Beyond the balance sheet: What American households still use the mail for

Nearly every conversation about the future of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) begins with its balance sheet. In recent testimony before the Senate, Postmaster General David Steiner put it plainly: “The bottom line is that we are out of cash.” That framing treats the Postal Service as a business in financial trouble and asks what it would take to stop the losses. In doing so, it skips a more basic question: what households still use the mail for, and which of them rely on it most.

The data to answer that question already exists. Each year, USPS commissions a survey of how American households send and receive mail. The survey now spans more than four decades, recording what arrives in the mailbox, who receives it, and how both have changed. It is a demand-side record that rarely enters a policy debate dominated by the Postal Service’s finances.

The benefits of the postal network are not abstract. They are felt by many households and businesses in ways that rarely enter the financial debate: rural patients who receive medication by mail, voters and taxpayers who rely on a postmark as evidence that a ballot or return was filed on time, and small businesses in rural and small-town America that depend on a nearby post office. Each illustrates a single element of what the network provides. The Household Diary Study captures the whole, measuring how households across the country use the mail and how that use has changed over time.

This analysis surfaces two patterns in the data. First, what remains in the mailbox reflects deliberate household choices more than incomplete migration online. Second, mail use is not evenly distributed: it is heaviest among older households and in non-metropolitan areas. Together, they reframe what is at stake — not simply whether the Postal Service loses money, but what may change and for which households when financial pressures are weighed against the network’s commitment to universal service.

The USPS’s Household Diary Study is an annual record of mail use that rarely enters the debate over the agency’s future

The Household Diary Study is USPS’s own record of how American households use the mail. Each year, the Postal Service recruits a representative sample of roughly 5,000 households and asks them to log every piece of mail they send and receive over a set period. According to USPS, the survey has been conducted every year since 1987; the agency files each year’s results with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), the independent body that oversees postal rates and service.

The Household Diary Study measures something the standard postal data does not. Most of what is known about mail trends comes from aggregate sources, including USPS’s Revenue, Pieces, and Weight (RPW) reports and its annual 10-K filings, which track total volume and revenue by mail class. These show how much mail moves through the system, but not who sends or receives it, what it contains, or why.

The Household Diary Study, by comparison, works from the household up. Each participating household records each piece of mail they send and receive, along with its mail class, its sender, its contents, and, in many years, what the household did with it after it arrived.

The survey also records who is receiving the mail. Each household’s mail is tied to its demographic profile, including the age, income, and education of the householder and whether the household is in an urban or rural area, which makes it possible to see not just how much mail arrives but how use differs across the population. The survey covers mail flowing to and from households; it does not capture business-to-business mail flows, which made up 20% of total mail volume in FY2024.

In 2025, USPS redesigned the survey and renamed it the Household Mail Survey. Under the original design, recruited households kept a paper diary, logging each piece of mail they sent and received over a set week. The new design replaced that instrument with an online and telephone survey, expanded the sampling frame to include all residential addresses in the 50 states and Washington, D.C., and added strata to improve representation of lower-income and renter households. These changes affect how the data are collected, not what they measure. In years where the old and new methods overlap, the empirical differences are small. As a result, a nearly four-decade record of what American households actually do with the mail informs a policy debate that has largely proceeded without it.

Mail volume has halved since 2005, but the composition of the mailbox has changed far less.

Mail volume has fallen by more than half since its 2005 peak, and that number anchors almost every conversation about the Postal Service’s future. It’s the correct starting point. It’s also an incomplete one.

As Figure 1 shows, mail per household rose for nearly two decades before peaking at roughly 1,480 pieces per year in 2005, then fell to about 620 by 2025. At the peak, the typical household received and sent about five pieces of mail per day; by 2025, that was down to about two. The decline is steep and sustained, and it is the number that has defined how the Postal Service’s future gets debated. What it does not show is whether the mail that remained is the same mail that left.

As Figure 2 shows, the composition shifted less than the steep decline might suggest. Advertising mail held its dominant share, at 59% of household mail in 2010 and 62% in 2025. Transactions mail—first-class bills and financial statements—fell from 24% to 14% as routine billing moved online, the sharpest categorical shift in the data. Correspondence edged up from 10% to 15%; packages grew. The mailbox may be smaller than it was, but it isn’t unrecognizable.

The composition chart surfaces what changed; the sections that follow explain why. Bills didn’t fall to zero, and packages didn’t grow by accident. Each follows a pattern that goes well beyond what share numbers can show.

The bills still arriving on paper are the ones households have a reason to keep

Bill payment is the clearest case of digital substitution in the survey. As Figure 3 shows, mail’s share of household bill payments fell from 81% in 2000 to 13% in 2024, one of the steepest demand-side declines the data records. The decline unfolded over two decades and across several methods. Mail was the most common way households paid bills through 2013; online payment through a computer passed it around 2014 and remains the most common method today, at 28%. Payment by mobile device and automatic deduction from a bank account each grew steadily to roughly 20%. By 2024, mail had fallen behind all three.

But fewer bill payments going by mail is not the same as fewer households using it. In 2000, 94% of households paid at least one bill by mail; by 2024, 43% still did—a share that has declined, but remains substantial. That residual is not simply the households that never went digital. As Figure 4 shows, most give an affirmative reason for paying by mail. Record-keeping leads, cited by 42% of households that still pay by mail, with security or privacy, convenience, and habit close behind at 29% each, and biller requirements at 25%. Least common, at 18%, is the simple inertia of never having set up electronic payment.

