We calculate in three-flavor lattice QCD the short-distance hadronic matrix elements of all five $Delta C=2$ four-fermion operators that contribute to neutral $D$-meson mixing both in and beyond the Standard Model. We use the MILC Collaborations $N_f = 2+1$ lattice gauge-field configurations generated with asqtad-improved staggered sea quarks. We also employ the asqtad action for the valence light quarks and use the clover action with the Fermilab interpretation for the charm quark. We analyze a large set of ensembles with pions as light as $M_pi approx 180$ MeV and lattice spacings as fine as $aapprox 0.045$ fm, thereby enabling good control over the extrapolation to the physical pion mass and continuum limit. We obtain for the matrix elements in the $overline{text{MS}}$-NDR scheme using the choice of evanescent operators proposed by Beneke emph{et al.}, evaluated at 3 GeV, $langle D^0|mathcal{O}_i|bar{D}^0 rangle = {0.0805(55)(16), -0.1561(70)(31), 0.0464(31)(9), 0.2747(129)(55), 0.1035(71)(21)}~text{GeV}^4$ ($i=1$--5). The errors shown are from statistics and lattice systematics, and the omission of charmed sea quarks, respectively. To illustrate the utility of our matrix-element results, we place bounds on the scale of CP-violating new physics in $D^0$~mixing, finding lower limits of about 10--50$times 10^3$ TeV for couplings of $mathrm{O}(1)$. To enable our results to be employed in more sophisticated or model-specific phenomenological studies, we provide the correlations among our matrix-element results. For convenience, we also present numerical results in the other commonly-used scheme of Buras, Misiak, and Urban.
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