Mailing a first-class letter may soon cost almost $1 as the U.S. Postal Service’s financial situation worsens.
USPS wants to raise the stamps’ price from 78 cents to between 90 and 95 cents, Postmaster General David Steiner said at a congressional hearing Tuesday. This would be the eighth increase since 2021.
The postal service reported a $9 billion loss in 2025 due to a drastic reduction in mail volume, from a historic peak of 213 billion pieces in 2006 to 109 billion last year, Mr. Steiner said. It has lost more than $100 billion since 2007.
“I am not sure that the American public is aware that the Postal Service is at a critical juncture,” he said.
At its current rate, USPS could run out of cash in about one year, meaning it could no longer deliver mail.
“As you all know, there are only three things that any company can do to improve financial performance — sell more products, raise prices or cut costs,” Mr. Steiner said in his congressional testimony. “On the pricing side, we need to look for higher prices on both our package and mail products.”
A first-class stamp at 78 cents is the lowest in the industrialized world, he said. France charges about $3 and the U.K. assesses $2.50 to travel a distance smaller than the state of Texas.
“We deliver from the tip of Puerto Rico to the tip of Alaska for 78 cents. That’s a distance of 5,000 miles,” Mr. Steiner said. “So we sell the stamp at less than half the cost to travel eight times farther.”
Changing the stamp price to 95 cents would “largely solve our controllable loss,” he added.
Congress may need to provide short-term financial relief to help the postal service avoid running out of cash, said David Marroni, director of physical infrastructure at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“At the same time, it’s essential that Congress also address the long-term issues with the USPS business model. If those underlying issues aren’t addressed now, USPS will likely continue to struggle financially, and its service performance may decline further,” he said.
