phenomenalworld.org: In mid-March, the Postmaster General told Congress that the United States Postal Service would be unable to deliver mail within twelve months unless Congress lifted its debt limit. Shortly thereafter, in response to rising energy prices following the US war on Iran, USPS announced a fuel surcharge on packages, a first ever in its fifty-five year history as a government corporation. Around the same time, Amazon presented USPS with the double insult of cutting its contract (USPS’s largest) by 20 percent and, according to the logistics consulting and analytics firm ShipMatrix, surpassing it in parcel volume.
The clouds on the horizon for USPS have coincided with the revival of proposals for postal privatization, long a dream of conservatives and neoliberals. In 2018, the first Trump administration called for privatization of the USPS, and in 2019 the Treasury Department attempted to assume control of USPS business decisions. But with the second term the threat has become more concrete. Even before the inauguration, in December 2024 the president-elect reiterated that the agency was on the proverbial chopping block. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term,” Carey Mulligan, the chief economist of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the first Trump administration, said at the time, “but we should finish it now.” In February 2025, Wells Fargo’s Equity Research team, an arm of its investment banking business, answered the call by publishing a “framework” for postal privatization, further whetting the private sector’s appetite.
What would privatization entail? Will the current struggles of rising energy costs, imperilled congressional appropriations, continued growth of private competition, and decreasing revenue from Amazon give such machinations new life? For postal privatization to proceed, there would need to be congressional action to overturn the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 (which established USPS in its current form), a vote that would no doubt make legislators on both sides of the aisle queasy. While this does not seem like an imminent possibility, just months after Wells Fargo published its privatization framework, the USPS Board of Governors elected David Steiner, a member of the FedEx board of directors, as Postmaster General. By 2028, all eight of the members of USPS’s Board of Governors will be Trump appointees.
The unfortunate predicament of the post office is not going away, and this administration seems intent on letting no crisis go to waste. Senator Bernie Sanders has rightly said that the privatization of the post office would be a disaster. Here I’d like to get concrete about precisely why and how.
National Urban League: There is an institution older than the United States itself that is now fighting for its survival, and too many people in power are watching it happen without lifting a finger.
The United States Postal Service was founded in 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General. It has survived wars, depressions, technological upheavals, and the death of the handwritten letter. It has never missed a day of service. Today, it is being quietly bled out, and the silence from Congress is its own kind of crisis.
The Postmaster General has warned lawmakers that the agency is at a “critical juncture” and will run out of cash in less than a year unless Congress allows it to borrow more money. “At our current rate, we’ll be out of cash in less than 12 months. So in about a year from now, the postal service would be unable to deliver the mail,” Postmaster General David Steiner said before a House subcommittee. This is not a hypothetical. USPS suspended employer pension contributions in April 2026, pausing roughly $200 million every two weeks to free $2.5 billion in cash just to keep the lights on.
This is the slow unraveling of an institution that helped build the American middle class.
The Postal Service was never just a place to buy stamps. It was infrastructure. It was connectivity before broadband. It was the original equalizer, guaranteeing that a family in rural Mississippi and a family in Manhattan received the same service at the same price. It built a path into the middle class for generations of Black Americans who could not access employment in the private sector. Postal work was union work, stable work, dignified work, one of the first federal employers to hire Black men and women at a meaningful scale. In city after city, the post office was not just a government building; it was a community anchor.
USPS continues to operate its universal delivery network, visiting 168 million addresses, six days a week. It remains the largest mail service in the world, delivering nearly 40 percent of mail sent globally. And it does all of this while operating under congressional mandates that private competitors never face, including the requirement to serve every address in America at a uniform price, regardless of how remote or expensive that delivery is.
The financial crisis did not appear overnight. USPS has lost money almost every fiscal year since 2007, with net losses totaling approximately $109 billion from fiscal years 2007 through 2024. Much of that loss traces back to a 2006 law that forced the agency to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health benefits in just 10 years, a burden placed on no other federal agency or private company. Congress created the problem. Congress has been slow to solve it. And now, rather than stepping up with the legislative action that every credible financial analysis says is required, too many members are standing aside while the institution crumbles.
Privatizing the USPS could mean the end of guaranteed mail service to every American address, leaving many rural customers without the deliveries they depend on. For communities of color, the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income families who depend on the Postal Service for medications, government benefits, and financial correspondence, this is not an inconvenience. It is a rupture in the basic terms of citizenship.
Forbes: Last week, the United States Postal Service told federal budget officials it would suspend its employer contributions to federal retirement annuities, $200 million every two weeks, because it is running out of cash. Officials now project USPS will be unable to pay its bills by early 2027. The agency has already hit its $15 billion statutory borrowing limit. It lost $9 billion last year. Stamp prices are rising again. Congress is once more being asked to step in.
Call it what you like. I would not call it a crisis. A crisis is sudden and unforeseen. What we are watching is something more troubling: a slow-motion fiscal collapse that was documented, predicted, and ignored for more than thirty years.
The warning was not subtle. And the accounting made it visible.
In October 1991, the Postal Service’s own Board of Governors commissioned a report on the financial condition of the agency. Trevor Harris — my longtime collaborator, who served as the economic and accounting lead on the team — was one of its authors. The report laid out the problem in language that is, in retrospect, uncomfortably precise. The system was steadily losing money. Its ratemaking process was, in the report’s own words, “not providing for the financial health of the organization.”
