How Many Post Offices Are in the US?

The US has 26,147 Post Offices, and 32,907 places to buy a stamp

The United States had 26,147 Post Offices in fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S. Postal Service's historical series. That figure counts offices operating under their own postmaster, which is what the Postal Service means when it capitalizes the term. Add the 4,825 stations, branches, and carrier annexes that report to a parent office and the total reaches 30,972 Postal Service-managed retail offices. That is the number on the agency's Postal Facts page, and the one most articles quote as "about 31,000."

Neither figure covers the whole counter network. USPS also contracts with pharmacies, grocers, and general stores to sell postage under 1,356 Contract Postal Units, 336 Community Post Offices, and 243 Village Post Offices. Counting those brings the total to 32,907 retail locations. The USPS Office of Inspector General rounds that to approximately 33,000 in its September 2025 white paper on the network.

• 26,147 Post Offices in FY2025, each with its own postmaster (USPS Historian series)
• 4,825 stations, branches, and carrier annexes, subordinate units reporting to a parent Post Office (USPS FY2025 Annual Report to Congress)
• 30,972 Postal Service-managed retail offices in total, the figure USPS publishes on Postal Facts
• 1,935 contractor-run units: 1,356 Contract Postal Units, 336 Community Post Offices, 243 Village Post Offices
• 32,907 retail locations all in, which the USPS OIG rounds to approximately 33,000
• 76,945 Post Offices at the 1901 peak, putting today's count 66% below it (USPS Historian)
• 468 fewer Post Offices than in 2015, a decline of 1.8% across a full decade
• More than half of individual post offices do not cover their operating costs (USPS OIG, September 2025)
• 170.4 million delivery points and 236,347 delivery routes nationwide (USPS Postal Facts, FY2025)
• 8,500 owned and more than 24,000 leased properties, ranging from 273 square feet to 40 acres (USPS FY2025 Form 10-K)

Four ways to count the post office network

Ask how many post offices are in the US and the honest answer starts with a question back: do you mean buildings with a postmaster, every counter USPS staffs, or every place that sells postage? All three appear in Postal Service documents from the same fiscal year, and they differ by more than 6,700 locations.

The narrowest definition is the Postal Service's own historical one. A Post Office is an independent unit with its own postmaster. Stations and branches are subordinate counters that report to a parent office, so they add retail capacity without adding Post Offices. Contract units are not USPS facilities at all; they are counters inside somebody else's business, staffed by that business under contract.

Sources: USPS Historian; USPS FY2025 Annual Report to Congress; USPS FY2025 Form 10-K. The property count sums the 10-K's more than 8,500 owned and more than 24,000 leased properties and is not a retail measure.

What the 32,907 locations actually are

Post Offices carry the network. They account for 79% of all retail locations and 84% of everything USPS staffs itself. Stations and branches fill in dense metro areas where one postmaster oversees several counters. Contractor-run units, the layer that confuses most people, make up just 5.9% of the total.

Source: USPS FY2025 Annual Report to Congress, which reports postal services sold at approximately 30,972 Postal Service-managed Post Offices, stations, and branches, plus approximately 1,935 additional contract and community locations.

Those locations cover 170.4 million delivery points, which works out to about 6,500 addresses and roughly nine delivery routes for every Post Office.

The count peaked in 1901 and has fallen ever since

The US had 76,945 Post Offices in 1901. That is the all-time high, and the collapse that followed was fast: 59,580 by 1910, a 23% drop in nine years. The Postal Service attributes it directly to rural free delivery, which became permanent in 1902. Once carriers brought mail to farmhouse mailboxes, the crossroads post office that existed because someone had to walk in for it lost its reason to exist.

Source: USPS Historian, Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789.

The modern era looks nothing like that. Across the last decade the count fell from 26,615 to 26,147, a loss of 468 offices, or 1.8%. Mail volume collapsed on a different scale entirely, from 154.3 billion pieces in FY2016 to 108.7 billion in FY2025, a 30% drop in nine years. The network stopped shrinking long before the mail did.

The states with the most post offices

New York and Pennsylvania top the list, which surprises people who expect Texas or California. Both states industrialized early, when a post office served a walkable town rather than a highway exit. They kept the resulting density. Texas and California have more people and more land but were largely built out after rural free delivery had already killed the crossroads office.

Source: Evan Kalish (Postlandia), from a USPS facility list obtained by FOIA request, October 2021. Total across all states and territories: 30,438 active offices, after excluding 548 carrier-only facilities. The dataset counts USPS-staffed offices, stations, and branches; it excludes Contract Postal Units, Community Post Offices, and Village Post Offices.

USPS runs six retail locations for every UPS Store

The UPS Store operates 5,503 US locations as of December 2025. USPS runs 32,907. That is six to one. The ratio understates the reach, because USPS locations cluster in places where no franchise would open a storefront.

