The U.S. Postal Service is gearing up for a busy 2018 holiday season.
As the postal service is expecting to deliver 15 billion pieces of mail and 900 million packages, for a total of almost 16 billion deliveries from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.
“The postal service is ready to deliver for the holiday season. We have increased our operating capacity to include additional transportation and extended our delivery windows,” said Megan J. Brennan, Postmaster General, and CEO.
The postal service will be expanding its Sunday delivery operations to locations with high package volumes beginning Nov. 25. The USPS already delivers packages on Sundays in most major cities and anticipates delivering more than 8 million Sunday packages in December.
Mail carriers will also deliver packages on Christmas Day in select locations.
With an increase in early and online shopping for gifts, there is no longer a “busiest day” for holiday shipping, according to the USPS. Instead, the postal service’s busiest time is two weeks before Christmas.
Starting the week of Dec. 10, customer traffic is expected to increase, and the service expects to deliver nearly 200 million packages per week during these two weeks.
The week of Dec. 17-23 is predicted to be the busiest mailing, shipping, and delivery week, when nearly 3 billion pieces of first-class mail, including greeting cards, will be processed and delivered.
For domestic service, the USPS also released the following deadlines for Christmas packages:
- USPS Retail Ground: Dec. 14
- First Class Mail: Dec. 20
- Priority Mail: Dec. 20
- Priority Mail Express: Dec. 22
Visit USPS for more information about holiday season deliveries.
