Time Machine

Postal mail sorters and processors

Name: Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators: employment and wages since 1890
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators (SOC 43-5053)

Also called Mail sorter, Mail handler, Mail processor, Processing machine operator, Mail handler assistant

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 105,200 US postal mail sorters and processors, with median pay of $58,470 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 224,250, in May 2003. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 5,800 from 1890, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for postal mail sorters and processors: Advanced flat-mail OCR + Automated Package Processing System + ECIP edge AI, 2000 to 2020.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 5.3% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

12.5% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

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 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Postal mail sorters and processors: jobs and pay since 1890 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-5053

Chicago

Future History. "Postal mail sorters and processors: jobs and pay since 1890." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-5053.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_5053, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Postal mail sorters and processors: jobs and pay since 1890}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-5053}}, 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

187519001925195019752000now

Country

2026

Known then as Railway Postal Clerk / Post Office Distribution Clerk (mail sorting on trains and in post offices)

Known then as Postal Clerk (Clerk Craft) / Mail Handler (USPS reorganization era)

Known then as Postal Clerk / Mail Processing Clerk (automation era, DBCS/OCR)

Known then as Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators (BLS SOC 43-5053)

Known today as Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators (BLS SOC 43-5053)

Projected to still be called Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators (BLS SOC 43-5053)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

105K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$58,470

Est.

≈ $56,971 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1862

July 28, 1862: The first Railway Post Office route in the United States begins on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad in Missouri, with clerks sorting mail on moving trains to speed delivery. George Armstrong, the Chicago postmaster, had championed the idea. The permanent service begins August 28, 1864, on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad with clerks Leonard and Bradley. The concept transforms mail distribution: instead of locked sacks arriving unsorted at each post office, the train itself becomes the sorting floor.

Beat · 1890

Between 1890 and 1900, more than 80 Railway Mail Service clerks are killed and another 2,100 injured in train wrecks. The work is acknowledged to be physically dangerous: derailments, fires, and robbery attempts are regular hazards. The clerks work in cars surrounded by flammable paper and wooden cases; several die in the burning cars of high-profile rail accidents. The Post Office responds by improving car construction and eventually switching to steel cars, but the hazard is never eliminated.

Beat · 1963

July 1, 1963: The United States Postal Service introduces the five-digit Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) code, the single most important infrastructure change in the history of American mail sorting. ZIP codes are explicitly designed to support machine-readable addressing: the five digits encode a sectional center facility (first three) and a delivery zone (last two) in a format that OCR equipment can read and barcode sorters can act on. The ZIP code is the conceptual prerequisite for the entire automated sorting system that follows over the next six decades.

Beat · 1970

March 18, 1970: Approximately 200,000 postal workers across the country walk off the job in the largest wildcat strike in US history, beginning in New York City. The strike lasts eight days; President Nixon deploys 23,000 Army and National Guard personnel to New York to sort mail, but the military workers cannot match the output of trained clerks, and the mail piles up. The strike ends with the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act (August 12, 1970), which converts the Post Office into an independent government corporation, grants full collective bargaining rights to postal unions, and delivers a 14% pay increase. The APWU is formed from five predecessor unions on July 1, 1971. The Reorganization Act also accelerates the mechanization program, setting the stage for the DBCS automation wave of the 1980s-1990s.

Beat · 1977

June 30, 1977: The last surviving railway post office route, operating between New York City and Washington, D.C., is discontinued. The RPO had been the defining institution of American mail sorting for 113 years. The era of the highly trained, train-riding clerk who memorized hundreds of routing schemes ends permanently. The final boat-based RPO (on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire) ceases operation on September 30, 1978. Mail distribution has by this point fully shifted to air transport (first-class) and trucking (bulk) with stationary processing centers.

Beat · 1988

USPS career employment peaks at 779,083 in 1988, the highest point in the history of the organization, before beginning a long decline driven by automation and eventually by volume loss. The 1989 Corporate Automation Plan projects "savings of from 84,000 to 100,000 work-years by 1995, including an outright reduction of over 40,000 work-years" from the ongoing DBCS and OCR deployment. The plan proves optimistic: a 1995 GAO review finds that manual sorting work-years actually increased in 1993 and 1994 because volume growth outpaced the machine rollout. The structural decline does arrive, but on a longer timeline than the 1989 plan assumed.

Beat · 2001

US first-class mail volume peaks at approximately 108 billion pieces in 2001, then begins a long decline driven by email, electronic bill payment, and online statements. Total mail volume (all classes) peaked at roughly 213 billion pieces in 2006. By 2024, total mail volume has fallen to roughly 128 billion pieces, a 40% decline from peak. The volume decline is the second major driver (alongside automation) of mail sorter employment contraction in the 2000s and 2010s: fewer pieces mean fewer processing hours regardless of what machines can or cannot do.

