Last week the Postal Service submitted its Annual Compliance Report (ACR) for FY 2025 to the Postal Regulatory Commission.

Most of the report is about the extent to which each postal product complies with the law that it covers attributable costs so that one product doesn’t subsidize another.

One section of the report covers Consumer Access to Postal Services. It includes data on the number of post offices, emergency suspensions, collection boxes, and wait times in line.

Retail facilities

The ACR observes that “At the end of FY 2025, there were 26,147 Post Offices and 4,825 stations, branches, and carrier annexes; 1,356 Contract Postal Units (CPUs); 243 Village Post Offices (VPOs); 336 Community Post Offices (CPOs); and 2,854 Approved Shipper active locations.”

The following table combines these FY 2025 numbers with comparable data from the FY 2015 ACR and the FY 2025 Annual Report to Congress.

Post Office closings

Over the past fiscal year, the total number of USPS-managed post offices declined by 76. Since the Postal Service rarely creates entirely new post offices, this number is a reliable indication of how many offices were closed during FY 2025, and in fact the ACR states that during FY 2025, the Postal Service discontinued a total of 76 post offices.

The ACR includes a library reference (USPS-FY25-33) that contains a list of these 76 post offices. These discontinuances were also announced in the Postal Bulletins throughout FY 2025. (The ACR list is here, tab “Closed During FY25 ” A list derived from the various issues of Postal Bulletin is here; for a list combining the ACR and PB lists with other data, see tab “ACR+PB.”)

These 76 closings represent a decline of about 0.2 percent of all USPS-operated post offices, which is about the average annual decline over the past ten years and approximately the rate since 2000.

The rate of decline has thus been relatively modest and not a matter of serious concern — that is, unless your post office is among those that closed.

Emergency suspensions

The 76 discontinuances announced in Postal Bulletin and listed in the ACR are not actually about post offices that closed during FY 2025. These are all post offices that were closed by emergency suspension years ago — in some cases, more than ten years ago. What happened during FY 2025 was simply the completion of discontinuance processes that began long ago.

The same goes for the 635 post offices that have been removed from the facilities count since 2015. They were closed by suspensions years before they were finally discontinued.

It should be noted that according to the ACR 2025, “In FY 2025, the Postal Service closed 158 post offices, stations and/or branches, owing to the Postal Service’s successful year achieving dispositions within its administrative backlog of long-suspended offices.” It’s not clear where the number 158 comes from or why it’s different from the lists showing 76 discontinuances during the fiscal year.

But the backlog referred to here involves 662 suspensions that took place during and before FY 2016.The Postal Service spent a decade clearing this backlog. At the end of FY 2025, there were finally no longer any active suspensions from FY 2016 and earlier.

The Postal Service provided an update on the status of the 662 in November 2025. it’s on the PRC website here and Google Docs here.

Of the 662 on this backlog list, about 562 were eventually discontinued, with announcements published in Postal Bulletin. About 100 were reopened.

Of those that reopened, 81 involved suspensions less than two years old (as of the end of FY 2016). Of the 506 suspensions more than two years old at the time, only 19 offices reopened — less than 4 percent

All of which is to say: Once a post office has been suspended for over two years, the chances of it reopening are very slim.

Even as the pre-FY 2016 backlog was being cleared, a new backlog was developing. At the end of FY 2025, there were 428 offices under suspension. About 230 of these suspensions took place sometime from FY 2017 to FY 2023, i.e., more than two years ago. (A list of them is on the PRC website here and Google Docs here,)

Most likely, only a handful of these suspended offices will reopen; the rest will eventually be discontinued.

This appears to be the new normal. For over a decade, there hasn’t been a “normal” discontinuance procedure on an active post office — a process that involves public notice, a comment period, and an opportunity to appeal to the PRC. But during this time, the Postal Service has closed hundreds of post office by emergency suspension — which requires no notice, public input, or right to appeal — and then completed a discontinuance procedure several years later.

A suspension dashboard

Emergency suspensions usually occur because of an issue renewing the lease or some sort of safety problem with the building. They are intended to be temporary, and they should be resolved relatively soon, by either reopening the post office at the same or a new location or by proceeding to a discontinuance process to make the closure permanent.

But the Postal Service often leaves communities in the limbo of a suspension — the post office has closed, but it hasn’t.

It’s a well-known problem, and just last week, Representatives Jack Bergman (MI-01) and other members of the bipartisan Co-Chairs of the Congressional Postal Service Caucus introduced legislation to increase transparency around emergency suspensions.

The bill would require the Postal Service to create a publicly accessible and searchable website that provides the information on suspended post offices, including its address, suspension date, reason for suspension, location and hours of nearest post office, and an estimated date for a reopening.

Back in February 2022 the Postal Regulatory Commission opened a Public Inquiry (PI2022-1) into long-standing suspensions. I submitted comments recommending that the Postal Service create just such a website dashboard, and I created a prototype to illustrate what the dashboard might look like.

The Postal Service has such a dashboard for internal use, but it nixed the idea of a public website. The PRC, however, created a very good one, which you can find here

Contract postal units

Transitioning the retail network to contract units is often mentioned as a way the Postal Service could cut costs.

As noted in a recent OIG report on The Evolution of the Post Office Network, outsourcing retail operations “can be a way to reduce costs since the Postal Service does not have to pay salary, rent, and other operating expenses.” Outsourcing also makes it easier to open and close offices, since “there are no statutory requirements for closing contract units.” In many European countries, notes the IG, “outsourcing of post offices has been the primary retail strategy.”

