Following the November 13-14 meeting of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors, the agency announced a loss of $8.98 billion for Fiscal Year 2025, less than the $9.5 billion loss in FY 2024, but also much less than the $2.1 billion surplus forecast in former PMG Louis DeJoy’s 10-Year Plan.
Revenue and volume
Total revenue for the year increased 1.15% from FY 2024, despite price increases on market-dominant products of more than 15% since July 2024. (The degree to which these increases contributed to the 3.34% decline in total volume can be debated, but they likely didn’t help.)
In its press release, the Postal Service attributed the modest increase in revenue “largely to continued growth of our USPS Ground Advantage shipping service as well as strategic price increases in both of our mail and shipping categories.”
However, total shipping and packages revenue was up only 0.98% compared to an increase of 1.27% in other (mostly market-dominant) revenue. Moreover, total shipping and packages volume decreased 19.43%, so the 26.51% growth of Ground Advantage volume was more than offset by the 20.85% volume decrease in other products – suggesting possible cannibalization among competitive product offerings.
Expenses
Using its customary defense of “uncontrollable expenses” driving its losses didn’t help for FY 2025 as those factors decreased, resulting in a 49.32% larger “controllable loss.”
Meanwhile, compensation and benefits – arguably a controllable expense – grew by 3.15%.
Total complement decreased 2.4% (to 624,000), largely because about 10,500 employees took the ”early-out” offered last spring. The number of fixed-schedule career workers fell less than 0.38%, however; former PMG Louis DeJoy’s preferred a “stable workforce” despite decreasing mail volume.
Transportation expense was 4.79% lower, mostly because of less air transportation, again reflecting a DeJoy-driven policy, the impact of which is evident in service performance data.
The Postal Service’s complete Form 10-K for FY 2025 is available at http://about.usps.com/what/financials/.