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Postal service mail carriers

Also called Mail carrier, Letter carrier, City carrier, Rural carrier, Postal carrier

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 328,820 US postal service mail carriers, with median pay of $60,550 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 354,570, in May 2008. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 450 from 1863, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for postal service mail carriers: USPS Informed Delivery and MDD-TR scanner, 2017 to 2025.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects little or no change in employment from 2025 to 2035 (-0.3%).

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 0.68 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.68. BLS counted 307,490 of these jobs in May 2013 and 328,820 in May 2025 (+7%, a change derived by Future History).

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Postal service mail carriers: jobs and pay since 1863 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-5052

Chicago

Future History. "Postal service mail carriers: jobs and pay since 1863." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-5052.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_5052, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Postal service mail carriers: jobs and pay since 1863}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-5052}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1775180018251850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Post Rider / Post Boy / Mail Carrier (colonial and early republic era)
Known then as City Letter Carrier (Free City Delivery era)
Known then as City Letter Carrier / Rural Free Delivery Carrier (dual system era)
Known then as Letter Carrier (Post Office Department, then U.S. Postal Service)
Known then as Postal Service Mail Carriers (BLS SOC 43-5052)
Known today as Postal Service Mail Carriers (BLS SOC 43-5052)
Projected to still be called Postal Service Mail Carriers (BLS SOC 43-5052)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
329K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$60,550
Est.

≈ $58,998 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1775

July 26, 1775: Benjamin Franklin is appointed by the Continental Congress as the first Postmaster General of the United States, formalizing a mail system that had operated since the colonial era. Franklin reorganized post roads, standardized postal rates, and established the accountability structures that would govern American mail for the next century. The post riders who carried the physical mail in 1775 were the direct ancestors of the city letter carrier who would emerge in 1863.

Beat · 1863

July 1, 1863: Free city delivery begins under an Act of Congress passed March 3, 1863. Starting at 49 post offices in Northern cities with 450 carriers, the service is transformative in one immediate respect: for the first time, Americans must put street addresses on their letters. Prior to 1863 the post office stored all mail for recipients to collect, paying on pickup. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair had proposed the reform in 1862, arguing it would pay for itself by accelerating correspondence. By the end of the first year, 65 cities employed 685 carriers. The service is initially open only to cities where local postage revenue exceeds the cost of delivery.

Beat · 1889

August 30, 1889: Sixty delegates convene above Schaeffer's Saloon in Milwaukee to found the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), the union that will eventually win collective bargaining rights for all postal workers. The meeting is timed to coincide with a Grand Army of the Republic reunion to reduce travel costs. By 1890 the organization represents approximately 4,600 carriers in 52 branches. The NALC will become one of the strongest federal employee unions, playing a central role in the 1970 postal strike and the Postal Reorganization Act that followed.

Beat · 1896

October 1, 1896: Rural Free Delivery service begins experimentally with 82 routes in Charles Town, Halltown, and Uvilla, West Virginia. Postmaster General John Wanamaker had first proposed rural free delivery in 1891; the idea required five years of Congressional debate before receiving the initial appropriation. By 1901 over 37,000 rural carriers serve more than 100,000 route-miles. Rural free delivery is the largest federal rural infrastructure program of its era, credited with reducing rural isolation and accelerating the demand for better roads.

Beat · 1970

March 18, 1970: New York City letter carriers walk off the job, launching the first and only strike by federal postal workers in American history. More than 210,000 postal workers eventually participate across 30 major cities. Carriers are earning $6,176 a year to start; veteran carriers with decades of service earn less than $8,500; many qualify for food stamps. President Nixon mobilizes National Guard troops to sort mail in New York City, without success. The strike ends with a 6 percent wage increase. The Postal Reorganization Act, signed August 12, 1970, creates the U.S. Postal Service as an independent establishment, grants full collective bargaining rights to postal unions, and provides an additional 8 percent wage increase. Effective July 1, 1971, the Post Office Department ceases to exist.