Harris explains the structural trap the agency was in:
“the core problem was an imposed cost attribution system that was politically motivated and badly regulated. The mandate was to break even over a three-year rate making cycle. USPS’ competitors spent millions lobbying the Postal Rate Commission (https://www.prc.gov/) to maximize cost allocations to the areas they competed in so that USPS would be the high price supplier or exit those services as too pricey to operate. Because the postal service was mandated to deliver mail six days a week at uniform pricing, they could not allocate costs on a marginal basis (i.e., higher costs for incremental services that are more expensive to provide). So overnight or express mail could not be priced to compete.
FedEx and UPS – two private carriers positioned to capitalize on a weakened U.S. Postal Service – poured nearly $20 million into federal lobbying in 2025, an OpenSecrets analysis found.
A series of events left USPS bracing for an uncertain future. First, its leader warned the agency could run out of cash by 2027, leaving it unable to pay employees or vendors. Amazon then announced it would sharply reduce the number of packages it ships through the Postal Service. Amazon moved more than 1 billion packages through USPS last year, roughly 15% of the agency’s total volume. A two-thirds reduction could strip USPS of billions in revenue amid those concerns of insolvency.
USPS cited that “severe financial crisis” in announcing plans to raise stamp prices by four cents, to 82 cents, in July, saying it is “using all available tools” in attempting to keep meeting its universal delivery obligations.
“The Postal Service is no longer a financial or economic issue,” James O’Rourke, a professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame who studies USPS, told OpenSecrets. “It’s a political issue.”
Another USPS expert has a different view: Steve Hutkins, a retired literature professor at New York University who publishes “Save The Post Office,” said the “insolvency” narrative may be an overstatement.
The Spring 2026 Newsletter from Community and Postal Workers United (CPWU) has articles on the Postmaster General’s testimony to Congress that the USPS is going broke, the postal unions’ response, Trump’s interference with voting by mail, the push to gain a $30 starting wage for letter carriers, and a case for funding basic human needs, not wars. Read the newsletter here.
The IRS considers a tax return to be filed on time if it is postmarked by the filing due date, April 15.
The Postal Service is now warning tax-filers that the postmark date on the envelope may not be the day the return was mailed at a post office. There’s also a similar warning on the Find USPS Locations website:
If you want to ensure your return receives a postmark on April 15, says the Postal Service, you should take it to your local Post Office and ask for a manual postmark at the retail counter. There’s no charge for the service.
The need for an alert like this is a new USPS cost-saving initiative called Regional Transportation Optimization.
Under the RTO, mail is no longer collected at the end of the day and transported to a processing center, where letters are scanned and postmarked on the same day. Instead, the mail sits in the back of the post office overnight, to be collected the next morning when the day’s mail is dropped off.
In other words, the two trips between the processing center and the post office are combined into one. The RTO cuts transportation costs, but it adds a day to delivery times and means that the electronic postmark won’t be applied until the next day.
The RTO applies only to post offices more than 50 miles from one of the new network’s 56 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDC). Those within 50 miles continue to get the evening collection, so returns mailed at one of these post offices will usually get the same-day postmark.
While alerting customers to the postmark issue, the Postal Service does not inform them if their post office is subject to RTO or not. There are no signs at the RTO post offices, no notices in PO boxes, no readily accessible list of where RTO has been or will be implemented.
The Postal Service has, however, been sharing lists with the Postal Regulatory Commission. These lists are updated monthly, and they show the ZIP Codes of the post offices where the RTO has been “activated.” (The latest list is here.)
Place, State ZIP
RTO Status
Activation Date
PO Address
Campus Site
RPDC
Weems, VA 22576
RTO Activated
10/28/2023
3960 WEEMS RD
RICHMOND VA RPDC
As of April 1, the RTO had been activated at about 14,300 post offices. When the RTO is fully implemented, about 23,000 post offices — three-fourths of the 31,000 USPS-operated post offices in the country — will no longer get an end-of-day collection.
You can use our “RTO Status Checker” app, which is based on lists shared with the PRC, to see if RTO has already been activated at your post office. Just enter the ZIP code or “city, state,” and hit “enter” on your key pad.
The Checker will show if and when your post office was activated for RTO. If it says “RTO TBA,” it means the post office is eligible for RTO and will eventually be activated. If it says “Not RTO,” it means the post office is within 50 miles of a RPDC and not directly affected by the postmark issue.
Here’s a map of where the RTO has been activated as of April 1, 2026. The blue shows where it’s been implemented; yellow where it will be implemented over the coming months; orange shows the areas within 50 miles of a RPDC. You can search the map using a place, state or a ZIP Code followed by US.
There’s more about the USPS postmark policies here, and there’s a USPS Fact Sheet here. The list on which the map and status checker are based is here. For more about the RTO, see our RTO Dashboard.
Los Angeles Times: As Democratic leaders in California challenge President Trump’s latest effort to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, they also must grapple with a troubling development in the last election.
A significant number of mail-in ballots arrived too late to be counted in the Nov. 4 special election for Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful measure to reconfigure the state’s congressional districts, according to state data.