Beat · 2025

USPS accepts over 10,500 voluntary early retirement offers in 2025, meeting its workforce-reduction target without involuntary layoffs. The retirements are concentrated in the Clerk Craft and mail handler categories, the same occupational groups that automation has been displacing for decades. The PILS machine begins wider rollout to processing centers the same year, at double the throughput of the machines it replaces. The combination of departing workers and arriving machines is accelerating the long-run contraction of the 43-5053 occupation even from its already-reduced 2024 base of 106,400.

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.

How it began · 1864

On August 28, 1864, a converted baggage car rolled out of Chicago on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad toward Clinton, Iowa. Inside, two postal clerks named Leonard and Bradley had been assigned an extraordinary task: sort the mail while the train was moving, so that by the time the cars pulled into each station, the letters bound for that town were already bundled and ready. It was the first permanent Railway Mail Service route in the United States, an idea pioneered by George Armstrong, the Chicago postmaster who saw that the old system of locked mail pouches requiring post-office processing at every stop was choking the growing nation's correspondence. The clerks who rode these cars were a distinctive class of federal worker. They memorized hundreds of postal routes, sorted at a pace of dozens of pieces per minute while the car lurched and swayed, and hung pouches on mechanical catcher arms to pass mail to stations without stopping. By 1890, some 5,800 Railway Mail Service clerks served 154,800 miles of railroad; by 1907 that figure had grown to over 14,000 clerks covering more than 203,000 miles of track. The job demanded both physical endurance and encyclopedic memory, and it paid accordingly for the era: annual salaries rose from roughly $2,067 in 1920 to $3,550 by 1946. The Railway Post Office clerk is the direct ancestor of every mail sorter, processor, and processing machine operator who has followed: the same core mandate (get the right piece of mail to the right place as fast as possible), compressing through a century and a half of machines that have changed the tools but never quite eliminated the human in the loop.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace postal mail sorters and processors? 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

-5.3%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-5053 (Postal service mail sorters, processors, and processing machine operators): 101.2 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 95.9 thousand in 2035, a change of -5.3 thousand (-5.3%). 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.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

12.5%

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 43-5053.00 Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators. Shown: human-rated β = 0.125, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.05 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.2; GPT-4-rated β 0.1. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for postal mail sorters and processors

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

AI is taking this onBundle, label, and dispatch sorted trays and sacks to the correct outbound staging area within tight dispatch-window deadlines, verifying container counts against dispatch manifests to prevent missent loads.

Bundle, label, and dispatch sorted trays and sacks to the correct outbound staging area within tight dispatch-window deadlines, verifying container counts against dispatch manifests to prevent missent loads.^[1],[8]

Where your edge is

Cross-train on both the dispatch-manifest system and physical staging procedures; as automated conveyor routing expands, the remaining human role shifts to audit and exception sign-off rather than physical bundling.

AI is sitting alongside you hereVerify postage sufficiency, address legibility, and item condition before pieces enter the automated line

Verify postage sufficiency, address legibility, and item condition before pieces enter the automated line; flag underpaid, damaged, or restricted items and route them to the appropriate handling queue.^[4],[8]

Tools picking this up

USPS Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP) ↗

Where your edge is

Stay current on postage rate schedules and USPS Domestic Mail Manual updates; the AI postage-verification layer catches most cases but human sign-off is still required for disputed pieces.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor automated sorting-machine dashboards (USPS DOIS, APPS) for throughput metrics, jam alerts, and misroute flags, then intervene to clear jams or redirect misread mailpieces that OCR and barcode scanners could not resolve.

Monitor automated sorting-machine dashboards (USPS DOIS, APPS) for throughput metrics, jam alerts, and misroute flags, then intervene to clear jams or redirect misread mailpieces that OCR and barcode scanners could not resolve.^[8],[4]

Tools picking this up

USPS Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP) ↗

Where your edge is

Build proficiency on the DOIS and APPS operator consoles; learn to interpret throughput reports and escalate recurring jam patterns to maintenance before they cause downstream delays.

Where postal mail sorters and processors go next

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

First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers
US median pay
$69,500 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+0.1%
Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks
US median pay
$45,260 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
-7.6%
Stockers and Order Fillers
US median pay
$37,330 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+8.9%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers

First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers is the natural internal advancement path within USPS processing centers, and the pathway the early-retirement departures in 2025 have made more accessible for experienced operators. Supervisors oversee machine operators, manage dispatch deadlines, and handle workforce scheduling -- tasks where deep floor knowledge matters more than formal credentials.

