中文For print service providers who make their living from mail, the US Postal Service’s fiscal third-quarter results contain one figure worth circling and a great deal of context that complicates it. The figure is Marketing Mail revenue, up 12.3% year over year. The context is a Postal Service that improved substantially and still lost $2.5 billion.
The Headline Numbers
USPS reported a controllable loss of $1.0 billion for the quarter covering April through June, an improvement of $584 million against the same period last year. The GAAP net loss narrowed by $562 million to $2.5 billion. Total operating revenue rose $1.1 billion to $19.9 billion.
Revenue growth came from several directions at once: USPS Ground Advantage, Marketing Mail, higher prices on both First-Class and Marketing Mail, and a temporary transportation-related price increase implemented on 26 April for certain Shipping and Packages products. Notably, that is a list dominated by pricing and by parcels — which makes the volume growth in Marketing Mail stand out all the more.
Why Marketing Mail Matters Most to Printers
Among all the mail categories, Marketing Mail delivered the only combination of strong revenue growth and genuine volume growth. Revenue increased $440 million, or 12.3%, while volume grew by 574 million pieces, or 4.3%.
That pairing is the important part. Revenue growth driven purely by rate increases tells a printer nothing encouraging — it means the same or less work at a higher postage cost, which pressures the total campaign budget the printer competes within. Revenue growth accompanied by volume growth means more physical pieces entering the mailstream: more paper, more presses, more finishing, more inserting. Nearly 574 million additional pieces is real production work.
The contrast with First-Class Mail is instructive. First-Class revenue rose 4.3% despite a 3.5% decline in volume — the classic profile of a category being sustained by pricing while its underlying demand erodes. Shipping and Packages showed a similar pattern, with revenue up 7.7% against a 3.4% volume decline. In both cases, higher prices are doing the work that volume used to do.
Marketing Mail is, on these numbers, the only major category where Americans are receiving meaningfully more mail than a year ago. For an industry that has spent two decades hearing that direct mail is in terminal decline, a 4.3% volume increase is a data point worth holding onto — particularly as advertisers grapple with rising digital acquisition costs, signal loss from privacy changes, and the growing difficulty of standing out in saturated inboxes and feeds. Physical mail arrives in a far less crowded channel than it did a decade ago.
The Liquidity Problem Has Not Gone Away
USPS was explicit that year-over-year improvement does not resolve its position, cautioning that it still faces a severe liquidity challenge. The mechanics behind that warning deserve attention, because they reveal how much of the improvement is structural and how much is deferral.
In April, the Postal Regulatory Commission granted a temporary conditional waiver of required pension amortization payments. USPS also suspended certain Federal Employees Retirement System contributions, deferring approximately $1.4 billion during the quarter alone.
That $1.4 billion figure sits against a $584 million improvement in controllable loss. The deferred obligations exceed the operational gain by a wide margin. These are payments postponed rather than eliminated, and the waiver is described as temporary and conditional. Anyone modelling future postal costs should treat the current cost base as artificially light.
Postmaster General David Steiner said management is making progress on revenue, cost control and service, while maintaining that legislative, regulatory and administrative reforms are necessary to create a financially sustainable Postal Service. That is a familiar position from postal leadership, but the specific combination here — genuine operational improvement alongside more than a billion dollars of deferred obligations — gives the argument more weight than usual.
What Mailers Should Take From This
The practical implication is a split-screen outlook. On the demand side, the case for direct mail is strengthening on the evidence. Volume growth of 4.3% in Marketing Mail, sustained across a full quarter, indicates advertisers are actively increasing physical mail spend rather than merely absorbing rate increases. Print providers with mail production capability have a growing market to sell into, and a credible statistic to sell with.
On the cost side, the pressure is unresolved. A Postal Service that needs $1.4 billion of deferred retirement contributions to reach a $1.0 billion controllable loss is not a Postal Service positioned to moderate future price increases. The pattern visible across First-Class and Shipping — revenue growth on declining volume — is what a pricing-led strategy looks like, and Marketing Mail already carries higher prices in this quarter’s revenue mix.
The strategic question for mailers is therefore not whether postage will rise, but whether Marketing Mail’s response function holds as it does. This quarter suggests it might: prices went up and volume still grew 4.3%, which implies advertisers are finding the returns justify the cost. That is a stronger signal about mail’s competitive position than any single revenue figure.
For print businesses, the planning conclusion is straightforward enough. Build campaign models that assume continued postage inflation, because the Postal Service’s finances leave little room for anything else. But do not treat mail volume as a declining input. On these figures, it is the one part of the mailstream moving in the right direction.
Source: INKISH.NEWS, August 21, 2026 — USPS Narrows Third-Quarter Loss as Marketing Mail Revenue Jumps 12.3%