Beat · 1982

USPS deploys its first computer-driven optical character reader (OCR), which can read handwritten and typed envelope addresses, print routing barcodes, and sort letters to the correct delivery station without human sorting. This is the beginning of a twenty-year automation arc that will ultimately eliminate most manual letter-casing work from carriers' morning office time. By 1990 the delivery barcode has been extended to encode exact addresses; Delivery Point Sequencing (DPS) arrives in 1993, pre-sequencing letters into the carrier's walk order. By 2007, 99 percent of city routes receive DPS mail. The productivity gain is real: pieces handled per postal employee rose from 159,435 in 1980 to 197,202 in 1990.

Beat · 2006

Mail volume peaks at 213 billion pieces annually in fiscal year 2006, the highest in USPS history. First-class letter mail had already begun declining as email adoption accelerated in the late 1990s; 2006 is the inflection point at which overall volume peaks and begins a sustained fall. By FY 2023, total mail volume is 109 billion pieces, a 49 percent decline. First-class mail alone falls 50 percent between FY 2008 (92 billion pieces) and FY 2023 (46 billion pieces). The decline is structural and irreversible; USPS has described it as "electronic diversion." Total USPS career employees fall from 784,000 in 2006 to 533,724 in 2024.

Beat · 2025

March 2026: USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy warns Congress that the agency is running out of cash and may face insolvency, with a $9.5 billion net loss in FY 2025. More than 10,000 USPS employees accept voluntary early retirement in 2025, meeting the agency's workforce-reduction target. The Delivering for America ten-year plan, which had projected return to profitability by 2026, misses its targets. Proposed remedies under Congressional discussion include reducing delivery days from six to five, closing processing facilities, and restructuring the prefunding mandate for retiree health benefits. The financial crisis represents the most serious structural threat to the carrier occupation since the 1970 strike, because it operates through organizational contraction rather than direct automation.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace postal service mail carriers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
-0.3%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-5052 (Postal service mail carriers): 316.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 315.5 thousand in 2035, a change of -0.9 thousand (-0.3%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
68%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 43-5052 Postal Service Mail Carriers: probability of computerisation 0.68, rank 375 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for postal service mail carriers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCase (sort) the day's mail volume at the post office into delivery sequence, merging machine-sequenced flat mail with manually sorted parcels, certified items, and local collection pieces into a single walk order before departure.

Case (sort) the day's mail volume at the post office into delivery sequence, merging machine-sequenced flat mail with manually sorted parcels, certified items, and local collection pieces into a single walk order before departure.[1],[8]

Where your edge is

Learn to flag sequencing errors in the machine-generated sort to the facility's automation coordinator. As volume of hand-processed parcels grows relative to flat mail, carriers who understand both the mechanical sequencer output and manual merge logic become more efficient and harder to replace with a single-mode system.

AI is sitting alongside you hereScan barcodes on letters and parcels using the MDD-TR handheld device at each delivery point, generating GPS-timestamped proof-of-delivery records that feed USPS real-time tracking, Informed Delivery notifications, and the 72.9 million active users who preview their incoming mail.

Scan barcodes on letters and parcels using the MDD-TR handheld device at each delivery point, generating GPS-timestamped proof-of-delivery records that feed USPS real-time tracking, Informed Delivery notifications, and the 72.9 million active users who preview their incoming mail.[6],[9]

Where your edge is

Treat scan discipline as professional craft: accurate GPS-tagged scans are what makes USPS tracking competitive with UPS and FedEx. Carriers with clean scan records become reference points for route data quality and are better positioned for supervisor or logistics-coordinator roles.

AI is sitting alongside you hereComplete end-of-day close-out: turn in cash-on-delivery collections and receipts for certified and registered mail, reconcile undelivered items with scanner records, and sync the MDD-TR device to upload the day's delivery data to USPS route management systems.

Complete end-of-day close-out: turn in cash-on-delivery collections and receipts for certified and registered mail, reconcile undelivered items with scanner records, and sync the MDD-TR device to upload the day's delivery data to USPS route management systems.[1],[6]

Where your edge is

Accurate end-of-day data sync and exception reconciliation prevents downstream tracking errors for customers and USPS operations staff. Carriers who treat this as a data-quality task -- not just paperwork -- build a skill set transferable to logistics coordination and operations support roles.