Ballots came in late at an average rate four times higher than that of the 2024 election, with rural counties seeing some of the biggest increases, according to a Times review.
“Something changed,” said Melvin E. Levey, who heads the Merced County Registrar of Voters. “We don’t like seeing late ballots and if someone has made the effort to vote, we want to count it.”
Merced saw almost a sevenfold increase in late-arriving mail ballots in the November election compared with the year before.
Vote-by-mail ballots are considered late if they are not postmarked on or ahead of election day or do not arrive within seven days of election day.
The issue appears to be linked to the U.S. Postal Service, which last year reduced the number of trips to pick up mail at post offices in mostly rural areas. Election officials warned before Nov. 4 that the Postal Service changes could delay the postmarking of ballots and lead to votes not being counted.
During the Nov. 4 election in California, an average of 8 out of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected by counties because they arrived too late, according to Secretary of State data. In the 2024 general election, which included the presidential race, an average of 2 of every 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots were rejected for being late.
The Postal Service has posted a notice inviting comments on the proposed relocation of the Lancaster, KY, Post Office, located at 107 Danville Street (40444).
The notice says that “due to severe space constraints at the facility,” the Postal Service is looking for a new location for retail services, possibly the carrier operation as well.
According to the notice, “The desired size of the new facility needs to be one of the following: (a) an existing building, approximately 800 square feet, with dedicated parking, for retail operations only, or (b) a vacant land site to lease, approximately 14,000 square feet, in which the Postal Service can bring in a postal-owned modular building, or (c) an existing building, approximately 5,000 square feet, with dedicated parking, for the relocation of delivery operations only or delivery and retail operations.”
Presenting three options to the community in this way is standard operating procedure for the Postal Service when it wants to relocate. As usual, the notice requires a closer look.
According to the USPS facilities report, the current post office has 3,820 square feet and a site with 26,746 square feet. The post office has a delivery unit with 11 carriers.
Eleven carriers may make the office somewhat cramped. A post office with that many carriers typically has about 8,000 square feet. But it’s not clear what the Postal Service intends to do for the carrier operation.
The first two options involve moving the retail to another location, but there’s no indication of what would happen to the carriers. Would they remain in the building and expand into the space now occupied by the retail operation, or would they too move to a new building, as suggested by the third option, which calls for relocating the carriers, with or without the retail.
If carriers were to remain at the current location, the additional square footage made available by moving out the retail would probably be less than 1,000 square feet. That might make a difference, but the notice doesn’t say so.
If the Postal Service can’t find a suitable space to lease for retail, it might go with the second option and move retail to a modular building. The Postal Service currently owns about 750 modular buildings, which average 850 square feet. A site of approximately 14,000 square feet is much smaller than the current site, but presumably it would be enough for customers.
The third option — an existing building with approximately 5,000 square feet – would apparently be sufficient for delivery and retail operations or maybe just delivery. That’s 1,200 square feet more than the current facility.but it’s still smaller than most offices with eleven carriers.
One possible outcome involves a combination of the three alternatives. The Postal Service could end up leasing two spaces, one for a small store front or a modular unit for a retail unit, perhaps near the center of town, plus a larger space for the carrier unit, perhaps outside of downtown where there’s more space for parking.
In any case, all three options in the notice involve moving the retail operation out of the current location, and none of the options specifically says that the Postal Service intends to keep anything in the current building.
It appears that the Postal Service is planning to sell the Lancaster post office.
Something similar is going on in Lamar, Missouri, where the Postal Service has proposed a relocation of a historic post office. In the relocation notice for Lamar, the Postal Service specifically says one of the three options is to move both carriers and retail and then sell the building.
According to the USPS facilities report, the Post Office Department took occupancy of the Lancaster post office in 1919. The building itself may have been constructed in 1917.
As reported on the Postal Service’s website, there was a ceremony in October 2017 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Lancaster office. “We are very pleased to invite the community to join us for this special event,” said the postmaster in the press release.
The post office is located in the center of downtown Lancaster, the county seat of Gerard County. It’s a couple of blocks from several county government buildings — the Gerard County Court House (built in 1868); the Gerard County Justice Center, which houses the District and Circuit courts; and the County Clerk’s office.
Lancaster is a historic town known for its nineteenth-century architecture. The town boasts over 50 properties listed on the National Register. The post office is eligible for the National Register, but it’s not included in the list, perhaps because the Postal Service never submitted an application.
The USPS relocation notice invites written comments, due within 45 days (i.e., May 1). The public will not be able to see these comments, however, and there won’t be a public meeting to discuss the relocation of retail services and possible disposal of the building either.
Such meetings were part of federal regulations for 25 years, as set forth in a revision to 39 CFR Part 241 back in 1998. But in June 2023, the Postal Service changed these regulations – based on its practices during the pandemic, when public meetings weren’t possible — so that meetings on relocations are no longer required.
Our archive of previous posts on relocations is here.
WSWS.org: Less than 24 hours before the Trump administration demanded an additional $200 billion for the war against Iran, members of Congress from both parties convened a hearing to warn that the United States Postal Service (USPS) could run out of money by next February.
Testifying before the House Oversight Committee, Postmaster General David Steiner, a former CEO of Waste Management and board member of FedEx, bluntly warned that the agency is approaching collapse. “At our current rate we will be out of cash in less than 12 months,” Steiner said. “So in about a year from now the Postal Service will be unable to deliver the mail, if we continue the status quo.”
