The United States Postal Service (USPS; also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or simply the Postal Service) is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States, its insular areas and associated states. It is one of a few government agencies explicitly authorized by the Constitution of the United States. The USPS began operations in 1971, replacing the United States Post Office Department, a Cabinet department. As of March 29, 2024, the USPS has 525,377 career employees and 114,623 pre-career employees.
The USPS has a monopoly on traditional letter delivery within the United States and operates under a universal service obligation (USO), both of which are defined across a broad set of legal mandates, which obligate it to provide uniform price and quality across the entirety of its service area. The Post Office has exclusive access to letter boxes marked "U.S. Mail" and personal letterboxes in the U.S., but has to compete against private package delivery services, such as United Parcel Service, FedEx, and DHL.
History
The first national postal agency in the US, known as the United States Post Office was founded by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 26, 1775, at the beginning of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general; he also served a similar position for the American colonies. The Postal Clause was then included in the United States Constitution when it was ratified in 1788, authorizing the U.S. Congress to "establish post offices and post roads"; the original intent of the clause was to facilitate interstate communication as well as to create a source of revenue for the early United States. The Post Office Department was then created in 1792 with the passage of the Postal Service Act. It was elevated to a cabinet-level department in 1872, and was transformed by the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 into the U.S. Postal Service as an independent agency.Postal Reorganization Act, Pub. Law No. 91-375, 84 Stat. 719, at 720 (August 12, 1970), codified at .
In 1844, entrepreneur and legal theorist Lysander Spooner challenged the Post Office's monopoly by founding the American Letter Mail Company, which offered lower rates and faster service between major cities. Although popular with customers, his enterprise was ultimately shut down by federal legal pressure, prompting Congress to reinforce the postal monopoly in 1851.
The Post Office Department owned and operated the first public telegraph lines in the United States, starting in 1844 from Washington to Baltimore, and eventually extending to New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Philadelphia. In 1847, the telegraph system was privatized, except for a period during World War I, when it was used to accelerate the delivery of letters arriving at night.
Between 1942 and 1945, "V-Mail" (for "Victory Mail") service was available for military mail. Letters were converted into microfilm and reprinted near the destination, to save room on transport vehicles for military cargo.
The United States Information Agency (USIA) helped the Post Office Department, during the Cold War, to redesign stamps to include more patriotic slogans. On March 18, 1970, postal workers in New York City—upset over low wages and poor working conditions, and emboldened by the Civil Rights Movement—organized a strike. The strike initially involved postal workers in only New York City, but it eventually gained support of over 210,000 postal workers across the nation. While the strike ended without any concessions from the federal government, it did ultimately allow for postal worker unions and the government to negotiate a contract which gave the unions most of what they wanted, as well as the signing of the Postal Reorganization Act by President Richard Nixon on August 12, 1970. The act replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with a new federal agency, the U.S. Postal Service, and came into effect on July 1, 1971.
Among the changes from the Postal Reorganization Act, a key aspect was the requirement for the USPS to be self-financing, which introduced a conflict with its other requirement to provide a nationwide service. The next major legislation affecting the service, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, was passed in 2006. This act limited the services that the Postal Service could offer to only those it already provided and also established a requirement for the USPS to save money for the medical benefits of future retirees. The Act set a goal to save $5 billion per year for the first 10 years of a 50-year schedule, however within 6 years the Postal Service began to default on its payments.
Declining mail volume First-class mail volume peaked in 2001 at 103.65 billion, declining to 52.62 billion by 2020 due to the increasing use of email and the World Wide Web for correspondence and business transactions. The Postal Service experienced lower revenues as mail use declined in the 2010s. Private courier services, such as FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS), directly compete with USPS for the delivery of packages.
Internal streamlining and delivery slowdown In response, the USPS has increased productivity each year from 2000 to 2007, through increased automation, route re-optimization, and facility consolidation. Despite these efforts, the organization saw an $8.5 billion budget shortfall in 2010,McElhatton, Jim "Postal Service Reports $8 billion in Losses" , The Washington Times, November 12, 2010, accessed August 4, 2011. and was losing money at a rate of about $3 billion per quarter in 2011.