What you'd add

· USPS Supervisor Development Program or equivalent leadership training
· Workforce scheduling and overtime management
· DOIS/APPS reporting and throughput analysis
· USPS performance measurement system (dashboards, delivery-commitment tracking)

What it takesSome new skills to pick up

Tools of the era

How has the work of postal mail sorters and processors changed since 1864?

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

Hand sorting with distribution cases (Railway Post Office era)
Railway postal clerks sorted mail entirely by hand into wooden distribution cases fitted with small pigeon-hole slots, each labeled for a town, route, or connecting line. A clerk memorized hundreds of schemes (the official routing tables for their assigned run) and could sort thousands of pieces per hour by touch and recognition alone. The cases were mounted on the walls and aisles of the RPO car; letters flew from hand to slot while the car swayed through the night. The same hand-case method was used in stationary post offices for the distribution clerks who sorted incoming sacks into local carrier routes. No machine assisted until the 1950s; the tool was entirely the human body and a memorized map.
Effect on the work
At peak (1946) approximately 22,546 Railway Mail Service clerks sorted mail on trains; an unknown but larger number of stationary distribution clerks worked in post offices. The method was labor-intensive by design: every sorting decision required a human.
Transorma semiautomatic letter sorter (first USPS machine, April 10, 1957)
On April 10, 1957, the USPS installed its first semiautomatic letter sorting machine: a Transorma 5/300 distributed by Pitney Bowes. The Transorma had been invented in Rotterdam in 1930 and was already in use in several European postal systems. The machine used a conveyor belt and a series of sorting keyboards; a clerk still had to read each address and key in a destination code, but the mechanical routing of the letter to the correct bin happened automatically. The USPS reported that the Transorma doubled the throughput of letters that the same number of clerks could do by hand sorting alone.
Effect on the work
The Transorma did not eliminate clerks but doubled output per clerk, implying that each facility could process the same volume with half the sorting staff or double the volume with the same staff. The USPS used the productivity gain primarily for volume growth rather than headcount reduction in the late 1950s, as first-class mail volumes were rising rapidly.
High-speed optical character reader + Multi-Position Letter Sorting Machine (MPLSM)
In 1965 the USPS deployed its first high-speed optical character reader (OCR), capable of reading ZIP code information on envelopes and spraying a barcode on each piece. The Multi-Position Letter Sorting Machine (MPLSM), deployed through the late 1960s and 1970s, required several operators who read addresses on a screen and keyed destination codes; the machine routed the physical letter to the correct bin at high speed. The ZIP code, introduced in 1963, was specifically designed to support this machine-readable addressing system. The 1970 Postal Reorganization Act, which turned the Post Office into an independent agency with collective-bargaining rights, coincided with the acceleration of this mechanization wave. From 1970 to 1980 USPS total employment actually declined even as mail volume grew, a net effect of productivity gains from the MPLSM and related equipment.
Effect on the work
The USPS's own 1989 Corporate Automation Plan estimated that the 1970s-1980s mechanization wave had saved tens of thousands of work-years, though a 1994 GAO audit found actual savings were far below projections.
Computer-driven single-line OCR + Delivery Bar Code Sorter (DBCS, deployed from 1990)
In 1982 the USPS deployed its first computer-driven single-line optical character reader, which could read a ZIP code and automatically spray a barcode without human keying. In 1988 USPS began offering postage discounts to mailers who pre-barcoded their mail, shifting address-reading labor off the sorting floor onto mailers and their equipment. The Delivery Bar Code Sorter (DBCS) arrived in 1990 and was the automation breakthrough the previous generation had promised: a DBCS read the pre-sprayed barcode, sorted the letter into delivery-walk sequence, and by 1997 thousands of DBCS machines had been deployed nationwide under the Delivery Point Sequencing (DPS) program. For the first time, a letter could move from inbound arrival to carrier-sequence order without a human hand touching it. A 1995 GAO study found the automation program had produced savings far below projections. Still, by 2000 the first-class letter sorting workforce had contracted sharply from its 1988 peak.
Effect on the work
USPS total employment peaked at 779,083 in 1988 and began a long decline. The 1995 GAO report noted the Postal Service had "abandoned its strategy of replacing career employees with temporary workers," yet nonunion employees still lost positions. By 2015 USPS had shed hundreds of thousands of positions from its 1995 level, with automation as the leading structural cause alongside declining mail volume.
Advanced flat-mail OCR (AFSM 100) + Automated Package Processing System (APPS) + ECIP edge AI
The 2000s saw automation extend from letter mail into the fast-growing parcel stream. The Automated Flat Sorting Machine 100 (AFSM 100), reaching Phase II OCR deployment in April 2002, automated flat-mail sorting that had previously required keyboard entry. The Automated Package Processing System (APPS) replaced the labor-intensive Small Parcel and Bundle Sorter. The 2007 USPS Comprehensive Statement described DIOSS machines (combining DBCS + OCR) that automated mail previously requiring manual distribution, removing hundreds of legacy multi-line OCR machines. By 2020 the USPS Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP) was running many AI algorithms on NVIDIA EGX hardware across more than a hundred processing centers, reading package addresses at hundreds of pieces per second, verifying postage, and deciphering damaged barcodes. A missing-package investigation that once required several people over several days was handled by one ECIP operator in hours.
Effect on the work
Mail volume peaked at billions of pieces in 2006 and then fell sharply as email displaced first-class letters and the 2008 financial crisis reduced advertising mail. Employment of mail sorters and processors fell in step: between 2000 and 2015. The combination of volume decline and machine capability created compounding headcount pressure that no labor-management agreement fully absorbed.
USPS Matrix Regional Sorter (MaRS, 2024) and Parallel Induction Linear Sorter (PILS, 2025)
The latest generation of USPS hardware processes packages at throughput rates that would have been unimaginable to the Railway Post Office clerks of 1864. The Matrix Regional Sorter (MaRS), deployed at Atlanta and Chicago Regional Processing and Distribution Centers in 2024, uses laser scanners, mirrors, cameras, and OCR to process over eight times more pieces per hour than the legacy machines it replaced. The Parallel Induction Linear Sorter (PILS), tested at Dulles, VA over ten months and beginning wider rollout in 2025, auto-unloads containers onto a conveyor, reads addresses with a six-sided camera array, and sorts at thousands of packages per hour, double the previous single-induction sorter's 3,500/hour. The operator's job has shifted accordingly: a single worker monitors dashboard alerts, clears jams, and manages the exception mail that OCR cannot resolve. The voluntary early retirements USPS accepted in 2025 (meeting its workforce-reduction target) illustrate the direction: each departing worker is not fully replaced because the machines have taken on most of the physical volume.
Effect on the work
The OIG 2024 audit of MaRS found an increase in rewrap labor hours at Atlanta and Chicago, revealing that new machines generate damaged-parcel exceptions that require human correction. This is the characteristic pattern of postal automation: each machine generation reduces sorting-by-hand headcount while creating a smaller but persistent demand for exception-handling and machine oversight.

