Why USPS Just Lost the Power to Raise Stamp Prices Twice a Year
A federal regulator capped USPS to one mail price increase a year through 2030, reversing a five-year run of twice-yearly hikes that still left the agency $9 billion short.
The Postal Regulatory Commission ruled this year that the U.S. Postal Service can raise prices on its monopoly mail products only once per fiscal year, starting in March, through Sept. 30, 2030. The order ends a five-year run in which USPS treated an emergency-era pricing tool as a standing license for twice-yearly hikes on First-Class Mail, Marketing Mail, and Media Mail.
The commission's own math is the reason the rule exists. In Order No. 9426, regulators found that a second annual rate increase brought in, at most, roughly $700 million a year -- and by more conservative estimates, as little as $230 million -- against a Postal Service that lost $9 billion in fiscal 2025 alone. That revenue, the commission wrote, "would at most cover 1-3 days of the Postal Service's costs, a gap which could be reasonably addressed by even limited cost control measures."
How USPS got a second rate hike in the first place
The twice-a-year cadence traces to December 2020, when the commission eased pricing rules for a Postal Service that was, in the middle of the pandemic, months from running out of cash. USPS treated the resulting flexibility -- the Modified Ratemaking System -- as an annual two-shot tool, raising prices most Januaries and Julys since. A first-class Forever stamp that cost 55 cents in May 2021 reached 78 cents by July 2025, and rose again to 82 cents that same month in 2026.
Congress, separately, tried to help. The Postal Service Reform Act, signed in April 2022, eliminated a requirement that USPS prefund retiree health benefits decades in advance -- a mandate regulators say helped justify the extra pricing authority in the first place, and one whose repeal saved the agency an estimated $107 billion in future costs. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), now chairman of the House Oversight subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, warned during a May 2021 hearing not to let the new flexibility become an excuse: "We've got to make sure stamps don't go to 60 cents, don't go to 70 cents, don't go to 80 cents," he said, with the stamp price then sitting at 55 cents. It's at 82 cents now. That mailbox is also protected by a separate 1934 law barring anyone but USPS from putting mail in it, a legal moat nearly a century older than the current pricing fight.
What the order actually restricts -- and what it doesn't
Order 9426 caps the frequency of increases, not the total amount USPS can eventually raise prices by. The agency can still file for a single, above-inflation "exigent" increase in extraordinary circumstances, and can still make de minimis adjustments -- under 0.001% at the class level -- more than once a year. The rule also excludes Competitive products entirely: Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express, and Ground Advantage can still be repriced more than once annually, with the next round set for Jan. 18.
The order's second piece tightens "workshare discounts" -- the price breaks USPS gives large mailers who presort their own mail or truck it deeper into the postal network before handing it over. Regulators found USPS had been setting those discounts further from the actual cost it avoids than the rules allow, over-rewarding some arrangements at the expense of the agency's own revenue. The commission called waivers from the tightened standard "disfavored" and said they would be "strictly enforced."
Did USPS want this rule?
No. The Postal Service's Board of Governors lobbied against the change last summer, and USPS spokeswoman Marti Johnson said afterward the agency is "very disappointed" by the outcome. Governor Ron Stroman, a former deputy postmaster general, told the commission that twice-yearly increases had "maximized the Postal Service's revenue during the post-pandemic period of high inflation" and that limiting pricing authority "would be a mistake." USPS had separately petitioned the commission the previous month for the opposite outcome -- broader pricing power starting in 2027, including removal of remaining price caps tied to retiree obligations. That petition remains undecided.
Does this mean stamp prices are done rising for a while?
No -- it means whatever increase comes lands once a year instead of twice, and mailing-industry veterans expect each hike to run larger as a result. Postmaster General David Steiner has told lawmakers the agency may still need prices as high as 90 to 95 cents for a Forever stamp, and has warned Congress that USPS risks running out of cash within roughly 14 months absent other intervention -- a warning industry representatives who have heard it before treat with some skepticism.
Who actually benefits from a once-a-year cap?
Mailers, mostly -- the businesses, nonprofits, and print shippers that budget around postage costs months in advance. Kathy Siviter of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers said the twice-yearly increases had been driving mail volume out of the system faster for nonprofits than either the pandemic or the 2008 recession, as organizations shift communications to cheaper channels. A single, predictable annual increase doesn't reverse that trend, but it replaces a moving target with a fixed planning calendar.
The commission's order doesn't fix the Postal Service's finances, and it says as much: fewer rate increases, its members wrote, just mean USPS has to find its savings somewhere other than the mailbox.