The financial crisis of the United States Postal Service was presented to Congress this week as a matter of bipartisan concern, with leading Democrats and Republicans united in calling for sweeping “cost-cutting” measures that would further erode wages, staffing and universal service.
The USPS, which employs over half a million workers and delivers more than 100 billion pieces of mail annually, reported annual losses of roughly $9 billion. By contrast, the Pentagon’s budget has surged to nearly $1 trillion a year, before the additional $200 billion is factored in.
the opening days of the war against Iran, the US burned through more than $12 billion. In other words, the cost of less than a single week of war exceeds the yearly losses at USPS, which will be used to justify the deepest cuts in the history of the post office.
The “financial crisis” invoked by both parties is not simply the result of declining revenue but due to longstanding policy decisions. Above all is the requirement that the Post Office be entirely self-funding, first enacted in 1971 when it was demoted from a cabinet-level department of the federal government to an independent agency. This has been used to justify decades of cuts and set the stage for its eventual privatization.
This reached a new level over the past few years with the “Delivering for America” program, aimed at restructuring the USPS network along Amazon lines. Conditions in the “modernized” facilities are atrocious. Two workers, Nick Acker of Michigan and Russell Scruggs of Georgia, died late last year in separate incidents. Acker died after falling into a mail sort machine; his body was not found for hours. Scruggs died of a heart attack on the floor; EMS was considerably delayed in reaching him because of the fact that cell phone signals are blocked in the facility.
In his testimony before the House this week, Postmaster General Steiner listed seven anchors that threatened to sink the ship of the Postal Service. Here’s an except from the hearing transcript.
Anchor and No Life Jacket
I like to say that in the time since peak 2006 mail volume, the Postal Service was thrown overboard and instead of tossing us a life jacket, we were thrown an anchor.
So, what does that anchor look like, and why is it weighing us down?
First, there is our regulator. We are regulated like a monopoly, though we ceased to be one long ago. There are electronic or private competitor alternatives to every piece of volume in our system. In fact, we are regulated worse than a monopoly, because even a monopoly is allowed to make money. Think about that: our regulator ensures that we won’t make money or break even – out of fear of a non-existent mail monopoly. The regulator puts pricing restrictions on us, requires we give “work share” dollars back to our customers, and places a number of other unreasonable burdens on us that cost us billions of dollars every year. Moreover, they recently enacted an order that, among other things, limits us to one price
increase per year for our mailing services, a change that by their own math could cost us up to $700 million in lost revenue in a year. The regulator characterized the $700 million hit to the Postal Service as “small.” Obviously, if they consider $700 million to be small, they are not prioritizing the financial stability or survival of the Postal Service.
Second, we are required to pay a disproportionately high share of Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) benefits for employees that worked for both the Post Office Department, prior to our creation as an independent entity in 1971, and subsequently for the Postal Service. Virtually everyone, from our Office of Inspector General (OIG) to our labor unions, agrees that the allocation is incorrect. Because we are a self-financed independent entity, and postal ratepayers rather than Congress/taxpayers pay the cost of our employee benefits, we are closer to a private company in our employee benefit financial structure than we are to a government agency. No acquiring company in the private sector would ignore modern actuarial practices in apportioning the acquired company’s pension obligations, the way the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has for the Postal Service.
This CSRS pension amortization payment part of the anchor costs us about $3 billion per year, on top of the other very large retirement payment obligations to which we are uniquely subjected.
Third, and most urgent to our current situation, we cannot borrow more than $15 billion, and we reached that limit years ago. The $15 billion limit was established more than three decades ago, when we were half the size—measured by revenue—that we are today. This limit is one reason we were forced to defer capital improvements for many years, leading to a deterioration in our network that we are still trying to recover from. If you applied inflation over 30 years to that borrowing limit or looked at it based on revenue, the limit should be $30 to $40 billion. Again, no private company is as limited in its credit access as the Postal Service, and certainly not one with our scope, operational complexity, and importance to the American public.
Fourth, we are only allowed to invest our retirement funds in Treasury notes. Obviously, that reduces returns. Neither private companies nor state or local governments limit their investments to Treasury notes. According to estimates by the OIG, if we had been able to use a very conservative 60–40 split of stock indexes and bonds, our retirement plans would have an additional $800 billion in them. Absent those returns, our pension funding obligations are consistently a draw on our income statement and balance sheet, and we have been forced to at least partially default on our funding payments, which would not have been the case given more reasonable returns.
Fifth, we are mandated by law to deliver to every address—more than 170 million of them—six days a week. While this is our statutory obligation as a public service entity, it is also our financial burden. This leads to 71 percent of our delivery routes being financially underwater. And fifty-eight percent of our Post Offices do not cover the cost of their operations. Each day of delivery costs billions of dollars every year. The simple financial solution would be to cut the number of days of delivery, and Post Office locations, which I don’t believe is anybody’s preference. But if we are expected to deliver six days per week, absent the volume or pricing authority to justify or afford it, some source of funding beyond postal revenue needs to pay for it.