Where postal service mail carriers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

  • Postal Service Clerks
    US median pay
    $62,130 (May 2025)
    BLS outlook 2025-35
    -0.3%
  • First-Line Supervisors of Material-Moving Machine and Vehicle OperatorsNo timeline for this role yet
  • Light Truck Drivers
    US median pay
    $44,860 (May 2025)
    BLS outlook 2025-35
    +6.3%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Postal Service Clerks

Mail carriers already understand the full postal workflow -- sorting, processing, and customer-service tasks performed by clerks overlap directly with carrier pre-departure case work and post-delivery reconciliation. Inside USPS, lateral bids from carrier to clerk craft are a standard workforce-mobility path. Clerk roles are also automation-exposed (flat-sorting machines handle much bulk volume), but the inside environment and customer-service counter work offer a sustainable alternative for carriers whose physical condition limits outdoor walking routes.

What you'd add
  • · Window clerk retail transactions: money order issuance, passport acceptance, customs form processing
  • · Point-of-sale and cash drawer management
  • · Priority Mail and Express Mail processing procedures and acceptance standards
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of postal service mail carriers changed since 1775?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Post rider on horseback (colonial and early republic mail delivery)

    The original mail carrier was a post rider who transported sealed leather pouches between post offices along established post roads. The rider did not deliver to individual addresses; recipients collected their mail at the post office and paid the postage on receipt (pre-paid postage only became standard in the 1840s-1850s with the adhesive stamp). The rider carried no sorting tools, no address verification system, and no route management beyond the road itself. The occupation was defined entirely by physical endurance, geographic knowledge, and reliability.

  • Walking route with leather satchel (city free delivery system)

    Free city delivery created a new kind of postal worker: a carrier who walked fixed neighborhood routes on foot, delivering mail directly to addresses. The technology was minimal: a leather satchel or pouched bag, a route card or slip, and the carrier's own memory of the addresses on the route. The carrier sorted the day's mail by hand at the post office before departure, a process called "casing," and then walked the route in sequence. No mechanical aid existed between the post office and the front door. The efficiency of the system depended entirely on the carrier's familiarity with the route and the accuracy of the address on the envelope.

    Effect on the work

    The free city delivery system created the occupation from scratch.

  • Rural Free Delivery wagon and early automobile (1896 RFD launch, motorization from 1906)

    Rural Free Delivery, launched experimentally on October 1, 1896, in West Virginia and made permanent in 1902, required carriers to cover far greater distances than city routes. Early rural carriers used horse-drawn wagons. Motorization began in December 1899 when the Post Office tested its first automobile mail wagon in Cleveland; by 1906 two Columbian Mark cars were successfully running routes in Baltimore. By 1921, the postal fleet had grown to 4,000 trucks, and by 1923 Ford was the largest supplier. Rural carriers covered millions of miles per day by 1980. The motor vehicle transformed the rural carrier from a horse-dependent laborer into a vehicle operator covering routes impossible to walk.

    Effect on the work

    Rural carrier employment grew from a small set of experimental routes in 1896 to over 37,000 rural carriers by 1901, driven by Congress's decision to fund rural mail as a public good and by the expansion of farm-to-market roads. At its peak in the 1910s-1920s, rural free delivery was the largest federal rural infrastructure program in the United States.

  • OCR letter-sorting machines and Delivery Point Sequencing (DPS)

    In 1982 USPS deployed its first computer-driven optical character reader (OCR), which could read addresses, print ZIP-code barcodes on envelopes, and automatically route letters to the correct delivery station. In 1990 the delivery barcode was extended with exact address digits, enabling the DPS program. Delivery Point Sequencing, rolled out through the 1990s and essentially complete by 2007 (nearly all city routes), pre-sorted letters into the carrier's exact walk sequence before they arrived at the delivery unit. DPS eliminated one to two hours of manual "casing" time from the carrier's morning, increasing route size without increasing carrier hours. The productivity gain was real and substantial: average annual pieces handled per postal employee rose from 159,435 in 1980 to 197,202 by 1990.

