Regional Transportation Optimization ends evening collections at nearly 12,000 post offices

Steve HutkinsBlog, Featured

Over the past two years, the Postal Service has been quietly eliminating the evening collection of mail at thousands of post offices. Rather than going out the same day to a processing center, 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. The initiative is called Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO).

RTO began in October 2023 as a pilot called Local Transportation Optimization (LTO). It was relaunched as RTO per se in February 2025. The Postal Service has been sharing monthly reports on the latest activations with the PRC. The eighth such report was shared on Monday of this week.

Together, as of of December 1, 2025, LTO and RTO had been activated at about 11,900 post offices.

The eighth report indicates that no further activations will take place in December. Presumably they will resume after the holiday mailing season. The plan calls for ending the evening collection at about 24,000 post offices, so the implementation process is about half done.

The list of 11,900 ZIP codes is on the PRC website here; our enhanced list, with post office names and addresses and other information shared with the PRC for the advisory opinion on the Delivering for America plan, is on Google docs here. An interactive map showing the activations, color coded by campus site, can be found here. There’s more about the activation process in this post.

The RTO applies to post offices and ZIP Codes more than 50 miles from one of the country’s sixty Regional Processing and Delivery Centers (RPDCs). Those less than 50 miles continue to get the evening collection.

The RTO adds a day to delivery times for outgoing mail and package; it adds two days for anything sent on a Saturday, and three days for anything sent on Saturday if Monday is a federal holiday.

The RTO also delays the postmark date, as discussed in this previous post. The final rule about postmark policy was published in the Federal Register on November 24; it can be found here.

There’s more about the initiative on our RTO dashboard.