OIG: Delivery Growth Concentrated in South and West

If you deliver in Texas, Utah, Idaho, or North Dakota, and you think your truckloads have been increasing, you’re not imagining things.

An April 19 report by the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General found that mail delivery in these states — and in the South and West more generally — has exploded in the last fiscal year. More specifically, those four states added more than twice as many delivery points in fiscal 2021 as the national average, the report explains.

In Utah, delivery points increased by a whopping 24 percent from 2011 to 2022. Idaho wasn’t far behind at 23 percent, while Texas and North Dakota each saw a 22 percent spike over that time frame.

States with the lowest growth tended to be in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. Illinois, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Ohio, and Michigan each grew by 5 percent while Rhode Island saw only 4 percent growth.

Suburban Expansion

The report also states that delivery points in suburban areas are growing more than in areas classified as “very rural” or “very urban.” Of the 13.2 million delivery points added over the past 10 years, more than 8 million — or 62 percent — were in suburban areas.

Another trend noted in the report is a 23 percent increase in centralized delivery in the past decade. This includes apartment mailboxes, cluster-box units, and other delivery points that serve multiple addresses.

In addition, centralized delivery points became a larger proportion of all new delivery points over those 10 years, increasing from 56 percent to 68 percent percent.