While contract offices have such benefits, their numbers in the U.S. have been in steady decline. As the IG observes, “Since FY 2000, the number of post offices managed by third parties fell by nearly half, from 4,382 to 2,265 locations.”

It appears that this trend may be accelerating. The table above shows that during FY 2025 the total number of contract units declined from 2,265 to 1,935, a drop of 14.6 percent. That’s more than twice the average annual decline of 7 percent since 2015 and almost five times the average since 2000 (about 3 percent).

A Community Post Office (CPO), if you’re not familiar with the terminology, is a contract unit that usually bears the community’s name and ZIP code, often because it was converted from a USPS-operated post office discontinued many years ago.

A Village Post Office (VPO) is a contract unit that offers only limited services, such as Forever Stamps and Priority Mail Flat Rate packages. They were supposed to be a low-cost replacement when the Postal Service launched a major initiative to close post offices back in 2011-2012By the end of FY 2015, there were a total of 874 VPOs. But VPOs didn’t turn out to be such a great alternative, and now there are about 240.

The ACR does not include a list of which contracts were terminated. The PRC may ask for one later. In the meantime, here’s a short list of the closings that made it into the news.

The closing of an unusually large number of contract offices has been the subject of recent news articles, including one in Newsweek

The Postal Service cancelled the contract with Hy-Vee stores in Omaha. The contracts with Lewis Drug and Hy-Vee stores in Sioux Falls, Brandon, Tea and Harrisburg were also cancelled. (Aside from the closures, there are still more than 130 CPUs in HY-Vee stores in Iowa, South Dakota, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Based on a spot check of Find USPS Locations, they continue to operate.)

Members of Congress have expressed concern about the CPO closures. In August, Rep. Frank J. Mrvan of Indiana sent a letter to the Postmaster General concerning the upcoming closure of the CPU in Winfield.

Rep. Rick W. Allen (GA-12) issued a statement expressing his disappointment to the closure of the CPU at the Surrey Center Pharmacy in Augusta.

Rep. Allen and George Whitesides (D-CA-27) have introduced a bill called the Contract Postal Unit Transparency Act, which would require the Postal Service to provide reports on how the closure of CPUs will impact residents and allow for public hearings before any closure takes place.

Retail revenue

The ACR provides the following table showing the sources of retail revenue.

The ACR notes that in FY 2025 there were less revenue-generating customer visits to retail facilities than in previous fiscal years, which has been the case for many years.

Despite the decline in revenue at post offices, they remain a key component of the network. Nearly 85 percent of retail revenue is collected at post offices. As the Postal Service told the OIG in response to the IG’s 2025 report on post offices, while more than half of offices do not cover their costs individually, “the network as a whole remains revenue positive.”

To address retail revenue declines, the ACR says the Postal Service “will continue to pursue endeavors listed above to improve the customer experience, which includes mitigating wait times, raising point-of-sale customer satisfaction, and leveraging alternate access channels to make the retail experience more convenient.

Collection boxes

Nationally, says the ACR, there were 121,605 collection boxes available at the end of FY 2025. That’s down from 131,374 at the end of FY 2024 — a decline of nearly 10,000 boxes. Here’s a chart showing the number of collection boxes at the end of FY 2015 through the end of FY 2025, based on the ACRs on the PRC website. (If the chart isn’t showing, click here.)

At the end of FY 2015, there were 154,000 boxes; at the end of FY 2023, there were 139.010 — a decline of 14,990. That’s an average drop of 1,874 per year.

In FY 2024 the removal of boxes increased significantly, from 139,010 at the start of the year down to 131,374 at the end — a reduction of 7,636. That’s four times the average decline during 2015-2023. This year’s reduction of 10,000 boxes is over five times that average.

The Postal Service regularly culls boxes that don’t have many letters. The drop in boxes during FY 2025, says the ACR, was also driven by initiatives aimed at removing duplicate boxes and efforts to remedy vandalized collection boxes.

Wait Time in Line

The average Wait Time in Line (WTIL) at Postal Service facilities decreased by three seconds at the national level this past year, improving from 2 minutes and 35 seconds in FY 2024 to 2 minutes and 32 seconds in FY 2025. The Postal Service attributes its WTIL improvement of 3 seconds to continued efforts to encourage patrons to use self-service kiosks and the like.

Here’s a table showing the average WTIL over the past few years.

The Postal Operations Manual says the Postal Service aims for a “Five Minutes or Less” standard, so an average of two and half minutes sounds pretty good. But that’s the average. The range is something else.

According to a customer survey submitted as part of the ACR in FY 2023, about 14.5 percent of customers reported waiting longer than five minutes in line, and 3.3 percent waited more than 16 minutes. With about a billion retail transactions a year, this means about 150 million visits exceeded the five-minute standard. (In 2024, the survey stopped asking about wait time in minutes; it now just asks if the wait time was “acceptable.”)

Over the coming weeks, the PRC will ask the Postal Service for much more data to clarify the results of the ACR, and it will eventually issue its own Annual Compliance Determination Report. Highlights of last year’s ACDR are here.

— Steve Hutkins

(Featured Image: Alva, WY, post office, suspended in June 2017 over lease issue, discontinued in January 2025, announced in Postal Bulletin Feb. 6, 2025; photo by Evan Kalish, Post Mark Collectors Club, 2012)