A Map of the Station You're Leaving
Military PCS Map Art Gifts
A PCS — Permanent Change of Station — means packing up a place you've spent a few years of your life and starting over on new orders somewhere else. A map of the town you're leaving is a simple way to keep it. Not the installation itself, but the streets around it: where you lived, where the kids went to school, the routes you drove every day.
It works as a gift between people who were stationed together and are scattering to new assignments, and as something you make for your own family — a marker of one chapter, hung in the next house.
Create your duty station map →Which location to map
Most people map the town they were stationed in, centered on where they actually lived rather than on the installation. If you spent the tour in base housing, center it there; if you lived out in town, use that neighborhood. A dropped pin can mark the exact house or the gate you drove through.
If you PCS'd through several stations, a set of prints — one per duty station, in a shared palette — lays out an assignment history in order. Some families map the town they're leaving next to the one they're headed to.
What to put on it
You have three lines of text. A common layout is the town on the first line, the state or country on the second, and the years you were stationed there on the third — for example, 2021–2025. If you would rather show the coordinates of your street than the dates, the third line can carry those instead; it holds one or the other, not both.
Keep it factual. The place and the dates say enough.
Sizing and palette
Restrained palettes fit this best — muted blues, greys, earth tones — rather than anything flashy. A palette in a branch's colors works if you want the nod, but the map carries it on its own. An 11×14 or 16×20 frames in standard sizes and travels well to the next station.
Every file prints at 300 DPI and fits off-the-shelf frames, which matters when you're mid-move and buying frames as you go. It also works as a going-away gift from a unit, and as a keepsake for a spouse or kids who moved for the assignment too. For a service member retiring out, a print of the first duty station — or a set covering the whole career — marks the end of it plainly.
Cities to map for military pcs
Examples of duty-station metros — not a full list, and not every station is here. If yours isn't listed, you can map any address on earth from the homepage.
Create the Perfect Military PCS Gift
Choose any city, any palette. Your custom map print is ready in minutes, from $6.
Create your duty station map →