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Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators employment and pay by year

On record since1864

Latest US employment105,200 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$58,470 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook-5.3% 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 74100)
Employment, 2020
23,075, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 74100 Mail and parcel sorters and related occupations, 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$62,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 74100 Mail and parcel sorters and related occupations, 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

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1890	5,800	n/a	Est., National Archives Researched context	Report
1907	14,000	n/a	Est., National Archives Researched context	Report
1920	n/a	$2,067	Est., National Archives Researched context	Report
1946	22,546	$3,550	Est., National Archives Researched context	Report
1970	130,000	n/a	Est., USPS Researched context	Report
2000	205,000	n/a	Est., O*NET 43-5053.00 Researched context	Report
2003	224,250	$39,070	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	214,400	$39,430	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	208,600	$43,420	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	203,110	$43,900	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	201,430	$43,700	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	185,770	$50,020	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	162,940	$52,520	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	145,690	$53,080	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	139,700	$53,080	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	134,230	$53,090	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	121,580	$53,830	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	121,590	$54,520	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	109,930	$56,740	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	110,770	$56,220	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	111,960	$57,260	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	103,830	$58,770	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	102,390	$60,140	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	105,400	$53,140	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	112,130	$48,550	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	119,530	$49,130	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	116,540	$53,440	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	111,930	$56,530	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	105,200	$58,470	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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Where postal mail sorters and processors go next

First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers

Hand sorting with distribution cases (Railway Post Office era)Hand sorting with distribution cases1864–1957

Transorma semiautomatic letter sorter (first USPS machine, April 10, 1957)Transorma semiautomatic letter sorter1957–1965

High-speed optical character reader + Multi-Position Letter Sorting Machine (MPLSM)High-speed optical character reader + M…1965–1982

Computer-driven single-line OCR + Delivery Bar Code Sorter (DBCS, deployed from 1990)Computer-driven single-line OCR + Deliv…1982–2000

Advanced flat-mail OCR (AFSM 100) + Automated Package Processing System (APPS) + ECIP edge AIAdvanced flat-mail OCR2000–2020

USPS Matrix Regional Sorter (MaRS, 2024) and Parallel Induction Linear Sorter (PILS, 2025)USPS Matrix Regional Sorter2020–present

Postal Service Mail Sorters, Processors, and Processing Machine Operators employment and pay by year

In other countries

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