inch, shaving two off the waist. You will be measured at the meeting with a tape. Wrong measurements do not read as ambition; they read as someone who will also be unreliable about call times.

Cramming in more than five images

Six, eight, ten images on a 5.5 by 8.5 inch card means every image is a thumbnail and none of them communicate anything. Four to five total, across both sides. Editing down is the skill the card is testing.

Busy layouts, borders, and decoration

Script fonts, drop shadows, gradient backgrounds, colored borders, glitter overlays. The industry standard is white space, one clean sans-serif or a restrained serif, and images that carry the whole design. If your card looks designed, it is over-designed.

No name on the front

Sounds impossible, and it happens constantly with cards built from a photo template. The front has exactly one job beyond the photo: say who this is. Large, legible, bottom third, readable from arm’s length across a table.

Listing your exact age

A card lasts a year or two; a printed age is wrong within months and instantly narrows how you get cast. Leave it off. If a client needs it, the agency has it. The same applies to your home address and personal phone number — neither belongs on a card handed to strangers.

What should you do next?

If you are unsigned: skip the card. Shoot digitals against a blank wall this week and submit to twenty legitimate agencies. Come back here when someone says yes.

If you are signed: ask your agency for their template and specifications before designing anything, because their logo, their board name, and their layout rules take priority over your preferences.

If you freelance and go to castings: build the front above, add a back with three or four images and your stats, and print 50 cards on 14 pt stock for under 60 dollars. Carry ten with you.