August 25, 2025
Dear Alliance Members:
On Friday, the Postal Service released its preliminary financial results for July. They continued the losing trend for this year. Moreover, when you exclude the accounting adjustment for non-cash workers’ compensation, the USPS is performing $1.3 billion worse than its plan and $570 million worse than in the same period last year. These results indicate that with two months remaining in the fiscal year, the agency will perform much worse than its official FY 2025 plan to lose $6.9 billion without the workers’ compensation adjustment.
Without adjustments, the loss for July was $648 million, bringing the ten-month deficit to $6.873 billion. Adjusting for workers’ compensation, the July loss was $730 million, and the year-to-date loss was $6.281 billion.
Market Dominant mail volumes were better than planned but worse than last year for both July and YTD. Competitive package volumes continued to be much lower than both the plan and the prior year.
All of the major postal product categories lost more volume in July compared to the same period last year:
- First-Class Mail -5.7%
- Periodicals -9.5%
- Marketing Mail -1.9%
- Competitive Packages -4.7%
The year-to-date picture is similarly bleak:
- First-Class Mail -5.1%
- Periodicals -11.2%
- Marketing Mail +0.6%
- Competitive Packages -4.4%
(Marketing Mail benefited from the November elections.)
With the latest USPS results, we now project that the Postal Regulatory Commission could authorize a “mail density” addition to the CPI price cap of 1.8% to 2.2% for next July. There is a chance that the regulator will correct its rules in time to eliminate the density add-on.
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