FedEx is missing from this table on purpose. The company does not disclose a staffed retail count. The widely repeated figure of roughly 60,000 drop-off locations traces to marketing copy and aggregator blogs rather than any FedEx filing. It also counts unstaffed drop boxes and retail partner counters alongside full-service stores, so it measures something else entirely.

Common questions about the US post office network

How many post offices are in the US?

26,147 in fiscal year 2025, counting only offices with their own postmaster. Counting stations and branches raises it to 30,972, and adding contractor-run units brings the total retail network to 32,907.

Why do most articles say there are about 31,000 post offices?

Because 30,972 is the number USPS publishes on its Postal Facts page under "total retail offices." That is accurate for what it measures: every retail counter the Postal Service staffs itself. But it is not the count of Post Offices, which is 4,825 lower.

What is the difference between a Post Office and a station or branch?

A Post Office is an independent unit with its own postmaster and its own place in the postal hierarchy. Stations and branches are subordinate counters that report to a parent Post Office. To a customer they look identical. In USPS accounting they are not.

What is a Contract Postal Unit or a Village Post Office?

Both are retail counters operated by a private business under contract with USPS rather than by postal employees. Contract Postal Units usually sit inside pharmacies, grocers, or shipping stores. Village Post Offices offer a narrower set of services and typically appear in rural retailers where a full office closed or was never viable. USPS reported 1,356 of the former and 243 of the latter in FY2025.

Which state has the most post offices?

New York, with 1,820, followed by Pennsylvania at 1,782 and Texas at 1,650. Those counts come from an October 2021 FOIA dataset, the most recent state-level breakdown available. USPS does not publish one.

How many post offices has the US lost?

50,798 since the 1901 peak of 76,945, a decline of 66%. Almost all of it happened before 1970. Over the last decade the network lost 468 offices, or 1.8%.

Is USPS closing post offices?

Barely, and not for lack of financial reason. Congress has attached a closure moratorium to appropriations bills for years. The USPS Office of Inspector General found in September 2025 that more than half of individual post offices do not cover their costs. It also found that the agency has no strategy for modernizing its footprint, despite 25 years of population shifts and falling transaction volume.

How does the post office network compare to UPS or FedEx retail?

USPS operates 32,907 retail locations against 5,503 for The UPS Store, a six-to-one gap. FedEx does not publish a comparable staffed-retail figure.

Which number should you cite?

Use 26,147 when the sentence says "Post Offices." Use 30,972 when it says "postal retail locations" or "post offices" in the loose sense most readers mean. Use 32,907 when the point is total public access to postal services. All three are Postal Service figures from fiscal year 2025. Writers produce a confusing spread because they mix the three without saying which one they picked.

The more useful thing sits underneath the counts: this network was sized for a country that walked to the post office. Rural free delivery removed that reason in 1902, and the count fell by two thirds over the following seventy years. Then it stopped almost dead, held in place by appropriations riders rather than demand. Mail volume has dropped 30% in the last nine years alone while the office count moved 1.8%.

For anyone shipping product, USPS retail density is a real and under-priced asset. The agency has six times the counters of the nearest private network, concentrated in exactly the small-town geography where private carriers charge the most to deliver. That is why it still handles the last mile for so much lightweight ecommerce. The advantage is a byproduct of infrastructure nobody would build today, and the OIG's finding that half of these offices lose money is the bill coming due for it.

How we built this

Every count in this article comes from a Postal Service document covering fiscal year 2025. The itemized network breakdown comes from the FY2025 Annual Report to Congress. For the Post Office time series we used the USPS Historian's table Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789, which the agency maintains as its official historical record. Postal Facts supplies delivery points, routes, and the 30,972 retail-office total. Property counts, employee figures, and financials come from the FY2025 Form 10-K.

We calculated three figures ourselves from those inputs: the 66% decline from peak (76,945 to 26,147), the 1.8% decade decline (26,615 in FY2015 to 26,147 in FY2025), and the roughly 6,500 delivery points per Post Office (170.4 million divided by 26,147). Where the 10-K and the Annual Report disagree on contractor-run units, we cite the Annual Report's itemized figures and flag the discrepancy instead of reconciling it.

State-level counts are not published by USPS. The figures here come from a Freedom of Information Act request filed by postal researcher Evan Kalish. They are dated October 2021, and we note that date everywhere they appear.

• USPS FY2025 Annual Report to Congress
• USPS Historian — Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789
• USPS Postal Facts — Total retail offices
• USPS Postal Facts — Size and scope
• USPS Postal Facts — A decade of facts and figures
• USPS FY2025 Form 10-K
• USPS Office of Inspector General — The Evolution of the Post Office Network (RISC-WP-25-006, September 2025)
• The UPS Store — company media kit
• Postlandia — Number of Post Offices by State