United States Postal Service Declares Postmarks Could Be Delayed
On December 24, 2025, the United States Postal Service (USPS) rolled out a new practice regarding how mail is tracked and dated. While for more than 70 years a postmark has been a reliable way of proving when an individual met a deadline for filing items such as a ballot, tax return, or legal document, a postmark no longer indicates the first day the USPS received a piece of mail. Instead, under a technical change to the USPS’s Domestic Mail Manual (DMM 608.11), postmarks will now reflect when mail reaches one of its processing centers—which could be several days after it is first picked up by a letter carrier or dropped off at a mailbox.
The mail service’s shift on postmarks came about through Delivering for America (DFA), a ten-year cost-cutting plan approved in 2021. As part of the plan, the USPS began increasing postage prices, slowing service, and consolidating its network of mail processing centers. Before DFA, which was intended in part to modernize the USPS as the volume of letters shrank and packages rose, the postal service operated nearly 200 regional centers where mail would typically enter the system on a same-day basis.
But now, there are only about 60 of these facilities and they serve much larger areas, sometimes spanning multiple states. When the USPS had more processing centers, once a piece of mail was sent, it usually did not need to travel very far before it was deposited; with far fewer processing plants, however, mail spends a lot more time in transit, given that the remaining facilities can be hundreds of miles away from each other. This reduction has the largest impact on less dense and rural areas, where mail has to travel further and may not be processed until days after it was sent.
The DFA plan was not geared around changing the postmark system, but the reforms it brought about have significantly altered the way time-sensitive mail is dealt with. Since at least the 1950s, according to research by the Brookings Institution, many legal and administrative processes have depended on the “evidentiary convention” of knowing that a postmark could be used as proof of when mail was sent. Doing away with the certainty associated with a postmark, then, disrupts a key component of legal mail and court procedure—and one solution proposed by the USPS will likely be out of reach for most prisoners.
To make up for the postmark delays, the USPS has advised senders to physically request a hand-stamped postmark from a post office retail counter. Not only is this a constraint for anyone who can not easily access a post office, it also does not resolve the legal ambiguity produced by the USPS declaring that postmarks are not representative of when mail was sent. This distinction, as highlighted by Brookings, “raises questions about whether a hand-applied postmark can serve the evidentiary function that [automated postmarking] has historically provided, or whether statutory and administrative frameworks must now reassess the role of postmarks altogether.”
Sources: Brookings Institution, CNBC
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