Elimination of Saturday delivery averted On January 28, 2009, Postmaster General John E. Potter testified before the Senate that, if the Postal Service could not readjust its payment toward the contractually funding earned employee retiree health benefits, as mandated by the Postal Accountability & Enhancement Act of 2006, the USPS would be forced to consider cutting delivery to five days per week during June, July, and August. H.R. 22, addressing this issue, passed the House of Representatives and Senate and was signed into law on September 30, 2009. However, Postmaster General Potter continued to advance plans to eliminate Saturday mail delivery.
In February 2013, the USPS announced that in order to save about $2 billion per year, Saturday delivery service would be discontinued except for packages, mail-order medicines, Priority Mail, Express Mail, and mail delivered to Post Office boxes, beginning August 10, 2013. However, the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013, passed in March, reversed the cuts to Saturday delivery.
Post office closures On December 5, 2011, the USPS announced it would close more than half of its mail processing centers, eliminate 28,000 jobs and reduce overnight delivery of First-Class Mail.Postal Service to Delay Cutbacks Until Mid-May, Staving Off Bankruptcy , Fox News. Accessed: December 13, 2011. At peak mail volume in 2006, the USPS operated 673 facilities. New delivery standards were issued in January 2015 in which the majority of single-piece (not presorted) first-class mail started being delivered in two days instead of one. Large commercial mailers can still have first-class mail delivered overnight if delivered directly to a processing center in the early morning. In 2014, this represented only 11% of first-class mail. In May 2012, the service announced it had modified its plan. Instead, rural post offices would remain open with reduced retail hours (some as little as two hours per day) unless there was a community preference for a different option.
Delivering for America reform plan In March 2021, the Postal Service launched a 10-year reform plan called Delivering for America, intended to improve the agency's financial stability, service reliability, and operational efficiency. The plan includes $40 billion in investments meant to improve USPS technology and facilities. In April 2022, the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 was signed into law. It lifted financial burdens placed on the USPS by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
Retirement funding and payment defaults
The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA) obligated the USPS to fund the present value of earned retirement obligations (essentially past promises which have not yet come due) within a ten-year time span.
In 2012, in order to be able to meet obligations for payroll and continuing its operations, the Postal Service defaulted on payments due for retirements benefits in August and again in September that year. In September 2014, it defaulted on the payments for the fourth time, and continued to default into 2017. The Postal Service sought financial reforms from Congress for relief from the funding obligation and debt from the defaults. Legislation was introduced in Congress in 2016 as well as in 2019, aiming to remove the benefits funding obligations, however no new legislation was passed until the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act (PSRA). The PSRA was signed into law in April 2022. It forgave $57 billion in Postal Service debt and released it from the obligation to set aside funds for future retirees' healthcare, as well as adding requirements for delivery timing and reporting on performance metrics, and allowing the Postal Service to offer some non-mail services.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is the main bureaucratic organization responsible for the human resources aspect of many federal agencies and their employees. The PAEA created the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund (PSRHB) after Congress removed the Postal Service contribution to the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). Most other employees that contribute to the CSRS have 7% deducted from their wages. Currently, all new employees contribute into Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) once they become a full-time regular employees.
On September 30, 2014, the USPS failed to make a $5.7 billion payment on this debt, the fourth such default. In 2017, the USPS defaulted on some of the last lump-sum payments required by the 2006 law, though other payments were also still required.
Proposals to cancel the funding obligation and plan a new schedule for the debt were introduced in Congress as early as 2016. A 2019 bill entitled the "USPS Fairness Act", which would have eliminated the pension funding obligation, passed the House but did not proceed further. As of March 8, 2022, the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which includes a section entitled "USPS Fairness Act" cancelling the obligation, has passed both the House and the Senate; President Joe Biden signed the bill into law on April 6, 2022.
COVID-19 test kits to Americans
Postmaster General DeJoy helped the USPS deliver approximately 380 million home test kits from January 2022 through May 2022. As of March 2024, when the program concluded, the USPS had delivered over 1.8 billion free COVID-19 test kits. In September 2024, the distribution of free at-home COVID-19 tests was re-started.
Operations
Deliveries
In the 2025 fiscal year, the Postal Service operated 30,972 retail offices in the U.S., and delivered a total of 108.7 billion packages and pieces of mail to 170.4 million delivery points in fiscal year 2025.