USPS on Target To Meet Last Year’s Peak Season Delivery Metrics in 2022 Again

As this final week before Christmas is looking a bit bleak due to a major winter storm affecting much of the nation, USPS reported new delivery performance metrics for the week of December 9 to 16, 2022.

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What you need to know: The average time to deliver a mailpiece or package across the postal network was 2.5 days for the eighth consecutive week, even as mailing and shipping traffic increased during one of the busiest weeks of the year.

Currently, this average time to deliver is below the metrics USPS reported for last year when the Postal Service delivered more than 13 billion packages throughout the holiday season, averaging 2.7 days to deliver a mailpiece or package between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve 2021.

Looking now at 2022, the latest service performance scores covering the entire quarter from October 1 through December 16 included:

First-Class Mail: 91.6% of First-Class Mail was delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 1.6 percentage points over the last quarter. The current data reflects a year-over-year (YoY) increase of 1.5 percentage points compared to the same period during last year’s peak holiday season. 

Marketing Mail: 94.1% of Marketing Mail was delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a slight decrease of 0.7 percentage points over the last quarter. The current data reflects a 2.3 percentage points increase (YoY) compared to the same period during last year’s peak holiday season.

Periodicals: 85.3% of Periodicals delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 1.6 percentage points over the last quarter. The current data reflects a YoY increase of 4.1 percentage points compared to the same period during last year’s peak holiday season.

The Postal Service’s preparedness for the holiday season reflects strategic investments and operational precision improvements made as part of the Delivering for America plan over the past two years.

USPS Was Ready for Holiday Season

What else is important: In November, the organization completed installing 137 new package sorting machines across its network, expanding daily package processing capacity to 60 million.

USPS has installed 249 new processing machines since launching the Delivering for America plan in March 2021, part of its $40 billion investment in the postal network.

Additional holiday hiring initiatives include stabilizing the USPS permanent workforce by converting more than 100,000 workers to full-time roles since the beginning of 2021 (with more than 41,000 part-time workers converted to full-time since January 2022) and successfully hiring an additional 20,000 seasonal employees.

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