Press Release: UPU research calls for rapid global action as economic shocks threaten postal flows

The Universal Postal Union’s State of the Postal Sector 2026 shows that, while the postal network has the power to provide people and small businesses with affordable universal access to e-commerce, rapidly evolving trade policies have accelerated economic pressures and thinned the network in several postal corridors.

“Inclusive by design, the postal network is a vital channel to deliver essential services to everyone, everywhere. If given the means to secure its financial sustainability, its possibilities for service delivery in even the furthest reaches of our globe are infinite. We have the information we need to address the challenges before us – now we need decision makers to respond with coordinated, agile policy”, says UPU Director General Masahiko Metoki.

While indicators assessing the overall health of the postal network show marked improvement for 2025, development did not keep pace with economic pressures facing the sector. The report reveals that postal revenues, adjusted for inflation, declined for a third consecutive year – dropping from 606 billion USD in 2021 to 563.4 billion USD in 2024 (USD in purchasing power parity terms, or PPP).

While postal operators continue to hold the lion’s share of the rapidly declining letters segment, they are losing footing in growing markets such as parcels. Meanwhile, margins are increasingly thin, and postal operators remain bound to universal service obligations that reduce their ability to implement traditional cost-cutting measures.

Declining resilience to economic shocks

To compound this, markers assessing postal resilience fell in five of six regions, demonstrating the vulnerability of Posts to economic shocks.

Two policy-related shocks – the United States’ suspension of duty-free de minimis treatment in August 2025 and the European Union’s 3 EUR per-item duty introduced on 1 July 2026 – had an immediate negative impact on international postal flows associated with e-commerce.

Given the sector’s current intertwined state, trade policy change in one country or region now impacts every operator globally, almost in real time. The report’s findings show that the typical postal corridor between countries shrank by 10% on average.

The cost of disjointed policymaking

While information needed to offset macro changes is available, the sector lacks a coordinated approach to enable agile decision making, involving not only postal operators, regulators and ministries, but also adjacent government bodies responsible for trade, economy, international affairs and others.

A conservative assessment presented in the report puts the direct annual cost of delayed, network-level, strategic decision making at 411 USD billion cumulatively over 2026–2030.

This cost impact is diffuse across multiple sectors and stakeholders. Close to half of that impact is borne by postal operators, with e-commerce platforms, ministries and regulators, technology providers and private carriers sharing the rest.

An orchestrated solution

As the only intergovernmental body for postal coordination, collecting insights from a network of 192 countries, the UPU can help provide the holistic viewpoint needed to enable agile decision making on postal reform, remuneration, coherent customs policy and more.

The UPU is investigating how it can leverage AI platforms and capabilities to support human decision makers, and is currently piloting a solution on its Unified Data Platform – a centralized secure hub which combines postal, trade, logistics and aviation big data from member countries’ flows, as well as regulatory data.

Optimistic development markers

In addition to providing an overall status of postal activities, the report also measures postal development by country according to four indicators – reach, reliability, resilience and relevance – providing a comparative, peer-grouped ranking of 181 countries. The median postal development score rose year-on-year, with Switzerland leading the global ranking for the 10th year running.

Germany, France, Japan, Austria, Australia and Thailand also scored within the index’s highest postal development level. Meanwhile, Ukraine, China, Oman, Costa Rica and Mauritius led their respective regions. The report acknowledged Lithuania, Egypt and the United Republic of Tanzania as the countries with the greatest overall year-on-year improvement in their development scores.

Read the State of the Postal Sector 2026 report: https://www.upu.int/en/publications/2ipd/the-state-of-the-postal-sector-2026.