MARCH 31, 2025. Beginning April 1, 2025, mail will be slowed by at least one day coming from or delivering to approximately 75% of zip codes within the US, most of them rural.
Even though we ship out packages as fast as we can, since we are a small business shipping from a rural zip code, this will impact our customers' delivery times.
In this post, we'll share the data and maps showing what kind of delivery times you can expect for your zip code, how the service has changed, and what comes next.
Table of Contents
What Is The New USPS Service Standard?
In October 2024 and March 2025, the USPS announced a new initiative to slow services, called Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO). This initiative halves the number of deliveries per day at 24,300 of the country's 33,700 post offices (72%). This negatively impacts about half of the US population (including the entire state of Wyoming!).
Typically, a delivery truck delivers and picks up mail from post offices twice a day: once in the morning and once in the afternoon. This new initiative ends the afternoon delivery/pick-ups at all post offices more than 50 miles from one of the country’s 59 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs).
For example, in our region of rural Northwest Oregon, we aim to get our mail ready for the regular 12 pm pickup so it can make the 2 pm delivery truck. The 2 pm delivery truck brings the mail to the Portland regional distribution center and it's well on its way to our customers that evening.
Going forward, the mail from the 12 pm pickup will be stashed in the back of the post office until next day when the 10 am truck picks it up for the Portland distribution center, delaying transit for a full day.
Map Tool: Estimate New Delivery Times by Zip Code
To inform customers, USPS has created a map tool that shows how long you can expect a letter or package to take, by origin zip code.
These two maps show the delivery estimate, in days, for a package shipped from Walnut Studiolo (zip code 97131) for Ground Advantage (formerly known as First Class) on the left, and Priority Mail on the right. Pink is 2 days, Yellow 3, Purple 4, and Orange 5 days.
How Much Have Delivery Times Changed
The advocacy organization Save The Post Office has done a deep dive into the proposed changes and created maps and tools to help folks understand how the service standards have changed.
These maps show the same letter being sent from Pasco, Washington in 2020, currently, and with the new initiative for presorted (bulk) and stamped. Green is 2 days, Blue 3, Teal 4, and Purple 5 days.
What's Next
As members of the current administration advocate to privatize the postal service, we expect further service degradations and increased costs. Perhaps not coincidentally, and similar to the business process of enshittification common to the tech industry, UPS and FedEx package rates have been dropping, becoming more competitive to USPS. In enshittification, the business strategy is to make customers reliant on a private service with free or low-cost services, then jack the prices once they have a virtual monopoly.
In some cases we find it is now more economical to ship with UPS than USPS, a historic first.
However, as a rural business, we already know the danger of privatization: private carriers don't provide adequate and reliable service to rural areas. For example, the closest UPS drop-off is a 40-minute drive round-trip and they won't pick up packages out here same-day. DHL Express stopped providing service entirely a few years ago: we have to use the USPS to mail DHL packages to their office at the Portland Airport. It doesn't make business sense to serve all areas of such a large country, which is why it required the Rural Electrification Act for rural areas to get electricity, and why the Constitution mandated a national postal service.
We stand with the letter carriers of America and the postal union (APWU) and will continue to use the USPS as our first carrier of choice. It needs our support and it provides a daily rural pickup.
However for customers who need their orders faster, we do offer UPS, FedEx, and DHL (international) options for customers during checkout. If you need your package faster than Ground Advantage, particularly if you're in the Midwest or East Coast, Alaska or Hawaii, we recommend upgrading to Priority or Express services.
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