You can leave the mail you want to send in your mail box for your mail carrier to pick up, drop it in one of our mail collection boxes, or drop it off at a post office. We also collect mail from thousands of businesses, schools, and other institutions around the country.

• 312,000 mail collection boxes
• 38,019 post offices
• 130 million delivery points
• 107 billion pieces of First Class mail each year

At the post office, we sort your mail according to size, cancel the stamp, and read the bar code with an optical scanner. If it doesn't have a bar code, we read the address with an optical reader (which also sprays a bar code on it) and then put it in the correct tray for shipping to its destination.

• 331 processing plants sort and ship the mail
• 75,184 pieces of mail processing equipment
• 34,588 buildings with 270 million square feet
• 38 million change of addresses per year

Your mail is trucked to the airport where it is placed on one of the 15,000 commercial airline flights that carry the mail over long distances. For shorter distances we use our fleet of trucks.

• 2.7 billion pounds of mail carried on commercial airline flights, making us the airlines' biggest shipper
• 1.1 billion miles driven to move the mail annually
• 192,904 vehicles to pick up, transport, and deliver the mail

When your mail arrives at its destination city, it is trucked to a central distribution plant where it is directed to the post office closest to its delivery address. At the local post office, the mail carrier sorts your mail for delivery.

• 7 million customers a day transact business at our post offices
• 234,033 mail carriers deliver the mail in cities across the country
• 130 million delivery addresses every day
• 18 million post office boxes

Your mail carrier delivers your mail to your mail box, 6 days a week (and for Express mail we deliver 7 days a week, including Christmas Day), rain or shine, wherever you live, from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska, from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Bar Harbor, Maine, from the bottom of the Grand Canyon (by mule) to the top of the Empire State Building (by elevator). Every day everywhere we take care of the business of delivering the mail.

• 24 pieces of mail for every household every week
• 3.4 billion pieces of mail delivered every week
• 765,174 career employees (and 127,699 other employees) working to deliver your mail

If the U.S. Postal Service were a private company, it would be the tenth largest in the country.

The USPS:

• Handles 41 percent of the world's mail volume, 630 million pieces every day. Next largest is Japan at 6 percent.
• Provides daily mail delivery and pick-up for over 130 million households and businesses.
• Serves 7 million retail customers a day.
• Operates more than 38,000 post offices.
• Processes 38 million address changes each year.
• Delivers 24 pieces of mail for every household every week.
• Owns the nation's largest compressed natural gas (CNG) delivery fleet, with 7,000 of its Long-Life Vehicles converted. Electric and ethanol-powered vehicles also are being tested.
• Is the nation's largest civilian employer with more than 765,000 career employees.