The households that rely most heavily on the mail have also changed. Mail use was once tied closely to income: in 2010, households receiving the most mail had a median income roughly four times that of households receiving the least. By 2023 that ratio had narrowed to about 1.7 to 1, as the income of the heaviest-mail households fell and that of the lightest rose. The decline is not simply a story of higher-income households moving on to better alternatives. Within bill-paying specifically, the demographic pattern that stands out most is age.

As Figure 5 shows, nearly two-thirds of those headed by someone 65 or older paid at least one bill by mail in 2025, down from 86% in 2015. Among households headed by someone under 45, the share fell further, from 54% to 23%. Mail bill-paying declined in every age group, but fastest among the young, widening the age gap. The practice is increasingly concentrated among older households, though even a quarter of the youngest still keep it.

The bills that still arrive on paper are a particular kind. As Figure 6 shows, financial, medical, utility, and insurance bills made up 92% of the bills households received by mail in 2025. These are the documents a household is most likely to need after it arrives, whether to reconcile a medical bill against an insurance statement, verify a charge, or keep a record of payment. The pattern is clearest in what fell away: bills from merchants, the kind a household has little reason to file, dropped 70% between 2015 and 2025, while the documentation categories fell by roughly 40 to 50%. The bills households keep for their records are the bills still arriving on paper.

That pattern reflects deliberate choice, rather than simply never having moved online. The households still paying by mail are keeping specific bills for specific reasons, and the bills still arriving on paper are the ones where a physical copy and timely delivery carry real consequences: a payment deadline, a medical determination, and a notice requiring a response. Package delivery tells the other half of that story, and it runs in the opposite direction.

USPS package volume doubled in a decade, with the biggest gains in rural households

While households have moved routine financial transactions online, e-commerce has moved physical goods into the mailbox. That shift of more packages arriving alongside fewer paper bills is the clearest sign of what the mailbox now does for households that it didn’t twenty years ago.

As Figure 7 shows, USPS packages received per household nearly doubled over the past decade, from 25 per year in 2014 to 48 by 2024. Packages sent per household barely moved, averaging around five per year throughout. The growth isn’t households shipping more; it’s e-commerce arriving at the door.

What arrives in those packages has changed as much as how many do. As Figure 8 shows, physical media, such as books, music, video, and photos, made up nearly half of received packages in 2010 and fell to just 10% by 2023, displaced as those categories moved online. Clothing and footwear more than doubled their share, from 11% to 23%; health and pharmaceutical products grew from 9% to 15%; home goods, cosmetics, and kitchen products now account for 19%. The packages that once delivered things that could eventually be downloaded are now delivering things that still have to be shipped. What USPS carries for households is merchandise, not media.

Households are choosing USPS deliberately, and for specific reasons. As Figure 9 shows, 66% cite convenient location and 51% cite lower cost as their reasons for using USPS to send packages, the two attributes most closely associated with a network built for reach rather than market concentration. That choice appears to be validated: 88% rate USPS package delivery 8 or higher out of 10, with more than half giving a perfect score. Households are not using USPS for packages by default; they are choosing it and finding it works.

The growth in package volume has not been uniform, and the pattern is striking. As Figure 10 shows, non-metropolitan households received just 20 USPS packages per year in 2015, the fewest of any geographic category. By 2025, these same households received more than double the volume (50 packages per year) and the most of any geographic category. Large metropolitan households saw no net change: 33 packages per year in both years. In other words, reliance on the package network expanded most in the geographies where private carrier alternatives are thinnest and USPS’s reach is hardest to replicate.

That reliance extends beyond package delivery to the physical post office itself. In 2022, 49% of households visited a post office at least once per month, compared with 15% for private carrier retail locations. Small businesses show the same preference at higher intensity: 64% visited a USPS retail location two or more times per month in FY2022, versus 48% for UPS and 47% for FedEx. The post office functions as a retail service location, not just a delivery endpoint: a place to ship, return, and manage packages, and access services that private carrier storefronts have not made locally available. That the gap is most pronounced in non-metropolitan areas, where package dependence grew fastest, is not coincidental.

Taken together, the package data describe a network that has found a new role alongside its established one. Households receive twice as many packages as a decade ago, mostly merchandise rather than media, and they choose USPS for its reach and price. That growth landed heaviest in the places where those attributes matter most.

Conclusion

Policy conversations about the Postal Service’s future tend to resolve into financial questions: how large the losses are, what rate changes can recover, how to reduce costs. The Household Diary Study records something those conversations rarely address: who uses the mail, for what, and whether alternatives exist.

Household mail volume has fallen by more than half since 2005, but what remains is not residual. The bills still arriving on paper cluster in categories where households have a reason to keep them: financial, medical, utility, and insurance. Package delivery via USPS has grown, not fallen. The mailbox has lost the casual transaction; what it has retained serves a function.

The households that still rely most heavily on the network are not distributed randomly. Mail bill-payment skews sharply toward older households; a strong majority still paid at least one bill by mail in 2025. Package delivery grew most where it was lowest a decade ago: rural households went from receiving the fewest USPS packages per year in 2015 to the most by 2025. Households visit post office retail locations at more than three times the rate they visit private carrier retail, and the pattern holds for small businesses that rely on the postal network to reach customers.

Those patterns align with what the universal service obligation was designed to guarantee: delivery to every address, at affordable prices, and with reliable service. The heaviest remaining use is concentrated in both the geographies and the mail functions where those commitments carry the most weight: bills households keep for their records and delivery where there is no easy private substitute.

A financial assessment of the Postal Service that does not account for this is answering a different, albeit incomplete, question. The balance sheet records what the Postal Service costs; the demand side records what it provides and to whom. Both are necessary for the harder question the financial debate rarely asks: what would change, for which households, if the network were to shrink or slow.