The Postal Service has now implemented Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) at over 15,000 post offices.

Under RTO, mail is no longer collected at the end of the business day at post offices. Letters and packages are instead bagged and held until the following morning, when everything is collected at the same time the day’s mail is dropped off for delivery. By combining delivery and collection into a single trip, the Postal Service cuts its costs, but this adds a day to delivery times and postmark dates (as discussed in this previous post).

The latest update shared with the Postal Regulatory Commission on May 8, 2026, showed 15,347 ZIP Codes where the post office has lost the evening collection under RTO.

The list is on the PRC website here. Our expanded version with more information about the post office names, addresses, etc., is on Google docs here. You can check the status of any ZIP code or location using the RTO status checker widget in the sidebar.

The RTO applies to ZIP Codes where the post office is more than 50 miles from one of the country’s 56 Regional Processing & Distribution Centers (RPDC). Post offices within this 50-mile radius are exempt from RTO and continue to get the evening collection.

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. With 15,300 activations, the implementation process is thus about two-thirds completed.

These 23,000 post offices serve about 28,540 ZIP Codes. As of May 1, the RTO had been activated at about 17,700 ZIP Codes.

Here’s a map showing the implementations as of August 1, 2026. Blue indicates ZIP Codes where RTO has been activated; yellow is for areas that are eligible for RTO but that have not yet been activated; orange indicates the areas that are not eligible for RTC because they are within 50 miles of an RPDC. Search the map by place names or ZIP Code followed by USA.

Since May 1, 2025, the RTO has been activated at 10,500 post offices — an average of 950 post offices a month (not including December 2025, when there were no activations).

During the month of April 2026, the RTO was implemented at just over a thousand post offices, approximately the monthly average, but a significant increase over the previous two months. During February, RTO was activated at about 150 post offices, and in March, at about 500.

There are now about 8,000 more post offices eligible for RTO that have not yet been activated. At the rate of a thousand per month, the RTO could be fully activated by the end of calendar year 2026.

For more about RTO, visit our RTO Dashboard.