Sixth, we are not allowed to manage our own workers’ compensation claims. That costs us anywhere from $400 million to $800 million per year because the current federal program fails to reflect private-sector best practices. As an example, we are paying workers compensation benefits to recipients who are over 100 years old because the Federal Employees Compensation Act (FECA), which the Postal Service is subject to, does not contain any provision that limits the amount of time a recipient can receive monthly benefits, nor does it enforce other best practices.
And there are other smaller parts to the anchor. Transporting cargo to the most remote parts of the U.S. costs about $150 million per year. Not being able to ship alcohol like our competitors costs us hundreds of millions of dollars in missed revenue. Keeping all Post Offices open and not being allowed to consider financial losses as a reason to replace them with alternative means of accessing our services costs another $840 million.
And the list goes on and on.
A video and the transcript of the entire hearing are here.
The Hill: .Amazon announced this week it is planning on making substantial cuts to the number of packages it ships through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
The new development follows the e-commerce giant having already reduced postal shipments. Amazon is also aiming to cut the shipments by at least two-thirds by September, when its contract expires with the USPS….
Amazon and USPS have been negotiating for over a year to extend their relationship. Two months ago, the postal service started taking proposals for access to its last-mile delivery network and opened more than 18,000 destination delivery units and local processing centers nationwide.
“We negotiated with [the Postal Service] in good faith for over a year to try and reach a deal that would bring them billions in revenue and believed we were heading toward an agreement, when the USPS abruptly walked away at the 11th hour and introduced the auction concept,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
“I’ve never seen a strategic plan where so many options are not available to you. You have losing routes, can’t cut them. You have losing post offices, can’t close them. You have retirement benefits that earn only T-bill rates, you can’t invest in stocks. There are just so many strings. I tell people this is like Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver was the giant in the land of the small. One small person could not take him down, but they put so many strings on him they were able to hold down the giant.” — Postmaster General David. P. Steiner, House Subcommitee Hearing on Oversight of the U.S. Postal Service, March 17, 2026
Nevada County California: Treasurer-Tax Collector Michelle Bodley and Clerk-Recorder/Registrar of Voters Armando Salud-Ambriz are reminding residents that postmarks matter for time-sensitive mail, including property tax payments and vote-by-mail ballots.
“It is more important than ever for residents to understand mailing timelines and how the postmark process works, as this knowledge helps prevent missed deadlines and the penalties that can result from late mailing,” Bodley said.
Recent clarification from the U.S. Postal Service explains that most mail now receives a machine-applied postmark when it is processed at a regional facility; not when it is dropped into a local mailbox. As a result, mail sent close to a deadline may not be postmarked on time.
Why Postmarks Matter
If the second installment of the 2025-2026 property tax payment is not postmarked or received by April 10, 2026, delinquent penalties will apply.
If a vote-by-mail ballot is not hand-postmarked by Election Day, June 2, 2026, it will not be counted.
Earlier this week the Postal Service shared another monthly update on the implementation of Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO), the initiative that ends evening collections at post offices. (The update is on the PRC website here, and on Google Docs here.)
During the month of February, RTO activations were confined to the area of Springfield, Illinois (ZIPs 623, 625-627). About 150 more post offices now no longer get the evening collection.
That number of implementations is down considerably from January, when RTO was activated at about 1.940 post offices. It’s also well below the average of 875 per month over the past year — and that’s including two months, April and December, when there were no activations.
It’s not clear why the implementations slowed down so much last month, but it shouldn’t be taken as an indication that the Postal Service is faltering on its commitment to the RTO initiative. It’s entirely possible that the rate of activations this spring will return to January levels.
In any case, at this point, under the RTO and its pilot, Local Transportation Optimization (LTO), the Postal Service has discontinued the evening collection of mail at about 13,500 post offices. Many of these offices serve more than one ZIP Code, so overall, more than 16,000 ZIP Codes have been impacted.
When the RTO is fully implemented, about 23,000 post offices — three-fourths of the 31,000 USPS-operated post offices in the country — will no longer get an end-of-day collection.
Under the RTO, the mail, packages, and Priority items sit overnight in the back of the office, waiting to be collected the next morning, when the day’s mail is dropped off, as opposed to going out the same day to a processing center. The RTO adds a day to delivery times for most destinations, two or three days in the case of weekends and holidays.
The RTO applies to post offices and ZIP codes more than 50 miles from one of the country’s 56 Regional Processing & Distribution Centers (RPDCs) — the main hubs of in the network redesign being implemented as part of the Delivering for America 10-year plan.
Here’s a map showing the progress of the implementations as of April 1, 2026. The blue represents areas where RTO has been implemented; yellow is where it will eventually be implemented. The orange areas are where RTO will not be activated because they’re within 50 miles of a RPDC. In the search box, you can enter a ZIP Code (follow it with USA) or a city, state, then click enter, and the map will zoom to the location. A larger, full-page version is here. The map has been updated to show activations through April 1 2026.
The Postal Service does not inform customers at the impacted post offices that their mail will not be dispatched to a processing center until the next day.
The Postal Service explained why it doesn’t make the RTO status of your post office more accessible in its recent Federal Register rulemaking about how RTO impacts postmarking:
“While some information may be gleaned from an RTO designation, the Postal Service does not want customers to attach unwarranted significance to that designation.” For example, the Postal Service notes, RTO status is only one of several inputs determining service standards for a particular origin-to-destination mailing. Rather than focusing on RTO status, customers should check with the service standard map.
