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DD Form 2261 is a Department of Defense form, not a service form: DD Form 2261, Registered Mail - Balance and Inventory, May 2000., used to Registered Mail - Balance and Inventory. The DD prefix is the operative fact. It means one blank serves every military department — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Coast Guard under Defense jurisdiction — plus the defense agencies and combatant commands. No branch variant exists.
Authority: not stated prescribes it, not stated maintains it. Those two names settle most disputes about why the form is being asked for. Local commands add timing on top; the requirement itself comes from above them.
Edition not stated, status not stated. That comparison is the first thing worth making, because a DD form supersedes centrally and an old copy in a shared drive is out of date for every office, not just yours.
The set is PDF. Size: 2 pages, about 158 fields.
Nothing costs anything here. Work in a full desktop pdf application rather than a browser preview; field behaviour in browsers is unreliable.
What the form asks for
- Physical inventory, block 2.
- Physical inventory, block 3.
- Physical inventory, block 4.
- Physical inventory, block 5.
- Physical inventory, block 6.
- Physical inventory, block 7.
- Physical inventory, block 8.
- Physical inventory, block 9.
- Physical inventory, block 10.
- Physical inventory, block 11.
- Physical inventory, block 12.
- Physical inventory, block 13.
- Physical inventory, block 14.
- Physical inventory, block 15.
- Physical inventory, block 16.
- Physical inventory, block 17.
- Physical inventory, block 18.
- Physical inventory, block 19.
- Part 2. Remarks.
- Preparing Activity.
- Period covered (4 digit year, 2 digit month, 2 digit day). From.
- Period covered: To.
- Part 1. Number of Items Processed. Section A. On hand, accepted, received, and prepared for dispatch. 1. Items on hand at start of period.
- 2. Items accepted on PS Form 3806 and 3877 and returned from UMC on PS Form 3883.
Edition check comes first, ahead of any entry. Compare the printed date to not stated and replace anything older. Department-level supersession is simultaneous across the services, so a superseded blank is not merely out of date locally; the office receiving it is already working from the new field structure whichever branch it belongs to.
Field-level questions go to the printed instructions, then to not stated, which is authoritative.
Submit to the office named in not stated or in local instruction; retain a duplicate before it leaves. Joint routing often sends a DD form across organizational boundaries, and tracing one afterward is not a same-day matter.
Related forms are found by number alone. The DD sequence is one unified Department-wide series, so a cited number resolves to exactly one document with no branch qualifier needed.
Where a procedure cites both a service form and a DD form, the two are unconnected. Service numbering answers to a service proponent, DD numbering to not stated or another Department office, and the two sequences were never aligned. Matching numbers mean nothing whatever.
Three drivers of revision: directive reissue, altered collection requirements, updated statutory notice text. No notification accompanies any of them, so download fresh and confirm not stated rather than reusing an archived file.
This page publishes a Defense document and explains its contents. It does not advise, does not rule on applicability, and determines nothing about how a completed form will be treated. Direct such questions to not stated, to the servicing personnel office, or to the office designated in not stated.
Questions and answers
- What is DD Form 2261?
- DD Form 2261, Registered Mail - Balance and Inventory, May 2000.
- Which edition is current?
- Not stated by the publisher
- Who is responsible for this form?
- Not stated
- In which formats can it be downloaded?