Five-Day Delivery

Why USPS wants to changes its delivery schedule

The Postal Service is facing unprecedented volume declines and a projected $238 billion shortfall during the next decade. To ensure that America continues to have a viable Postal Service, the Postmaster General has introduced a comprehensive plan including cost cutting, increased productivity and legislative and regulatory changes that form the foundation for a leaner, more flexible Postal Service.

Moving to a six-day package delivery, five-day mail delivery schedule is one of the fundamental changes that will help USPS compete more effectively in the marketplace and better respond to changing customer needs.

How six-day package, five-day mail delivery would work

Simply put, our plan calls for six days of package delivery Monday through Saturday, and five days of mail delivery to street addresses Monday through Friday. Post Offices and P.O. Boxes will continue to be open six days a week.

USPS would maintain six days of package delivery because we are seeing strong growth of our package business — a 14 percent revenue increase since 2010 — along with projections of strong package growth in the future.

Under five-day mail delivery, mail would no longer be delivered to street addresses — residences or businesses — or collected from them on Saturday. However, Post Offices will remain open Saturdays, continuing to provide normal customer services, including the sale of stamps and other postal products. Mail addressed to P.O. Boxes also will continue to be available Saturday.

What would change

  • There would be no regular mail delivery to street addresses or mail collected from them on Saturday.
  • There would be no scheduled collection of mail from blue collection boxes Saturday.

What would stay the same

  • Express Mail will be delivered seven days a week, 365 days a year. Express Mail will be collected from dedicated Express Mail boxes on Saturday. Express Mail will continue to be processed on the day it is accepted, including Saturday and Sunday.
  • Priority Mail for street addresses will be delivered Monday through Saturday.
  • Packages will continue to be delivered Monday through Saturday.
  • Post Offices will remain open on Saturday. No Post Office will be closed as a result of the change to five-day mail delivery.
  • P.O. Box-addressed mail will be delivered Saturday.
  • Remittance mail addressed to P.O. boxes will be available for pickup seven days a week.
  • Mailers can still drop-ship enter destination or incoming mail at plants and delivery units.

When this would happen

We will implement the change when Congress passes comprehensive postal legislation that includes provisions affirmatively providing us with the ability to establish an appropriate national delivery schedule.