As for postmarking, while RTO status will almost definitely determine whether a letter will get a same-day or next-day postmark, the Postal Service says that it “has never guaranteed that the postmark date would align with the date of mailing.” So, if you need a same-day postmark, ask for one at the retail window.
Place, State ZIP
RTO Status
New RTO STATUS
Post Office
PO Address
Campus Site
RPDC
Agawam, MA 01001
Not RTO
Not RTO
AGAWAM PO
600 SUFFIELD ST
SPRINGFIELD MA RPDC
While information about a post office’s RTO status is not readily available, the Postal Service has shared monthly updates with the Postal Regulatory Commission since last May.
These lists provide the ZIP Codes of the impacted post office, along with the activation date. Based on these lists, we’ve made an RTO Status Checker that shows if a particular ZIP Code or place (city, state) is subject to the RTO or not. If the location has been activated for RTO, the status checker shows the date of activation The status checker is up-to-date as of April 1, 2026.
The full list shown in the status checker is on Google Docs here. The list on which the map and status checker are based is here. For more about the RTO here, visit our RTO Dashboard.
Nearly all of the 210 Sorting & Delivery Centers announced so far are located in currently operating post offices and processing centers with excess space that’s being utilized to consolidate carriers. But relocating carriers to S&DCs creates excess space in the back of post offices. In the end, the amount of excess space is not reduced. It’s just transferred from one facility to another.
In some cases, however, the Postal Service is leasing large new buildings to serve as S&DCs. The result in these cases in a net increase in excess space — and a big increase in lease costs as well.
Several of these large, newly leased S&DCs are included in a notification sent from the Postal Service to unions on January 21, 2026. The notice (which attaches an earlier list shared on October 1, 2025) identifies several S&DCs that will be launching over the coming months. Some of them were not included in the update list shared by the Postal Service with the Postal Regulatory Commission as part of the Annual Compliance review (ACR) (discussed in this post).
The ACR list included about 150 S&DCs that have already launched and 60 that are scheduled to launch through October 2026. But it did not include five other S&DCs, three of which have launch dates scheduled for June 2026. It’s not clear why they weren’t on the ACR list.
Here’s a list of these additional S&DCs and their spoke offices. Also included below is the Phoenix North Valley S&DC, for which the notification shows a change in spokes.
The original USPS notification is here; a list with more details is on Google Docs here.
Facility
Type
Address
Launch Date
Total Routes
MEDLEY FL S&DC*
Hub
11150 NW 122nd ST BUILDING 7, MEDLEY, FL 33178
6/13/2026
HIALEAH - HIALEAH LAKES STATION
Spoke
1500 W 84TH ST, HIALEAH, FL 33018
6/13/2026
24
HIALEAH - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
325 E 1ST AVE, HIALEAH, FL 33010
6/13/2026
23
HIALEAH- PROMENADE STATION
Spoke
3690 W 18TH AVE, HIALEAH, Fl 33012
6/13/2026
39
MIAMI - BLUE LAGOON BRANCH
Spoke
6200 NW 7TH ST, MIAMI, FL 33126
6/13/2026
34
MIAMI - DORAL BRANCH
Spoke
1700 NW 97TH AVE, DORAL, FL 33172
6/13/2026
24
MIAMI - MARTIN LUTHER KING BRANCH
Spoke
6700 NW 27TH AVE, MIAMI, FL 33147
6/13/2026
25
MIAMI - WEST CARRIER ANNEX
Spoke
2200 NW 72ND AVE STE 700, MIAMI, FL 33152
6/13/2026
6
MIAMI - MILAM DAIRY ANNEX
Spoke
2200 NW 72ND AVE STE 702, MIAMI, Fl 33152
6/13/2026
39
OPA LOCkA • MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
550 FISHERMAN ST, OPA LOCkA, FL 33054
6/13/2026
17
LEESBURG FL 5&DC*
Hub
3610 W MAIN STREET, LEESBURG, FL 34748
6/13/2026
FRUITLAND PARK - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
104 W MILLER ST, FRUITLAND PARK, FL 34731
6/13/2026
8
GROVELAND - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
304 W BROAD ST, GROVELAND, FL 34736
6/13/2026
14
HOWEY IN THE HILLS - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
105 S FLORIDA AVE, HOWEY IN THE HILLS, FL 34737
6/13/2026
2
LADY LAKE - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
850 TEAGUE TRL, LADY LAKE, FL 32159
6/13/2026
124
LEESBURG - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
1201 S 14TH ST, LEESBURG, FL 34748
6/13/2026
42
WILDWOOD - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
316 SHOPPING CENTER DR, WILDWOOD, FL 34785
6/13/2026
9
YALAHA - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
8712 COUNTY ROAD 48, YALAHA, FL 34797
6/13/2026
1
PHOENIX AZ NORTH VALLEY S&DC - PHX- NORTH VALLEY DOC*
Hub
2502 W GRANDVIEW RD, PHOENIX, AZ 85023
6/13/2026
GLENDALE - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
5955 W PEORIA AVE, GLENDALE, AZ 85302
REMOVED
N/A
SUNNYSLOPE ANNEX
Spoke
9623 N 7TH ST, PHOENIX, AZ 85020 (OR 9635 N 7TH ST)
6/13/2026
61
SHAW BUTTE
Spoke
12208 N 19TH AVE, PHOENIX, AZ 85029
6/13/2026
50
DANVILLE VA S&DC - MAIN OFFICE
Hub
105 TEAL CT, DANVILLE, VA 24541
6/13/2026
44
DRY FORK· MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
656 DRY FORK RD, DRY FORK, VA 24549
6/13/2026
3
SALT LAKE CITY UTAH WEST S&DC*
Hub
1095 SOUTH 4800 WEST, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84104
TBD
MAGNA - MAIN OFFICE
Spoke
8470 W MAGNA MAIN ST, MAGNA, UT 84044
TBD
10
SALT LAKE CITY - WEST VALLEY BRANCH
Spoke
3490 S4400 W, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84120
TBD
56
SALT LAKE CITY - MPA
Spoke
1795 W 2100 S, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84199
TBD
70
SALT LAKE CITY - FLETCHER F. ACORD AMF
Spoke
320 N 3700 W, SALT LAKE CITY, UT 84122
TBD
14
SAN JUAN PR SDC
Hub
525 CALLE JUAN CALAF STE 101, SAN JUAN, PR 00918
TBD
*new building in the bid cluster
Here’s a rundown of the newly leased S&DCs and some of the other facilities in the January notification to the unions that weren’t on the ACR list.
