The United States Postal Service guarantees local delivery of first-class mail should take between one and three days. Even though a letter is going just across town, it won’t necessarily arrive at its destination overnight. Sending Mail Within the Same City The USPS no longer offers overnight delivery on first-class mail, so even if one mails a letter to a destination just a few blocks away, it still might not arrive there for up to
three days. No matter how close the intended destination is, the sender can’t be sure of when it will arrive, unless he or she wants to pay extra for package tracking. However, the USPS does say that first-class mail consisting of a single piece, such as a letter or check, for example, will likely take two or three days pretty much anywhere. How Mail Travels Delivering mail involves much more than just simply directing it to the correct address, which is why even mail
headed for the next street over could take a few days to get there. When mail is deposited in a box, it may sit there overnight until it can be processed the next day, adding on one more day until it can embark on the delivery process. Once mail is collected, it goes through several more steps before arriving at its destination. For starters, mail is sorted by type, such as packages and letters, and then arranged so that the addresses face the same way. It’s then postmarked and imprinted with
several fluorescent bars before being sprayed with a bar code. Then, each piece of mail is sorted by the zip-code it’s headed to and then sent to a processing center. There, it’s sorted again and sent to the appropriate post office for final delivery. Determining Mail Delivery Timeline While it may seem like determining when mail will arrive requires a lot of guesswork, the USPS does give customers a way to estimate the most likely delivery date. Customers can consult the
USPS’s delivery map, which uses the agency’s service standards to predict when mail will arrive. Delivery timelines vary based on the zip-code from which the package was sent and whether it is being sent first-class or standard mail. By knowing these two pieces of information, USPS customers can better estimate when their letter will arrive, thus helping them more efficiently plan when to mail it. Typical Mail Timelines The USPS may not offer overnight delivery of
first-class mail as it did in the past, but that doesn’t mean that mail sent to a destination in the same city will take the full three days to get there. In fact, in practice mail sent within the same city arrives pretty quickly, often at the shorter end of the delivery timeline rather than the longer end. The New York Daily News tested this in 2009, with an informal experiment that demonstrated that a letter mailed from Manhattan to Brooklyn typically arrived just one day later no matter what
class of service was used. While there are several types of mail options available, they don’t always guarantee faster delivery, particularly for shorter distances such as within the same city. MORE FROM REFERENCE.COM
Data visual produced by Lauren Jo Alicandro/GBH News
On Monday morning April 5, a GBH News editor dropped a letter into a mailbox outside the U.S. Post Office in Central Square in Cambridge. The letter was addressed to a family member in Memphis, Tennessee.
Nearly three weeks later, that letter has not arrived.
Another GBH News editor sent a letter the same day to Berkley, Michigan, from the massive Fort Point Channel post office. It took 14 days for that envelope to make the trip.
The U.S. Postal Service advertises that first-class mail — your average letter with a 55 cent stamp — arrives within “1-3 business days.” That is an official standard set by the Postal Service.
We decided to test it.
Editors, reporters and producers at GBH News sent nearly 100 letters from different places in the metro area at various hours on the same day to correspondents of their own choosing in 38 states, creating a random sample. The letters were addressed to residents of large cities, suburbs and small towns. The experiment was designed to recreate what might be the experience of an ordinary user of the U.S. Postal Service.
The Postal Service did not pass our test. A little over half of our letters arrived within the three-day window.
By Friday of that week, much of our mail had arrived, but there were still ten letters wandering around the country looking for their addressees. A letter to rural Virginia arrived April 13; a letter to Washington, D.C., took another three days. As of April 22, there were still two letters that could not be accounted for. The results were better for mail within Massachusetts: All 10 of the in-state letters GBH staff sent arrived by April 8.
These results are far below what the Post Office aims to achieve — or what it used to achieve. In April 2020, the USPS reported that in the Greater Boston area, around 98% of local mail was arriving within 2-5 days, and 97% of nationwide mail from the area was landing within 7 days, according to reports archived by the Save The Post Office website.
For our sample, about 89% arrived by April 12.
Steve Hutkins, a retired New York University English professor who runs the Save The Post Office website, said that since last summer the postal service “has been having trouble keeping up with their standards.” Postal delivery times began to slow around July and bottomed out in December. “It has gotten better since then, but it is still not back to where it is supposed to be,” Hutkins said.
And while we are only talking about waiting a few extra days or a week for a piece of mail, Hutkins says those wait times are not trivial.
“If it’s your paycheck and you are waiting for it, it matters a lot,” he said. Data on his site shows that more than 30% of first class mail is “transaction” mail — things like bills, payments, requests for donations. A late bill or a late payment can have a dramatic impact. For every day the mail is delayed, “somebody’s not getting their money,” he said.
In our unscientific sample, distance from Boston did not appear to be a determining factor of how long a letter would take. A letter to Baltimore took as long as a letter to Hawaii (a week). On April 7, the U.S. Post Office delivered two dozen of our letters to points in the New England/Northeast corridor — and one to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Letters dropped at the central post office downtown had no apparent advantage for speed of delivery over letters dropped in residential building mail slots.
In issuing a new 10-year plan in March to overhaul the service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and chair of the Postal Service board of governors Ron Bloom acknowledged that the post office is not meeting its own service standards, and has not been for several years. Part of the solution, they say, is to change the standard, so mail can take longer: “Our plan is to modify existing service standards for First-Class Mail letters and flats from a current 1- to 3-day service standard within the continental United States to a one-to-five-day service standard.”
The reasoning here is that meeting the 1-3 day standard requires the use of airplanes to carry the mail, but the Postal Service does not control its own fleet and has been getting bad performance from the commercial planes it uses. Moving that mail to trucks may slow it down, but it will make it more predictable. The service will have to initiaite a formal rulemaking and consider public comment before making any change.
Steve Doherty, spokesman for the Postal Service's northeast region, said that like any other business, COVID-19 has made it hard for the post office to maintain staffing levels, but he also said that delivery times have improved since the end of last year and "are now back to pre-holiday peak service levels." He added that the change to a five-day service standard for first class mail "will improve service reliability and predictability for customers and enhance the efficiency of the Postal Service network."
Scott Hoffman isn't buying it. Hoffman, head of the Boston Metro local of the American Postal Workers Union, told GBH News the slowdown in the mail has been a direct outcome of policy changes implemented by DeJoy, including a reduction in staff overtime, removal of high speed sorting machines and a decision to hold mail trucks until they are full instead of letting partially-loaded trucks head out to get mail moving.
Instead of investing in more people and machines to move the mail faster, he said, “The postal service is now walking away from its service commitments” in the new 10-year plan. Hoffman said he thinks DeJoy’s real goal is to erode public confidence in the government-controlled postal system in order to build support for privatizing it.
“It is dastardly what he is doing,” Hoffman said.
If he put those concerns in a strongly-worded letter, it might take a while for the U. S. Postal Service to deliver it.
Ken Cooper contributed to this story, as did about two dozen members of the GBH newsroom.