    Effect on the work

    The productivity gains allowed USPS to handle growing mail volume through the 1990s without proportional carrier headcount growth. Conversely, when mail volume later declined, the same efficiency meant fewer carriers were needed per unit of volume drop.

  • Grumman LLV and successor delivery vehicles (1986 introduction, NGDV from 2024)

    The Grumman Long Life Vehicle (LLV), entering service in 1986, became the standard USPS delivery vehicle. Built on a Chevrolet S-10 chassis with right-hand drive and a compact turning radius optimized for curbside mailbox access, USPS purchased more than 100,000 LLVs between 1986 and 1994. The LLV defined how suburban letter carriers worked for four decades: a mounted route where the carrier drives from box to box rather than walking, dramatically increasing the stops-per-hour ratio on low-density routes. Designed for a service life, LLVs were still operational in 2024 at ages decades, comprising 57 percent of the local delivery fleet and representing a chronic maintenance liability.

    Effect on the work

    Motorized curbside delivery (LLV and predecessors) allowed individual carriers to serve more delivery points per route than foot delivery, supporting route consolidation. The mounted route model is the primary reason rural and suburban carrier employment has not grown proportionally with the expansion of delivery addresses.

  • USPS Informed Delivery and MDD-TR scanner (nationwide 2017, MDD-TR 2019)

    Informed Delivery, launched nationwide in April 2017, gives subscribers photographic previews of incoming letter mail and real-time parcel tracking. The system depends entirely on carrier scan compliance: every scan event at each delivery point generates a GPS-timestamped record transmitted via 4G cellular to USPS servers. The MDD-TR (Zebra TC77) handheld scanner, deployed to 197,000 carriers from 2019, added electronic lock authentication for cluster mailbox units, GPS-pinned hazard mapping, and address-management inputs. By April 2025, Informed Delivery had 72.9 million active subscribers and 94 percent satisfaction. This era transformed the carrier from a physical deliverer who left no data trace into a mobile data-collection node whose route generates real-time location, delivery confirmation, and community-hazard information.

  • Dynamic Route Optimization (DRO) and AI-assisted route planning

    USPS Dynamic Route Optimization, piloted from 2021 and audited by the OIG in 2024, uses delivery-volume data and GPS history to recalculate carrier routes dynamically based on the day's actual mail and parcel load. Unlike the static DOIS system that calibrated routes annually, DRO adjusts routes in near-real time. Bear Cognition launched an AI-powered bid and route optimization tool for USPS highway contractors in December 2025. The DataCenter Knowledge investigation (2024) documented USPS's Edge Compute Infrastructure Program processing 20 million packages per day using AI at sorting hubs. These tools represent a shift from carrier-as-route-executor toward carrier-as-AI-directed-agent, where the sequence, pace, and density of each day's route is increasingly set by algorithms rather than supervisor and carrier judgment.

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Postal Service Mail Carriers employment and pay by year

On record since1775
Latest US employment328,820 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$60,550 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-0.3% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 74101)

    Employment, 2020
    33,235, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 74101 Letter carriers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$65,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 74101 Letter carriers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1863450n/aEst., USPS Facts Researched contextReport
190056,322n/aEst., NALC Researched contextReport
1926169,000n/aEst., USPS Researched contextReport
1970268,000$6,176Est., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1980n/a$19,000Est., University of Missouri Libraries Researched contextReport
2000354,980$37,000BLS OEWS 2000 (employment) Official statisticEst., NALC (pay) Researched contextReport
2003344,580$39,620BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004344,050$44,450BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005347,180$46,330BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006346,990$44,350BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007348,070$44,500BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008354,570$49,800BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009339,030$52,200BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010324,990$53,860BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011315,330$55,160BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012305,490$56,490BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013307,490$56,490BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014307,490$57,200BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015315,950$58,280BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016328,950$58,110BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017336,900$57,000BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018342,410$55,210BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019339,650$51,310BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020333,570$51,080BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021335,540$52,440BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022326,760$54,250BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023331,600$56,330BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024336,040$57,490BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025328,820$60,550BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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