The Pompano Beach S&DC, appears on last month’s ACR list, but we start here because it’s an early example of the emerging trend of leasing large new spaces for S&DCs. It was discussed in this post back in November 2023, when word first came out that it would be opening.
The Pompano Beach S&DC took 250 routes from five post offices. The excess space left behind led to a decision to relocate one of them, the Tropical Reef Station.
Last week the Postal Service announced the opening of Tropical Reef’s new location, a small storefront in a shopping plaza. Something similar may happen to the other spoke offices.
The Leesburg S&DC is located at 3610 West Main Street. Its launch date is June 13, 2026. It too was not included in the ACR list.
The union notification describes it as a new building for bid purposes.
According to a property listing this facility was built in 2008 for Coca Cola, which leased it until June 2024. The CBRE listing says it’s a cold storage warehouse with “26,875 square feet of freezer space and 70,625 square feet of cooler space, all operating at a safe and consistent 34ºF.” It’s not clear why the Postal Service would lease such a space.
Perhaps there’s some confusion about the location. That’s also the address for Saddle Creek Logistics Services, which has partnered with the Postal Service in the past.
The Villages S&DC will take 200 routes from seven offices, including 124 routes from the Lady Lake post office, which serves The Villages retirement community.
The union notification list describes the Salt Lake City S&DC as a new building for bid purposes, but it was built in 2012. It has 150,300 square feet and parking for 172.
An October 1, 2025, posting on the website of the real estate company CoStar said that FedEx had leased this space and moved in, but according to a November 2025 Facebook post, CoStar negotiated a 10-year lease with the Postal Service at around that time.
The lease listing says the cost was advertised as $102,204 a month, $1,226,448 a year. It’s not known what the Postal Service is paying.
Perhaps some of these new costs will be offset by changes at the four spokes. The Magna office is leased; perhaps the retail services will move to a smaller, less costly space, like the Tropical Reef Station that lost its carriers to the Pompano Beach S&DC. The Postal Service owns the other three spokes of the Salt Lake City S&DC, so perhaps one or more will be sold.
Phoenix North Valley AZ S&DC
Phoenix North Valley S&DC (Google Earth)
The Phoenix North Valley S&DC is located at 2502 W. Grandview Road. It’s a Delivery Distribution Center (DDC) that the Postal Service has owned since May 1999. The USPS Owned Facilities Report says it has about 55,000 square feet.
This S&DC was included on the ACR list, but the union notification shows a change. North Valley was originally planned to take carriers from the Glendale and Shaw Butte post offices, but Glendale has been removed from the list, and Sunnyslope Annex has been added.
The North Valley S&DC will take 111 routes from Shaw Butte and Sunnyslope. The launch date remains June 13, 2026.
The Danville VA S&DC is the main post office in Danville. It’s located at 105 Teal Court. This S&DC was not included in the ACR list.
The Danville post office already has 44 routes. The union notification shows only one spoke, the Dry Fork post office, which is a good distance away, 15 miles from the S&DC. Dry Fork has just three routes, so not many carriers will need to drive the extra distance to their routes.
The historic New Deal Courthouse post office in Danville at 700 Main Street (built in 1934) is not part of the carrier consolidation. It’s now a finance station with no routes to consolidate. It’s open only four hours a day, operations having been reduced in 2012 due to “recent economic changes within the Postal Service.”
The new S&DC in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has a launch date to be determined. The list shows no spokes yet, but there are several post offices with delivery units that could be consolidated, including Hato Rey, Loiza Street, Cupey and Catano.
On the union notification, the address of this S&DC is 525 Calle Juan Calaf Ste 101, and it is already listed on the USPS locator page that way. This, however, is the address of an OfficeMax.
OfficeMax and its parent Office Depot have been reducing their retail footprint, so it’s possible that this store will close and the Postal Service will move in. But there’s nothing on the internet to indicate the San Juan location is closing, and the OfficeMax store locator shows it operating as of February 17, 2026.
The USPS leased facilities report lists this same address for a facility described as a P&DC/S&DC. It shows zero square footage for the interior and site, which is sometimes indicative of a new facility. But the union notification does not say it’s a new building in a bid cluster.
The main San Juan P&DC is located about a mile away, at 585 Ave FD Roosevelt. It doesn’t seem likely there would be two P&DCs in such close proximity. Perhaps the S&DC will be colocated not with a new P&DC but with the currently operating P&DC, and there’s just a mix-up over the address.
If that’s not the case, the actual location of the San Juan S&DC is something of a mystery.
Earlier this week the Postal Service announced the potential relocation of services at the historic post office in Lamar, Missouri.
The notice says a relocation is necessary “due to space deficiencies” at the current location, 131 West 11th Street. The notice indicates that one possible scenario is that the Postal Service will move to a new location and sell off the historic property. That would be a real loss for Lamar.
The folks in Lamar may be well aware of deficiencies at the post office, but looked at from afar, the relocation notice makes the decision to relocate something of a mystery.
The notice shares no details about what the deficiencies are. (“Space deficiencies” is a common term in relocation notices.) The Postal Service instead provides detailed specifications — in terms of square footage and parking spaces — of what it is looking for in a new location.
The specs might lead one to think that the current location is too small or has insufficient parking. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. The numbers in the specs don’t add up to an explanation for the move. They just raise more questions.
The Lamar post office is one of 1,400 post offices built by the Roosevelt administration under the New Deal that are still in operation. Hundreds of other New Deal post offices have been closed and sold, converted to law offices, restaurants, and in some cases, demolished.
The Lamar post office is one of 42 New Deal post offices still operating in Missouri. The USPS Facilities Reports list its date of first occupancy as October 1, 1933. It’s eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and it’s one of the architectural gems of Lamar.
The Postal Service says that it is considering three options for Lamar: keep retail services in the building and relocate the carriers, keep the carriers in the facility and relocate retail services, or purchase land with about 65,000 square feet, build a new post office for retail and carrier operations, and then sell the current post office.
None of these scenarios makes sense.
The notice says the Postal Service is considering a retail space of 1,550 square feet or a carrier space of 4,700 square feet. Apparently, then, the Postal Service needs about 6,200 square feet for both operations. The current post office has 6,736 square feet — 500 square feet more than what it is looking for.
The notice says the Postal Service is looking for facilities with 13 parking spaces for retail and 17 for carrier operations. The current site has 16,000 square feet, most of which is for a parking lot in the rear. It looks big enough for several postal delivery vehicles, perhaps enough for the eleven routes operating out of the post office (for Lamar 64759 and Jasper 64755). There are several spaces on the street in front of the post office for customers. Employees apparently park elsewhere. Judging by Google Streetviews, there are plenty of spaces available on the streets nearby.
It’s also not clear why the Postal Service would seek to purchase a site with 65,000 square feet. There are only 40 post offices in Missouri with sites that big, and most of them are for large post offices in highly populated areas in St. Louis and Kansas City. Why would a small town like Lamar, with a population of 4,316 and with maybe 20 employees at the post office at any given time, need so much space?
As for buying property and building a new post office, the Postal Service rarely builds new post offices anymore. It almost always leases an available property. According to the USPS Facilities Report, it hasn’t built a new post office in Missouri since 2001. On the other hand, a search of available properties shows that finding a location to lease won’t be easy.
There may be more to this story. There must be. Perhaps there have been complaints about the space. Perhaps the building needs repairs the Postal Service doesn’t want to make. Perhaps someone wants to buy the property.
The public is invited to submit written comments about the proposed relocation, but there won’t be a public meeting to ask questions, discuss the proposal and consider possible alternative spaces.
That’s because the Postal Service recently revised its regulations — based on its practices during the pandemic, when public meetings weren’t possible — so that public meetings on relocations are no longer required.
These regulations are spelled out in 39 CFR § 241.4. The changes regarding a public meeting were announced in June 2023 in the Federal Register. (The previous regulations were set forth in a final rule in March 2015.)
The Postal Service says it’s looking for a space within three miles of the current location. Lamar is a small city of five square miles. It’s just two miles from the northernmost point to the southernmost. Three miles could put the post office well outside of the city limits.
In any case, it will be difficult to find a better location for a post office than the current one.
The post office is across from City Square, the heart of the business district and the site of the Barton County Courthouse — Lamar is the county seat. It’s just a block away from City Hall.
The post office is six blocks from the Harry S Truman Birthplace State Historic Site. Although he grew up in Independence, the 33rd president of the United States was born in a small, white frame house in Lamar.
The post office is also just a couple of blocks from Wyatt Earp Park, where there is a statue of the famous lawman and his wife, Urilla. Earp began his career as Lamar’s local constable in 1870. Urilla died from typhoid or childbirth shortly after their marriage. she’s buried in East Cemetery, a mile from City Square.
The public can send comments on the proposed relocation within the next 30 days to: United States Postal Service, Attn Lamar MO Relocation, PO BOX 27497, Greensboro, NC 27498-1103.
As for the motives for the move and the possible outcomes, perhaps the commenters will tell the Postal Service what Harry Truman, son of Lamar, always used to say, “I’m from Missouri. Show me.”
